Art
Europe
London
"Hogarth" at Tate Britain (through Apr. 29). This wide-ranging retrospective, the most comprehensive devoted to the 18th-century British satirist and moralist William Hogarth in 30 years, includes portraits, conversation pieces, and proto-cinematic suites of paintings like The Rake’s Progress, and reveals an artist whose preoccupation with the city, sexuality, and corruption seems entirely contemporary.
Venice
"Sargent’s Venice" at Museo Correr (Mar. 23-July 22). Crumbling, licentious, and gloriously Byzantine, Venice cast an enchanted spell over 19th-century artists and literati. The first-ever solo exhibition of the expatriate American painter John Singer Sargent in the city he prized features watercolors and oils of Venetian churches, piazzas, palazzi, and waterways, many presented as he saw them from a gondola.
Paris
"The Gupta Empire, The Golden Age of Indian Civilization" at Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (Apr. 4-June 25). India’s Gupta dynasty (from around A.D. 320 to 500) witnessed a flowering of developments in science, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, religion, and the arts. More than 100 sculptures, all of them on loan from major Indian collections, form the heart of this exhibition, which explores a period of vast influence and extreme aesthetic refinement, still little known in the West.
United States
New York
"Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Mar. 27-July 8). A point of departure for pilgrims to the Holy Land, and a "hinge" between Europe and the Middle East, Venice maintained robust trade and unbroken diplomatic relations with the Islamic world even in wartime. This unprecedented exhibition of glass, textiles, furniture, armor, manuscripts, and paintings explores centuries of artistic exchange between La Serenissima and Damascus, Alexandria, and Istanbul. "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum (Mar. 23-July 1). This hotly anticipated show presents broadly political works, in an array of media, by more than 100 women artists from some 50 countries, including Sierra Leone and Indonesia.
Boston
"Edward Hopper" at the Museum of Fine Arts (May 6-Aug. 19). A retrospective devoted to America’s luminous premier painter of urban anomie includes nude studies and self-portraits as well as his more familiar restaurants, apartment interiors, lighthouses, and hotel rooms.
West Palm Beach
"Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction" at the Norton Museum of Art (Feb. 10-May 6). This show highlights O’Keeffe’s pioneering contribution to American abstract art, from the hypnotic swirl of petals in her painting of a white rose to the austere curves of pelvic bones in her later canvases.
Los Angeles
"The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Mar. 4-June 3). From Edward Weston’s photographs of the Western desert to Jackson Pollock’s appropriation of Native American symbols in his early paintings, this exhibition makes a compelling case for the central role of the frontier in shaping 20th-century American art.
—Leslie CamhiArchitecture
Europe
St. Petersburg
The fabled Mariinsky Theatre (www.mariinsky.ru) has opened a state-of-the-art concert hall in a former warehouse near its main stage on Theatre Square. When a disastrous fire nearly destroyed the building in 2003, the Mariinsky’s charismatic artistic director and conductor, Valery Gergiev, pushed to build a new permanent home for the orchestra. The warehouse was redone as a 1,100-seat hall by French architect Xavier Fabre, who designed cedar-lined walls to fit within the existing structure, which was then fine-tuned by Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustician of Los Angeles’s acclaimed Walt Disney Concert Hall.
United States
Kansas City, Missouri
Since the 1930’s, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (www.nelson-atkins.org) has been famous for its Neoclassical building, which commands 22 acres of parkland dotted with large-scale sculptures such as Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s shuttlecocks. In June, the opening of the Bloch Building, designed by Steven Holl, will expand the museum’s size by 70 percent without intruding on the original structure or its surroundings. Holl buried part of the 840-foot-long wing in the property’s grassy hillside but allowed five glass-walled pavilions—he calls them "lenses"—to emerge from the landscape to bring daylight into the underground spaces. The largest of them flanks a reflecting pool and contains a lobby that leads to five levels of galleries.
Seattle
The Seattle Art Museum (www.seattleartmuseum.org) took a more radical approach to enlarging its downtown building, a 1990’s concrete structure designed by Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates. Portland, Oregon-based Brad Cloepfil, of Allied Works Architecture, connected the museum’s interior to the lower floors of a new high-rise (housing Washington Mutual’s headquarters). When SAM reopens in May, 268,000 square feet of galleries will include its collections of contemporary, African, Aboriginal, and Oceanic art.
—Raul Barreneche
Theater
Europe
London
The Lady from Dubuque Theatre Royal Haymarket (opens Mar. 5; 44-870/400-0626; www.trh.co.uk). Maggie Smith plays the lady, an unexpected guest at a dinner party where a dark undercurrent suggests an ominous truth. Anthony Page directs Edward Albee’s rarely produced play. A Midsummer Night’s Dream Roundhouse (Mar 8-Apr. 21; 44-870/389-1846; www.roundhouse.org.uk). Tim Supple’s critically acclaimed Indian-inspired spectacle of the Shakespearean comedy arrives in London with a cast of actors, musicians, dancers, and street acrobats from India and Sri Lanka.
United States
New York
Curtains Al Hirschfeld Theatre (opens Mar. 22; 800/432-7780; www.telecharge.com). One of the last scores by the team of Kander and Ebb, with a book and additional lyrics by Rupert Holmes, this homage to 1950’s musical comedy stars David Hyde Pierce as a stagestruck detective who arrives on the scene to solve a playhouse murder—and save a weak second act. The Year of Magical Thinking Booth Theatre (opens Mar. 29; 800/432-7780; www.telecharge.com). David Hare stages Joan Didion’s dramatic adaptation of her memoir about the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the illness of her only daughter. Vanessa Redgrave appears in the limited 24-week run of this tribute to marriage and family. LoveMusik Biltmore Theatre (opens May 3; 212/239-6200; www.mtc-nyc.org). The legendary Harold Prince mounts a new musical work based on the letters of two theater icons: composer Kurt Weill and his wife, actress-singer Lotte Lenya, portrayed by Michael Cerveris and Donna Murphy. Deuce Music Box Theatre (opens May 6; 800/432-7780; www.telecharge.com). Tennis anyone? Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes star in the latest drama by Terrence McNally, about two retired tennis players who once made up a championship doubles team and are reunited for a match.
—Bill Rosenfield
Music
Europe
London
Traced Overhead: The Musical World of Thomas Adès The Barbican (Mar. 7-Apr. 22; 44-20/7638-8891; www.barbican.org.uk). The young British composer has almost too many musical ideas for his own good. At this in-depth festival, some of Adès’s most talented compatriots—conductor Simon Rattle, tenor Ian Bostridge, the BBC Symphony Orchestra—explore his mercurial, expressionistic, and very hip works.
Vienna
Manon Vienna State Opera (Mar. 3-19; 43-1/513-1513; www.staatsoper.at). Anna Netrebko is the darling of the international scene: her Russian Album debuted last fall at number eight on the German pop charts. Now, the soprano brings Massenet’s heroine to life in a new production by Andre Serban.
Madrid
El Viaje a Simorgh Teatro Real (May 4-17; 34/902-244-848; www.teatro-real.com). Opera in Spain is flourishing these days, and Madrid’s principal opera house is committed to works by Spanish-born composers. José María Sánchez-Verdú’s latest mingles 16th-century Spanish traditions with Muslim influences. Jesús López-Cobos conducts.
United States
New York
Orfeo ed Euridice Metropolitan Opera (May 2-12; 212/362-6000; www.metopera.org). The choreographer Mark Morris makes his Met debut, directing Gluck’s opera, with costumes by Isaac Mizrahi and a cast led by stellar countertenor David Daniels.
San Francisco
A Flowering Tree San Francisco Symphony (Mar. 1-3; 415/864-6000; www.sfsymphony.org). For Mozart’s 250th birthday, John Adams, one of America’s most celebrated composers, turned from political subjects (Nixon in China) to this unabashedly lyric tribute to The Magic Flute; his lush opera-oratorio draws on all the resources of a large orchestra.
Los Angeles
The Tristan Project Los Angeles Philharmonic (Apr.12-24; 323/850-2000; www.laphil.org). Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde led by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and staged by Peter Sellars, with video design by Bill Viola—part multimedia installation, all opera—returns to Los Angeles this spring, then travels to Lincoln Center in New York for performances on May 2 and May 5 (212/721-6500; www.lincolncenter.org); it should be the ticket of the season.
—Anne Midgette
