Now playing at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway.

I have always suspected that for some star-making roles, the magic is all in the part itself and any competent actor lucky enough to land the role could ride it to acclaim. But if that’s true in some cases, it absolutely isn’t true of Venus in Fur. Nina Arianda is unforgettable as Vanda, the dominant presence in the play (in every sense), but that’s in large part because it’s such a high-wire role. It’s all too easy to imagine how unconvincing the character could be in other hands. Capturing Vanda’s subtle wit and quicksilver tonal shifts cannot possibly be easy, and few actresses have the burning charisma and imposing physicality required to convey the woman’s utter mastery of the action on stage. Playwright David Ives needed nothing short of a goddess to make Venus in Fur work; it is to everyone’s good fortune that the play’s producers landed upon Arianda.

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The New York City Ballet on Sunday, February 5.

I learned after the fact that New York City Ballet’s all-Wheeldon program was a special honor for the relatively young choreographer, something usually done only with the works of George Balanchine or Jerome Robbins, but when I bought my ticket, it never occurred to me that the programming was anything out of the ordinary. Wheeldon’s work has been a constant in City Ballet repertory for the half a dozen (!) years I’ve been attending, and I’m sure I’ve seen more of his pieces than Robbins’s.

The program this weekend demonstrated why that’s the case, why the company created the role of resident choreographer for Wheeldon in 2001 and why it continues to champion his work even after his departure in 2008. Even in his weaker pieces, Wheeldon’s aesthetic fits New York City Ballet. Often playful but always elegant, acutely conscious of music, making gorgeous use of the corps, his work truly does feel descended from (though not derivative of) Balanchine’s. He can justify a full program easily.

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The MET Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Sunday, January 15.

The clarinet is often described as the instrument closest, in timbre and range, to the human voice. I never gave the idea much thought before this concert, but the juxtaposition put forth by the Metropolitan Opera’s exquisite orchestra turned out to be lovely. Alternating between supporting a clarinet soloist and accompanying soprano Renée Fleming highlighted the voice-like qualities of the wind instrument, the agility and virtuosity of Fleming’s voice, and the fine musicianship of both. The program itself was a bit quirky, starting with Mozart and ending with several hyper-romantic arias from twentieth-century American operas, but it pulled together beautifully behind its talented soloists.

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At the Blue Note on Wednesday, January 11.

Jazz is never going to be my thing. I have tried (and tried and tried and tried), but I always feel at sea to some extent. Sometimes I get something out of it, and sometimes I simply don’t, but the music never truly speaks to me the way other genres do. I feel bad about that (I feel bad about lots of things), but there it is.

That said, the surest way to pull me out a little bit is to feature a good pianist, and McCoy Tyner happens to be a great one. His résumé—pianist for the John Coltrane Quartet as well as sideman on numerous albums for Blue Note Records and eventual bandleader—is obviously pretty striking (it’s generally a good sign if even I recognize the names), but it wasn’t just Tyner’s credentials that impressed me. He’s an incredible pianist, in a way that transcends genre altogether.

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Chanticleer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday, December 1.

I’m late getting this post up, and for once, it’s not so much that I’ve been overly busy (though I have) or that I’ve been trying to smother my stress playing an assassin type in a video game (oh my god, Skyrim is SO FUN!). It’s mainly that this was the fourth time I’ve attended one of Chanticleer’s gorgeous Christmas concerts and I’ve mostly run out of things to say about the program.

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The London Symphony Orchestra at the White Light Festival on Sunday, October 23.

The most creative, haunting thing about Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem is the text, juxtaposing liturgical Latin against verses by war poet Wilfred Owen. It’s an audacious choice, sometimes subverting, sometimes embracing the religious significance of the traditional requiem. The music itself doesn’t always rise to the level of that simple, provocative brilliance, but it has does have moments of vivid text-painting and unsettling tonal shifts and a genuinely profound finale, gorgeously lush and then heartbreakingly stark. Even if its extramusical credentials weren’t impeccable, War Requiem might well have entered the classical music pantheon.

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The New York City Ballet on Saturday, October 1.

Atonal music is easier to appreciate than to love—and it’s not particularly easy to appreciate. In college, I performed one of Arnold Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke on recital, but that selection stemmed mainly from a perverse impulse to be off-putting and inscrutable. Despite the hours I spent studying the work’s spiky lines and stream-of-consciousness form, it never truly coalesced for me the way Bach and Brahms and Prokofiev did. I can’t imagine that I played the piece particularly well.

But what I failed to learn of atonality from my own dogged study, I’ve learned easily from George Balanchine. Since I started attending the ballet upon moving to New York, Balanchine’s iconic “black and white” works—stark, stripped-down pieces, usually set to music by Stravinsky at his most esoteric—have consistently snuck up on me, somehow surprising me again and again and again with how much I prefer them to much of the floaty, romantic rep. Balanchine’s choreography shows me the music in the atonal—the shape of the lines, the rhythmic motives, the elegance in the severity—that I glimpsed but never truly grasped on my own. It’s finally dawned on me that I should stop being surprised. Balanchine is the best ambassador for modernist, twentieth-century music I’ve ever encountered.

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The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory on Sunday, August 7, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

All the best parts of Julius Caesar happen before intermission, which generally falls after Mark Antony’s rabble-rousing public address. The conspiracy, the assassination, the dueling eulogies—that’s all over and done with, leaving only the frenzied descriptions of off-stage battles and the inevitable suicides. It is, I suppose, a tribute to director Lucy Bailey that the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of the play retains some energy through what sometimes feels like a very extended denouement. I can never muster much sympathy for Brutus, but this time I at least felt some of the drama.

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The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory on Saturday, August 6, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

Shakespeare’s go-to plot device of women passing themselves off as men always requires some suspension of disbelief, but As You Like It, which features the strangest example of the ruse, requires more suspension than most. Not only does Orlando, who met and became infatuated with Rosalind when she was a lady of the court, not recognize her when she’s presenting herself as a boy named Ganymede, he also accepts Ganymede’s eccentric suggestion that he woo Ganymede as if the boy were Rosalind to prove his love for her. To be fair, Orlando is supposed to be naïve and uneducated (that is, in fact, why Rosalind is interested in correcting some of his sillier ideas about love under her guise as Ganymede), but honestly, is he blind too?

Of course this is a comedy, not naturalistic drama, and the Royal Shakespeare Company makes Rosalind’s subterfuge—and by extension her relationship with Orlando—more compelling than in any other production I’ve seen. The performances are lovely, for starters, but beyond that, the production as a whole creates a magical, increasingly optimistic mood—like sunlight slowly breaking through clouds. Under that spell, accepting the absurd premise doesn’t seem so hard, and besides, it’s worth the leap.

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