Michael Cooper, The New York Times
Carnegie Hall will open its season with Gershwin for the second year in a row this fall, the hall said Thursday as it announced its 2018-19 plans. The new season will focus on the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, the pianist Yuja Wang and the mandolin player Chris Thile — who will become the rare nonclassical composer to be given the hall’s prestigious composer in residence position.
The hall’s annual festival will be called “Migrations: The Making of America” and will explore the musical traditions created by immigrants from Scotland and Ireland during the 18th and 19th centuries; Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th; and black Americans who left the South during the Great Migration.
“Virtually all of those migrations happened for the worst possible reasons — be it starvation, persecution, people being treated in the most terrible ways,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “And out of that came some of the greatest beauty, and some of the most extraordinary, wonderful experiences” …
Finally, Mr. Thomas will return with the New World Symphony, the orchestral academy he co-founded, for concerts featuring Carnegie’s other Perspectives artist, Ms. Wang, in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 5.
Ms. Wang, a technically dazzling pianist, will be showcased in a variety of settings in her own series: She will play arrangements of Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” with a quartet of percussionists, including Martin Grubinger, and collaborate in other concerts with Mr. Kavakos, the violinist; the comedy team of Igudesman & Joo; and the cellist Gautier Capuçon, with whom she will play Franck and Rachmaninoff.