DANCE
WEDNESDAY - SATURDAY, JULY 10 - 13, 2019
7:30 PM

Mark Morris Dance Group
Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center
10 Columbus Circle, Upper West Side, Manhattan

$40-$150
http://www.lincolncenter.org/mostly-mozart-festival/show/mark-morris-dance-group-2

Who better to make a brand new setting of Satie's exceeding droll Sports et Divertissements -- a piece illustrating sports and leisure activities originally presented as a cycle of piano works with visual and spoken-word accompaniment -- than The World's Funniest, Wittiest, And Most Purely Entertaining Choreographer (also The World's Choreographer Most Responsive To Music)? Morris and Satie were made for each other -- Morris's prior Satie settings are among his best works -- so expect the moon and stars from this new piece. Also on the bill is one of Morris's most miraculous prior musical settings, V to Schumann's stupendous Piano Quintet: you feel like you're actually seeing the music. And Empire Garden to Ives's Piano Trio, whose playful folk usages would be catnip to Morris even if the central movement's tempo marking, TSIAJ ("this scherzo is a joke"), didn't seem like something Morris would have written himself (surely the sophisticated readers of this list don't need to be told that "scherzo" is Italian for "joke"). Yet, as you'll see, Morris's response to Ives's music is not what you'd have expected at all.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT: Good Italian food -- and excellent Martinis (of all things) -- at Gabriel's.