Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts: 50º aniversário

Aqueles que - como eu - conhecem e apreciam a mais bela maçã do mundo, inevitavelmente, já passaram pelo Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA), verdadeiro paraíso das artes de performance - lírica, ópera, ballet and so on.

(Eisenhower - à direita -, em 1959, no lançamento da primeira pedra do complexo Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts)

Os melómanos - como eu, once again - consideram o LCPA um dos mais magníficos espaços de fruição cultural.

Comme par hasard, o Met - a catedral do LCPA - situa-se na zona mais nobre do dito centro, sendo a sua alma.

Pois bem, à beira de comemorar 50 anos de vida, as festividades estão aí, para quem quiser!

«On May 14, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower thrust a shovel into the ground on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to signal the start of construction on Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. With the maestro Leonard Bernstein as the master of ceremonies, the New York Philharmonic and Juilliard Chorus performed the national anthem. The Metropolitan Opera baritone Leonard Warren sang the prologue to Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.” The mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens sang the “Habanera” from Bizet’s “Carmen.”

On Wednesday Lincoln Center will announce a yearlong series of events to celebrate its half-century of existence. The 50th anniversary will be celebrated amid a construction site: Lincoln Center is in the middle of an ambitious $1.2 billion redevelopment plan that is not to be completed until 2011. But parts of the project will be finished, including a refurbished Alice Tully Hall, a renovated Juilliard School and most of the fountain plaza.

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By fall 2009, Lincoln Center hopes to open its new visitors’ space at the former Harmony Atrium, where for the first time audiences will be able to buy tickets to all of the center’s events, with discounts of up to 50 percent on the day of performances. In the center’s version of the popular TKTS booth, a block of seats from each theater will be available for every evening’s performance, unless the house is 90 percent sold. Internet and telephone ticket kiosks will also offer access to full-price tickets for all events presented on the campus. Also at the visitors’ center, on Broadway between West 62nd and 63rd Streets, Lincoln Center will present free weekly performances.

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In May 2009 the Paley Center for Media will show a selection of Lincoln Center television shows that were never commercially released, including the 1962 opening-night telecast from Philharmonic Hall (later renamed Avery Fisher Hall); the 1966 Bell Telephone Hour special “The New Met: Countdown to Curtain”; and the 1969 gala concert “Juilliard Comes to Lincoln Center.”»