Our guide to the city’s best classical music and opera happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
‘AS ONE’ at Merkin Hall (May 30, 8 p.m.; through June 6). All too few new operas manage to break through and receive a number of performances, but Laura Kaminsky’s “As One” has become the most performed 21st-century opera in the United States in the five years since its premiere in Brooklyn. New York City Opera and American Opera Projects present another chance to hear the story of Hannah, the transgender protagonist, with two alternating casts. Blythe Gaissert and Michael Kelly sing Hannah on Thursday and June 6; Briana Elyse Hunter and Jorell Williams, on June 1 and 4.
212-501-3330, kaufmanmusiccenter.org
‘UN BALLO IN MASCHERA’ at the Riverside Theater (May 24, 7:30 p.m.; May 25, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m.; May 26, 2:30 p.m.; through June 2). The plucky Amore Opera mounts Verdi’s opera in a production directed by Nathan Hull and conducted by Douglas Martin. The cast rotates in the lead roles of Riccardo and Amelia, but the singing will be lively either way.
amoreopera.org
CANTATA PROFANA at HERE Arts Center (May 23-25, 8:30 p.m.). This invigorating ensemble centers this program on Handel’s “La Lucrezia,” a solo cantata that takes us into Lucretia’s psyche after her rape, sung here by the mezzo-soprano Annie Rosen. The Lucretia story also informs some of the other works, including music by Britten and Respighi, Joan Baez and Shirley Collins.
212-647-0202, here.org
LOCRIAN CHAMBER PLAYERS at Riverside Church (May 30, 8 p.m.). This committed group of players has one rule: They only play works less than a decade old. Here, the program includes Thomas Adès’s “The Four Quarters,” Augusta Read Thomas’s “Twilight Butterfly” and the premiere of “Meditation,” by Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek.
locrian.org
[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]
ALEXEI LUBIMOV AND THE CALIDORE STRING QUARTET at Baryshnikov Arts Center (May 30, 7:30 p.m.). Lubimov, who was the inaugural Cage Cunningham fellow at Baryshnikov, plays in two commissions from Russian composers: Sergei Zagny’s “Keyboard Music of XVII-XVIII Centuries for Organ” and Pavel Karmanov’s “I Made My Home.” For the Karmanov, Lubimov is joined by the members of the excellent Calidore String Quartet, who also play a Haydn string quartet.
646-731-3200, bacnyc.org
NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (May 27, 7 p.m.) and David Geffen Hall (May 30, 7:30 p.m.; June 1, 8 p.m.). The busy week ahead for the Philharmonic includes the annual, free Memorial Day concert in Morningside Heights, in which Jaap van Zweden conducts Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8, and, back at Lincoln Center, another installment of the orchestra’s ongoing Music of Conscience series, featuring works by Mozart, Brahms and John Corigliano, whose Symphony No. 1 is a moving tribute to those lost during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
212-875-5656, nyphil.org
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