Phrases from spirituals floated softly from the podium. “Plenty good room, good room, in my Father’s kingdom,” Jessye Norman sang on Tuesday in a reception space at Carnegie Hall.
Jessye Norman, who organized the Honor! festival.
It was an unusual moment at a routine function, a news conference to announce Carnegie’s 2008-9 season. Ms. Norman was the featured guest because the hall has asked her to serve as curator for the centerpiece of its programs: a three-week festival called Honor! A Celebration of the African-American Cultural Legacy.
Ms. Norman, wearing a jaunty cap, sang a few snippets in a presentation of her plans for the festival.
“This festival is important and courageous in its scope, not only for the sheer pleasure of its many and varied artistic offerings,” she said, “but also as an educational avalanche that I trust will simply envelop us all.”
A foundation of black cultural heritage, she said, was the spiritual, “the purest example of grace and dignity under extreme pressure.”
Carnegie Hall, whose mission to create programming looms even larger than its role as a stage for musicians to rent, has taken to creating festivals featuring events in various disciplines around the city. This season it was Berlin in Lights last November.
Honor! begins on March 4, 2009. Ms. Norman was short on details of who will perform because, she said, she was still waiting for commitments.
“The whole idea of this festival is to bring to the forefront the names we’ve forgotten or never even heard of,” Ms. Norman said. She promised that the name of every African-American “who has ever walked across the stages of this hall” will be heard. One of those names is her own: she has performed at the hall 41 times, she said, “and counting.”
The festival will begin with a jaunt through blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul and more. Then Ms. Normanwill take part in a tribute to Duke Ellington at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. A day of panel discussions and musical performances will take place at Zankel Hall.
Ms. Norman will also perform in “Ask Your Mama!,” a multimedia presentation based on a text by Langston Hughes. The Apollo Theater will play host to spiritual and gospel music. Dee Dee Bridgewater will perform one evening, and the Philadelphia Orchestra will present a program of Milhaud’s jazzy piece “La Création du Monde,” Dvorak’s spiritual-influenced “New World” Symphony and a violin concerto by the black American composer George Walker. Charles Dutoit will conduct.
In the fall Carnegie, the New York Philharmonic and others will jointly present another festival previously announced, Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds. A two-week celebration of Hungarian music next winter will include the first New York appearance of the composer and pianist Gyorgy Kurtag, whose music will be featured in three programs.
The composer Elliott Carter, who turns 100 in December and is being honored around town this year, will be composer in residence at Carnegie Hall and have a number of works, including several premieres, on various programs.
Two other featured musicians are the Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain and the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, who will lead a Perspectives series at Carnegie. Mr. Hussain has been given five concerts, including one performing with Béla Fleck on banjo and Edgar Meyer on double bass.
Mr. Barenboim and Pierre Boulez will share conducting duties for a complete Mahler symphony cycle, mostly in order, with the Berlin Staatskapelle, the orchestra of the Berlin State Opera. Mr. Barenboim is the opera’s music director.
He will also play piano with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, teaming up with its music director, James Levine, in a Schubert four-hand piece in a program that includes Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and the New York premiere of Mr. Carter’s “Interventions” for piano and orchestra.
Mr. Barenboim, Carnegie disclosed, will also conduct a run of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Metropolitan Opera in November and December. In February 2006, the Met had said only that Mr. Barenboim would make his conducting debut in a future season. He will also play a piano recital at the Met on Dec. 14, Carnegie said, a rare such event at the opera house.
Major American orchestras — those of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston and San Francisco — will traipse through, as usual, along with other regular orchestras, like the Vienna Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic. Of smaller American orchestras, Baltimore, St. Louis and Minnesota will be on hand. The Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony, the Toronto Symphony and the Budapest Festival Orchestra also have dates.
Solo concerts will feature Jonathan Biss, Evgeny Kissin, Yundi Li, Jennifer Montone, Krystian Zimerman, Richard Goode, Maurizio Pollini, Christian Tetzlaff, Jeremy Denk, Alisa Weilerstein and Viktoria Mullova. Singers include Cecilia Bartoli, Isabel Bayrakdarian, Ian Bostridge, René Pape and Anne Sofie von Otter.
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