Words & Music: Events of Speech and Song

By Troy Segal

Some things just naturally go together: peanut butter and jelly, yin and yang, words and music. A variety of talks, lectures, and performances demonstrate all the glorious ways that spoken and sung sounds can complement each other.

©2013 Richard Termine

Boy Genius: Come summer, Lincoln Center’s performing halls are alive with the sound of the Mostly Mozart Festival — including a panel discussion about the Salzburg-born wunderkind composer’s operas, at the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, Aug. 16, the perfect prelude to the MM Festival Orchestra’s performance at Avery Fisher Hall that evening.

Sing-along: Lift your voice in song — scores will be provided if you don’t have one of your own — alongside the New York Choral Society in its performance of Carmina Burana, Carl Orff’s rollicking cantata set to 12th-century monks’ musings about life, love and of course fortuna, Aug. 27 at Symphony Space.

Ildar Abdrazakov in the title role of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. Photo: Anne Deniau/Metropolitan Opera

Old Wine in New Bottles: The Metropolitan Opera’s season opens with a new production of Le Nozze di Figaro, set in 1930s Spain. In between musical excerpts, Met Opera General Manager Peter Gelb talks the talk with the opera’s Tony Award-winning team: director Richard Eyre and set designer Rob Howell, Sept. 9 at the Guggenheim Museum.

Cinematic magic: Top Hat, 42nd Street, The Wizard of Oz, On the Town — were the 1930s and ’40s the Golden Age of Movie Musicals or what? Songs will be sung, scores will be played, and backstage tales will be told at this lecture on that musical era, at the 92nd Street Y Sept. 19.

Ildar Abdrazakov in the title role of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. Photo: Lucie Jansch

Rock the Sonnet: Composer Rufus Wainwright and director Robert Wilson discuss their 2009 collaboration, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a surrealistic opera in which 25 of the Bard’s poems are set and performed (by the Berliner Ensemble) to a variety of musical styles, ranging from cabaret to German medieval ballads, Oct. 8 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

Bridging the Gap: Book Eight (Songs of Love and War) of the dramatic madrigals of Monteverdi, the Renaissance composer whose work marked the transition from Renaissance to Baroque music, are being performed by the Boston Early Music Festival ensembles; on opening night, Oct. 10, there’s also a pre-concert talk, within the elegant confines of the Morgan Library & Museum.