Saturday, December 12, 2009

The holiday music is upon us!

This is one of those amazing weekends that you couldn't do anywhere but NYC. 3 completely different holiday concerts with top-notch musicians, preceded by great restaurants. It started off last night with dinner at A Voce, one of the newly-minted Michelin restaurants in Columbus Circle. Wycliffe Gordon and Niki Haris (Gene Harris' Daughter) were playing New Orleans style holiday Jazz at Lincoln Center. Wycliffe is a very well rounded musician (no pun intended), alternating between trombone, sousaphone, piano, and singing, and the other cats like Marcus Printup were on fire too.

Tonight we take a totally different tack. We'll be trying another of the new 1-star Michelin Restaurants, Rhong Tiam, which is the only Thai restaurant on the starred list in NYC, and then seeing the Bach Christmas Oratorio at Carnegie Hall with Les Violons du Roy and La Chapelle de Québec. I've never seen this piece performed but it is supposed to be epic, and where better to see it than Carnegie Hall?

Sunday is yet again something completely different. The principal brass of the New York Philharmonic join with the West Point Brass Band to play some holiday brass music. I went to see this last year when they paired with the Canadian Brass, and I'm going to make this concert an annual tradition. Even by NYC standards this is going to be a great weekend!