Lincoln Center Announces Great Performers Line-Up

By Adam Hetrick
January 24, 2008

Lincoln Center has announced the line-up of artists and events scheduled for its 2008-2009 season of Great Performers.

Great Performers will join the city-wide Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds celebration — in honor of the late award-winning composer's 90th birthday – by presenting The Joy of Music: Leonard Bernstein on Film. Rare archival footage, interviews, as well as film and television footage from 1954-1993 will highlight Bernstein's work (Oct. 15-Nov. 1).

Part of Lincoln Center's 43rd season of Great Performers will showcase pieces drawing on inspiration from great literary works. The New Visions series – subtitled The Literary Muse – features the U.S. premiere of the National Theatre of Great Britain's Waves, created by Katie Mitchell and based on the 1931 work by Virginia Woolf (Nov. 12-22).

Peter Sellars stages Kafka Fragments, penned by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtág and featuring Dawn Upshaw and Geoff Nuttall (Nov. 12-18). The works of Miguel de Cervantes inspire Don Quijote de la Mancha: Romances y Músicas, which will be directed by Jordi Savall (Oct. 20).

Russian Dreams: The Music of Sergei Prokofiev will feature the classical composer's theatre music, and Mark Morris Dance Group will incorporate new archival materials from Prokofiev's original orchestrations in a staging of Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare (May 14-17, 2009). Morris intends to create new choreography and utilize a radical ending abandoned by Prokofiev in 1935.

For a complete list of all artists and events in the 2008-2009 Great Performers series, visit www.lincolncenter.org.