Met Museum's Glass at 75: A Birthday Sing To Be Postponed

Therefore, the Music in the American Wing weekend January 20-22 consists of two events:

Music for the American Wing – Friday-Sunday, January 20-22, 2012
The final stage of the renovation of the Metropolitan Museum’s New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts opens January 16, 2012. Two distinctly American performance events in the wing’s Charles Engelhard Court, one of them free with Museum admission, celebrate the first weekend of the newly re-openEd Galleries: a march through the Met by the inventive “radical street band” Asphalt Orchestra (three performances); and “Song of America,” a recital by American opera star Thomas Hampson.

Friday, January 20, 2012, at 4:00, 6:00, and 8:00 p.m. – Asphalt Orchestra Marches through the Met
Asphalt Orchestra, the “radical new street band that brings ambitious processional music to the mobile masses,” in the band’s own words, will stage a march through the Met Museum that invites all museum-goers to follow. They will begin in the Great Hall, march through the Egyptian Wing and The Temple of Dendur in The Sackler Wing, and end up at the American Wing’s Charles Engelhard Court. The performance, choreographed specifically for the Engelhard Court by Mark DeChiazza and Susan Marshall, will feature music by Frank Zappa, Yoko Ono, and Stew and Heidi Rodewald. The band will also present a world premiere arrangement of hymns from the distinctly American shape note singing tradition, inspired by field recordings from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Asphalt Orchestra liberates innovative music from concert halls, rock clubs and jazz basements and takes it to the streets. With movement direction from internationally acclaimed choreographer Susan Marshall and dressed by designer Elizabeth Hope Clancy, the 12-member band brings together some of the most exciting rock, jazz and classical players in New York City: Jessica Schmitz (piccolo), Alex Hamlin, Peter Hess and Ken Thomson (saxophones), Shane Endsley and Stephanie Richards (trumpets), Jen Baker and Alan Ferber (trombones), Kenneth Bentley (sousaphone), and Sunny Jain, Nick Jenkins and Yuri Yamashita (percussion).

Begins in the Great Hall, concludes in The Charles Engelhard Court of The American Wing
Free with Museum admission

Sunday, January 22, 2012, at 7:00 p.m.- Thomas Hampson, Baritone - “Song of America”
Great American baritone Thomas Hampson and pianist Craig Rutenberg present “Song of America,” a panorama of American song, with music by Copland, Barber, Ives, Hopkinson, Griffes, Thomson, and others, in the Charles Engelhard Court of The American Wing. This is Hampson’s only New York recital of the season.

This concert is inspired by the New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts. This final stage of the renovation of the American Wing opens January 16, 2012.
Thomas Hampson enjoys a singular international career as a recitalist, opera singer, and recording artist, and maintains an active interest in teaching, research, and technology. Hampson has won worldwide recognition for his thoughtfully researched and creatively constructed programs that explore the rich repertoire of song in a wide range of styles, languages, and periods. He is one of the most important interpreters of German Romantic song, and through his celebrated “Song of America” project (www.songofamerica.net), a collaboration with the Library of Congress, has become an “ambassador” of American song. Through the Hampsong Foundation, founded in 2003, he employs the art of song to promote intercultural dialogue and understanding.

Hampson began his 2011-2012 season at San Francisco Opera, where he created the role of Rick Rescorla in the world premiere of Christopher Theofanidis’s Heart of a Soldier. The new opera, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, features a libretto by Donna Di Novelli and was directed by Francesca Zambello. Based on the 2002 book by James B. Stewart, the work is inspired by the true story of Rescorla and his tragic death in the collapse of the South Tower of the World Trade Center following his heroic evacuation of all 2,700 employees of Morgan Stanley. Hampson’s other operatic engagements this season include Iago in Verdi’s Otello and the title role in Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, both at Zurich Opera, and Verdi’s Macbeth at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. www.hampsong.com

The Charles Engelhard Court, The American Wing
Tickets: $65

For tickets, visit www.metmuseum.org/tickets or call (212) 570-3949. Tickets are also available at the Great Hall Box Office, which is open Tuesday-Saturday 10-5:00 and Sunday noon-5:00. Student and group discount tickets are available for some events; call 212-570-3949.