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Critic’s Notebook

Carnegie Hall and the Jewels of Midtown: Stroll the History

Our critic chats about the beloved stretch from the music hall to Lincoln Center around Central Park with the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

Credit... Zack DeZon for The New York Times

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By Michael Kimmelman

• Published Sept. 16, 2020 Updated Oct. 1, 2021

A reward for the city’s having flattened the curve, lines of culture-starved New Yorkers now snake out the doors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the Morgan Library. But the city still won’t be its old self until audiences start filing (safely) back into places like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. To stroll the few blocks between the two performing arts stomping grounds only takes around 15 minutes, skirting the southwest corner of Central Park — Merchants’ Gate, as Olmsted and Vaux , the park’s designers, called it.

But a lot of Midtown Manhattan is packed into that ordinarily trafficked, touristed stretch. Along with century-old architectural landmarks, a crop of supertall, anorexic apartment towers for the ultrarich have lately redrawn the city skyline , turning the storied cliff-face of high-rises lining Central Park South into the equivalent of chess pawns to their queens, kings and bishops along 57th and 58th Streets.

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have raised a family in this part of town, where they still run their architectural practice. They are designers of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia , the LeFrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park, Brooklyn , and the former American Folk Art Museum on 53rd Street — the building demolished several years ago to make way for the Museum of Modern Art’s latest expansion . Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien also lead the team doing the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center in Chicago and are helping to revamp what used to be called Philharmonic Hall, then Avery Fisher — now Geffen Hall — at Lincoln Center. They live up the block.

Before that, and for more than 30 years, they lived and worked in Carnegie Hall.

This is the latest in a series of (edited, condensed) walks around New York. It takes in some architecturally beloved buildings like the Gainsborough Studios, Alwyn Court and the West Side YMCA, and it begins on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 57th Street, at Carnegie, where Ms. Tsien and Mr. Williams suggested we “meet,” virtually, by phone.

Michael Kimmelman When I say you lived at Carnegie Hall, some readers may be imagining you camped backstage.

Billie Tsien We lived in the artist studios upstairs.

Andrew Carnegie built those now-gone studios hoping they would help support the concert hall. I knew them because I would go as a young pianist for auditions and rehearsals. The place was a fantastic rabbit warren from the 1890s — home to Enrico Caruso, Martha Graham, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando.

Tsien Also Bill Cunningham , the Times fashion photographer, and Don Shirley …

The pianist portrayed in “Green Book.”

Tod Williams He lived three floors below us.

Tsien It was weird seeing that movie, like having a dream about your former home. We would come across Don in the building in his full regalia, decked out in robes or yachting clothes. Living in the studios was unlike apartment houses now, where you might pass somebody in the elevator and that’s it. Life was lived in the hallways, with people clattering up and down the stairs, singing, rehearsing lines, doing their exercises, like one woman who would come out in her ballet clothes.

Williams It was a negligee. She was not youthful …

Tsien No, but …

Williams She was quite beautiful.

Tsien My point is that, inside the building, it was a crazy, buzzy life, in keeping with the city of the late ’70s and ’80s, an incredible place for our son to grow up in, especially being the only child in the building. The layout was byzantine. We were on the 16th floor, which required taking the elevator to 15 and walking up an extra flight. Once a family walked into our studio and showed us their concert tickets. They had bought cheap seats in the balcony and obviously gotten lost.

Williams I could go through a door just down our hallway, climb on top of the plaster ceiling above the main hall and look straight down onto the stage.

That sounds spectacularly unsafe.

Tsien Tod saw Tracy Chapman’s dreadlocks and shoulders through the ceiling. Yes, the building was very unsafe before the renovations. We were broken into all the time.

Williams A burglar once shimmied along the ledge and came in through our windows. Another guy broke down our door. It was the Wild West, but that meant we could also do what we liked. I liked to grill on the roof.

Tsien Tod once took his parents to the roof to grill and at a certain point we heard this huge commotion on the stairs. It turned out to be firemen rushing up with hoses. Somebody smelled smoke and thought Carnegie Hall was burning down.

People may forget that during the late 1950s Carnegie almost went the way of the old Penn Station. It was on the brink of demolition .

Williams The architect Ralph Pomerance had already designed a red tower that was going to go in its place.

Pomerance & Breines, the firm was called. Their plan would have swapped Carnegie for a 44-story office tower clad in red porcelain enamel, set into a sunken plaza, with a bridged entrance.

Williams A cool-looking design, actually, which had absolutely nothing to do with its context — anticipating the sorts of buildings that have recently been rising in the neighborhood.

You mean the supertalls. We’ll get back to them. The violinist Isaac Stern and some of your fellow tenants in the artist studios saved the hall from the wrecking ball. Then James Stewart Polshek renovated Carnegie during the ’ 80s , and added Zankel Hall in 2003. Today it’s a landmark, but, to be honest, the outside doesn’t begin to suggest how beautiful it is inside.

Williams It’s architecturally ungainly outside but I love that about it. William Tuthill was the architect. He was very, very young and had never done a hall. He was a cellist. The building’s Seventh Avenue elevation, with its fire escapes, is extremely plain. Seventh Avenue is an important avenue, but Tuthill basically said, “Move on, nothing to see there.”

Tsien That elevation reveals nothing about what’s inside. Tod and I have a taste for these sort of buildings — the Pantheon in Rome is an obvious example — which you could walk by 100 times and never guess what the inside looks like.

We haven’t talked about the surrounding neighborhood yet, including the supertalls .

Tsien To me, they’re like obelisks: silent, impenetrable, without contributing much of anything to life on the street. It feels almost as if those pieces of the neighborhood got removed.

To be fair, the neighborhood was never homey.

Williams No, and it also used to be rough. At the turn of the last century, rich people along Fifth Avenue and Central Park West kept their horse carriages on 58th Street, in stables, which were never desirable to live around, then the carriages turned into automobiles. That’s why automobile showrooms started clustering near Columbus Circle, just up the block, where General Motors also opened an office.

First in the former Colonnade Building, at Broadway and 57th Street, designed by William W. Bosworth in the 1920s. Eventually the company moved to the ’60s tower by Edward Durell Stone on Fifth Avenue at 58th Street, across from the Plaza Hotel, with the Apple store in the basement — so, same latitude. Of course this neighborhood was also a cultural hub, starting in the Gilded Age, with Carnegie and the Art Students League, which Henry Hardenbergh designed.

Tsien It’s interesting, you have buildings like Carnegie, the Art Students League and the Osborne on the one hand. And then you have buildings like the Alwyn.

Meaning the Osborne Apartments, which is a kind of grand but dour stone palazzo from the 1880s by James E. Ware. As opposed to the Alwyn Court apartments, built two decades later, by Harde & Short, an extravagantly ornate French Renaissance building.

Williams Exactly. Over the course of a few decades, the style of grand buildings in the area evolved from reserved — and kind of lumpy — to increasingly elaborate, like the Alwyn or the Gainsborough.

Officially, the Gainsborough Studios, from 1908, by Charles W. Buckham, on Central Park South, a couple of blocks north of Carnegie. You eventually moved your office from Carnegie to the Gainsborough, which is where my mother, a sculptor, always said she dreamed about living because of the double-height windows facing the park.

Williams I’m with your mother. Those double-height studios inspired Le Corbusier’s design for the Marseille housing block . We moved our studio because, by the ’80s, there were four or five of us working in the office. We had redone an apartment for a friend in the Gainsborough, who helped get us the place. The building was falling apart at the time so we agreed to renovate it — and did a very bad job.

That’s frank.

Williams Well, this was before restoration experts oversaw all these sorts of projects. We were just doing stuff by the seat of our pants. My older son, who back then worked for a tile company in New Jersey, redid the terra-cotta facade.

Tsien As punishment, Tod became president of the co-op board, and the whole facade had to be redone under him.

Williams Architects today have so many consultants, we are so risk-averse, but we still make mistakes. It’s just that now we can blame somebody else.

Carnegie is a stone’s throw away, but was being on Central Park South, which is 59th Street, any different from 57th Street?

Williams There were a lot of dentists and prostitutes. You know that building on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Central Park South with the rounded corner, where Raquel Welch lived?

200 Central Park South, by Wechsler & Schimenti, from 1964. New York’s attempt at Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel.

Williams That corner was a popular hangout spot for hookers. Central Park was a dust bowl back then. Abandoned and burned cars were dumped on Central Park South. New York felt more dangerous but also hopeful, as if it were possible to reinvent yourself and the city — kind of like it does now. The Gainsborough was still occupied mostly by artists, not only rich people. We bought our studio from a couple of photographers.

Tsien One of them shot the “I Dreamed I Was …” ads for Maidenform bras . Legend had it that he shot some of them there.

Williams He worked for the Saturday Evening Post. When we moved in we had to demo the whole apartment and in the process, a painting fell out of the ceiling. My son, who was 9 or 10 years old at the time, saw it and said, “That’s a Norman Rockwell.” It was.

I’m sorry, the previous tenant worked for the Saturday Evening Post, so a Norman Rockwell painting fell out of your ceiling?

Tsien Norman Rockwell must have sent the photographer the painting to shoot for a cover of the Saturday Evening Post — and, for whatever reason, the photographer stuck it up in the ceiling. I can’t remember whether there used to be a hatch up there.

Williams Speaking of art, we wanted to take you to see the mosaic at 240 Central Park South by Ozenfant.

The French Cubist Amédée Ozenfant, co-creator of Purism with Le Corbusier .

Tsien The mosaic is titled “The Quiet City”; it’s not big but very colorful. And beyond that, we get to Columbus Circle, which when we moved to the Gainsborough was still largely motorcycle parking and buses outside the old Coliseum taking families to visit relatives in prisons upstate.

The New York Coliseum, a brick, fortresslike Robert Moses concoction from the ’50s, gone and unmourned, which served as a convention center, with an office tower attached. Replaced, ultimately, by the huge, glassy Time Warner Center.

Williams Columbus Circle also had Huntington Hartford’s art museum , which riffed on the Baker’s Tomb in Rome . Architecturally, the site never added up. And the Coliseum was low, so the circle leaked.

You mean the building didn’t enclose Columbus Circle?

Tsien Right. At least Time Warner holds the circle better. Holding the circle is the most important thing.

Williams It’s funny, when I was a student at Princeton in the ’60s, Peter Eisenman complained about the Seagram Building and Lever House being architectural screw-ups because they didn’t hold the edge of Park Avenue. I couldn’t understand, because Park Avenue seemed kind of boring to me without them. The problem today with Columbus Circle is not that it leaks but that it still feels like a barrier to the rest of the city west of it. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to solve that problem.

Our plan was to end up at Lincoln Center.

Williams On the way let’s stop at Ethical Culture, where our son went to school.

A building by Carrère and Hastings, who famously designed the 42nd Street Library.

Williams Unlike the library, the school is fairly modest and straightforward, aligned with the humanist values of the Ethical Culture Society, which I find very beautiful.

Tsien I can’t think of Ethical Culture without also thinking of the West Side YMCA, next door. They’re like a package, extending themselves toward the community, expressing, architecturally, how we should treat others.

The Y, from 1930, by Dwight James Baum, who designed the building to look like an Italian hill town, with battlements and balconies and polychromed sculptures of evangelists.

Williams But it’s not ostentatious. Ethical Culture also has lots of ornamentation, but these are both quiet buildings, which gets back to what I was trying to say about Carnegie Hall. The architecture may not be the grandest, but it is substantive.

We’re now just around the corner from Lincoln Center, still a work in progress.

Williams I think it will continue to improve as it feels less anomalous. Credit to Ric and Liz and Reynold Levy.

Ric Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller, the architects who revamped the center a decade ago, while Levy was its president.

Williams I have a lot of respect for their desire to make the campus less precious.

Tsien People want more democratic spaces, especially now. Did you know there was once a plan to extend Lincoln Center all the way to Central Park?

Unbelievably, yes, the Lindsay administration floated that idea , which involved ripping down the whole block from 63rd to 64th Streets and from Broadway to Central Park — including the Y and Ethical Culture — to create a mall with underground parking. Promoters touted the prospect of an unobstructed view to the park. Myself, I’ve never gone to “Tosca” and thought, “Nice music, too bad there isn’t also an unobstructed view of Central Park.”

Tsien I went to Lincoln Center when I first moved to New York because the Mostly Mozart concerts had air-conditioning.

The air-conditioning was memorably epic .

Williams I rarely went to Lincoln Center — only if someone else paid for me. I didn’t have to pay for anything at Carnegie Hall. I could just sneak in.

Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic. While based in Berlin, he created the Abroad column, covering culture and politics in Europe and the Middle East. He is the founder and editor-at-large of a new venture focused on global challenges and progress called Headway. More about Michael Kimmelman

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A merican soprano Kearstin Piper Brown is delighted to begin her season with a return to Opera in Williamsburg as Musetta in La Bohème. She also headlined First Inversion's Holding on Through Song IV and made her PBS Great Performances debut in Lynn Nottage and Ricky Ian Gordon’s Intimate Apparel opera at the Lincoln Center Theater. Kearstin performed at the reopening of the Hochstein Performance Hall in Rochester, will make her debut with Santa Fe Opera in the world premiere of This Little Light of Mine, and debut with the Binghamton Community Orchestra. Later, Kearstin will make her Carnegie Hall debut singing the music of J.S. Bach and Margaret Bonds with the Cecilia Chorus of New York, and debut with the National Philharmonic Orchestra in Handel's Messiah. Future engagements include a concert with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, a recital at the Third Presbyterian Church in Rochester, a world premiere at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and a debut with Opera Parellèle in The Shining.

Last season, Kearstin began with a return to First Inversion as a soloist in Holding on Through Song. She then return to Finger Lakes Opera for two recitals with baritone Jorell Williams before making her debut with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Later, she headed back to New Orleans Opera to sing Musetta in La Bohème before debuting at Merkin Hall in concert with the New York Festival of Song. She also premiered Zaid Jabri's Southern Crossings and a sang a recital with the Berkshire Opera Festival.

Recently, Ms. Brown made debuts with the Dallas Symphony, New Orleans Opera, Syracuse Opera, Finger Lakes Opera, the Gateways Music Festival, and returned to Opera in Williamsburg as Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice after her debut as Pamina in The Magic Flute. She also made virtual appearances with the American Spiritual Ensemble and Nicole Heaston’s Purple Robe Song Series.

Earlier, Ms. Brown made her San Francisco Opera stage debut in It's a Wonderful Life by Jake Heggie and Gene Sheer. Other operatic highlights of Ms. Brown's career include Musetta with Dayton Opera, Euridice in Gluck's Orfeus with Opera Memphis, Violetta with Utah Lyric Opera, Micaëla with Arbor Opera Theater, and Clara in Porgy and Bess at the Teatro di San Carlo. She portrayed the role of Mrs. McDowell in the world premiere of Rise for Freedom: The John P. Parker Story by Adolphus Hailstork with Cincinnati Opera and sang with the Center for Contemporary Opera as Epiphany Proudfoot in the world premiere of Mark Scearse's Falling Angel. Ms. Brown also began work on Glenn McClure's new piece, Promised Land: An Adirondack Folk Opera.

Ms. Brown has performed the role of Bess worldwide with Opera Kazan, New Orleans Opera, Skylight Music Theatre, Dayton Opera, Virginia Opera, Utah Festival Opera and the Belarusian State Philharmonic Orchestra, Minsk. In addition, the European Porgy and Bess tour of New York Harlem Productions brought her Bess to such prestigious venues as the Hamburgische Staatsoper, the Semperoper Dresden, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, and the Komische Oper Berlin. Another touring production of the Gershwin classic was with Cape Town Opera, where she sang at the Edinburgh Festival, the Royal Festival Hall London, and the Israeli Opera.

Highlights of Ms. Brown’s performances as a concert soloist include appearances with the Dallas Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Residentie Orkest - The Hague, Moscow City Symphony, Pasadena Symphony, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Lebanon Symphony and Chorus, SanJose Chamber Orchestra, and Cedar Rapids Chorale and Symphony. She had also bee heard at the Palais Augarten in Vienna, in the Vaughan Williams Dona Nobis Pacem with the Rochester Oratorio Society, the Rochester Early Music Festival, KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival, and the Hines- Lee Opera Ensemble at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Ms. Brown starred in a gala concert Our Songs – The Music of African American Composers at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center with Opera Ebony, and the year before she was heard at Jazz at Lincoln Center under the auspices of the Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation. The versatile soprano has also toured with the 3 Mo’ Divas (sister group of the 3 Mo’ Tenors), and scored an early success as Sarah in the Light Opera Works Chicago regional premiere of Ragtime, earning her a “Best Actress in a Musical” nomination from the Black Theater Alliance in Chicago, and made a triumphant returned to the role with the Utah Festival Opera. In addition, she has appeared in theater productions in the Washington DC area with the Studio Theater, Roundhouse Theatre, Arena Stage, and the Kennedy Center Theatre for Young Audiences.

Ms. Brown was a prize-winner in several international competitions, including the Montserrat Caballé International Competition, the William Matheus Sullivan Foundation, the Gerda Lissner Foundation Vocal Competition, and the Licia Albanese-Pucinni Foundation International Vocal Competition.

A native of Alexandria, Virginia, Ms. Brown is a graduate of both Spelman College and Northwestern University. She is an active member of Sigma Alpha Iota Music Fraternity for Women, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Gateways Music Festival in Association with the Eastman School of Music, and a fill-in Classical Radio Host for WXXI Broadcasting.

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Tomomi Nishimoto

Tomomi Nishimoto is the current Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Illumin Art Philharmonic Orchestra. She concurrently serves as the Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Royal Chamber Orchestra, Music Partner with the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, and Visiting Professor at Osaka College of Music. Nishimoto has received an honorary doctorate degree from Matsumoto Dental University, and she also serves as the first Honorary Ambassador for the city of Hirado in Nagasaki Prefecture and as the first International Cultural Ambassador for Osaka.

After graduating from Osaka College of Music with a Bachelor of Music in Composition, she went abroad to study Opera and Symphony Conducting at the Saint Petersburg State Conservatory in Russia. During this time, she received many awards, including the Agency for Cultural Affair’s Arts Internship scholarship and the Idemitsu Music Award. She then went on to serve as Artistic Director and Chief Conductor for the Russian Symphony Orchestra of the Tchaikovsky Foundation (2004-2007), the Principal Guest Conductor for the St. Petersburg Mussorgsky State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre (2004-2006) and as Principal Guest Conductor of the State Symphony Orchestra of Russia (2010-2011).

Nishimoto has been invited to perform at numerous music festivals and has conducted the Moscow City Symphony, the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra’s season opening concert, the Romanian State Philharmonic Orchestra (George Enescu), the British Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra and many more. In 2010, she conducted the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and, since 2011 she has been regularly invited to the Westchester Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2014, she also began expanding the scope her activities to South American countries including Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador.

In 2013, as part of the Cardinal’s Mass at the Vatican, she led a restoration performance of a Gregorian hymn that served as the origin of “Oratio,” the chant and prayers of the Japanese Kakure Kirishitan (secret Christians). It was the first time in roughly 455 years that the hymn had been performed. The following year, she received the Honor of Fondazione Pro Musica e Arte Sacra in Vatican for her artistic talent and musical contributions, making Nishimoto the youngest recipient ever of the honor. Since then, Nishimoto has been invited to the Festival on a yearly basis.

Nishimoto has a penchant for historical performances: she has led concerts such as the concert commemorating the 1300-year anniversary of Nara Heijo-kyo Capital and 1200-year anniversary of Mount Koyasan, the opening concert for L’aquila Concert Hall, the concert commemorating the 120 th Anniversary of Diplomatic Relations between Japan and Brazil, and more.

Within Japan, Nishimoto has acted as guest conductor with major orchestras. She has also been involved in experimental musical activities, such as bringing together traditional aspects of Japanese culture and opera, as well as holding restoration performances of long lost Min’yō tunes. In recent years, she has performed a mix of opera and traditional Japanese theatre with a staging of Verdi’s Madame Butterfly (at Kyoto Minamiza & Shinbashi Enbujo) that takes advantage of the unique aspects of the Kabuki stage, spreading Japanese culture across the world in the process.

She was selected by “Newsweek JAPAN” as one of the “100 World’s Most Respected Japanese People” in 2004, and she appeared on the Japanese Government’s TV commercials promoting Japan for the G7 summit in Elmau in 2015 and Ise-Shima in 2016, as well as in the official Japanese Government English PR Magazine “We Are Tomodachi Summer Edition” as a Japanese national active on a global basis. Aside from music, Nishimoto was selected in 2007 as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum,which holds its annual meeting in Davos. In 2012, she completed the Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Education Program in public leadership as a fully funded fellow. Nishimoto continues to garner worldwide reputation through her global tours and activities.

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APSU’s critically acclaimed soprano Dr. Penelope Shumate delights audiences nationwide

By: Kara Zahn April 4, 2024

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – Dr. Penelope Shumate, assistant professor of voice at Austin Peay State University, has captivated audiences across the country with her exceptional vocal talents and artistry. During the Fall 2023 semester, she received critical acclaim from The New York Concert Review for her return performance at Carnegie Hall in Messiah — her 18th soloist appearance at the historic international venue. 

Shumate's distinguished list of soloist engagements has solidified her reputation as a soprano of unparalleled skill. These performances include her recent debut with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for a recording of Messiah at the world-renowned Abbey Road Studios in London, as well as return soloist performances at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall with Distinguished Concerts International New York. 

Her other upcoming and recent engagements include return and debut soloist appearances with Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Rapides Symphony Orchestra, Roanoke Symphony Orchestra, Gateway Chamber Orchestra, Paducah Symphony Orchestra, Lansing Symphony Orchestra, Gulf Coast Symphony Orchestra, Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, Opéra Louisiane, and Muddy River Opera. Shumate also performs as a soloist in a variety of vocal genres at campus and local events, showcasing her versatility and dedication to her craft. 

In the realm of opera, Shumate's portrayal of the title role in the Parma/Navona Records CD release of Kassandra garnered critical acclaim, with Opera News praising her performance of “sincerity and attractive lucidity.” Her collaborative work with composer Dr. Anthony Brandt, professor of theory and composition at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and the composer of Kassandra , highlights her commitment to pushing artistic boundaries. She also performed the work live at its world premiere at Opera in the Heights and the National Opera Association’s national conference. 

However, community members don’t have to travel far to hear Shumate and the APSU Opera Theatre students at these upcoming performances in Clarksville: 

April 13, 2024 - Bach to Broadway at Roxy Regional Theatre  

Join Shumate and the APSU Department of Music’s pianist Jan Corrothers for an enchanting evening at their "Bach to Broadway" recital on April 13 at the Roxy Regional Theatre, featuring favorites from vocal genres including oratorio, opera, concert aria, art song, jazz and musical theatre. Tickets for this special event to benefit APSU scholarships are available for $30 at roxyregionaltheatre.org. 

April 20 and 21, 2024 - Mozart's The Magic Flute at Mabry Concert Hall  

Witness the skills of the APSU Opera Theatre students during APSU's presentation of Mozart's The Magic Flute at 7:30 p.m. April 20 and 3 p.m. April 21. Shumate and Dr. Gregory Wolynec, the director of the APSU Symphony Orchestra, will lead the students in a captivating performance at Mabry Concert Hall, located inside APSU’s Music/Mass Communications Building.  

This will mark the first time in the APSU opera program’s history that The Magic Flute will be performed in full, and the event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.apsu.edu . APSU’s opera theatre, symphony orchestra and choirs also broke new ground in the Spring 2023 semester with a collaborative production of Cendrillon by Viardot, the first opera sung in French in the history of the opera program.