This season’s best of the best

With so many local arts venues and organizations announcing their fall and spring seasons, it may seem daunting to choose which events to purchase tickets for and make time to attend. To make the decision process easier, City Pulse staff has compiled a list of our top picks from five of the area’s top artistic institutions: the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum, Williamston Theatre, Wharton Center, Ten Pound Fiddle and Lansing Symphony Orchestra. There’s much more to come than this, but if you can only make room for one exhibition, theater performance or concert this season, these are the ones to see.

“Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico and the Survival of a People”

Through Feb. 2

MSU Broad Art Museum

The Broad will celebrate the opening of two exhibitions at its Sept. 13 fall opening party: “Complex Dreams,” discussed in detail on pages 16 and 17, and “Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico and the Survival of a People.” The latter, organized by the Broad and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at New York City’s Hunter College, in collaboration with the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, honors Puerto Rican identities in the archipelago and its diasporas.

The artists featured in the exhibition consider the Puerto Rican diaspora “in a fluid and expansive way,” according to the Broad. Several focus on the diaspora in the traditional sense — Puerto Ricans who migrate to the United States — while others honor the different diasporas that intersect with Puerto Rico.

“The Puerto Rican diaspora can be understood as a collage of overlapping histories of colonialism, resistance and survival,” the Broad’s website reads. “Countering the concept of a melting pot, which emphasizes assimilation and loss of culture, the idea of a collaged community allows for the celebration of roots and relations.”

— NICOLE NOECHEL

“Thirst”

Sept. 12-Oct. 20

Williamston Theatre

If you’re only going to attend one theater performance this season, make it Williamston Theatre’s season opener, “Thirst.” As our only professional, equity theatre in this region, I count on Williamston Theatre to truly challenge me with interesting, controversial, superbly acted shows. This world premiere, commissioned by the theater from rising Chicago-based playwright Terry Guest, is set in a future Michigan where the Great Lakes are poisoned, and water is a luxury. With its exploration of environmental crisis and moral dilemmas, “Thirst” promises to be a thought-provoking, can’t-miss production that showcases the very best our community has to offer and brings a tailor-made story of our local Anthropocene to life.

— CHELSEA LAKE ROBERTS

London Philharmonic Orchestra

7:30 p.m. Oct. 17

Wharton Center Cobb Great Hall

Michigan State University’s Wharton Center will lay out a diverse arts, dance, theater and entertainment banquet in its coming season, but if there’s one dominant meatball in this bountiful pasta toss, it’s a rare visit from the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Wharton Center director Eric Olmscheid said it took more than a year of planning and negotiation to make it happen.

“That’s a major, major programming deal for us,” Olmscheid said. “It’s one of the world’s finest orchestras, and having that here, in a program I think will electrify our audiences, is going to be so great.”

The program includes Beethoven’s “Egmont” overture, the fizzy fireworks of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and Samuel Barber’s deeply moving violin concerto, with dynamic young violinist Randall Goosby as soloist. The New York Times listed Goosby’s performance at Lincoln Center as one of the best of 2023: “In a perfect balance of intelligent artistry and showmanship, he brought down the house, prompting a standing ovation in the middle of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto and minutes of cheering afterward.”

— LAWRENCE COSENTINO

Planet D Nonet with vocalist John “T-Bone” Paxton

7:30 p.m. May 2

UrbanBeat

Courtesy photo

The Ten Pound Fiddle will wrap up its 50th season with a performance by the 11-time Detroit Music Award-winning jazz group Planet D Nonet on May 2. Co-founded by drummer and bandleader RJ Spangler and trumpeter James O’Donnell in 2007, the nonet has performed in 10 states, including multiple trips to New Orleans. At UrbanBeat, the group will highlight music from the Great American Songbook, including selections by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Burt Bacharach, Carole King and many more. Trombonist John “T-Bone” Paxton, who formerly played in a group called the Sun Messengers with Spangler and O’Donnell, will provide vocals.

“I’ve been playing with those guys for 46 years,” Spangler said of Paxton and O’Donnell in a July interview with City Pulse ahead of the nonet’s performance at JazzFest Michigan. “They’re my lifelong brothers in music.”

— NICOLE NOECHEL

Lansing Symphony Orchestra:

Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto”

7:30 p.m. May 9

Wharton Center Cobb Great Hall

All the soloists featured in the upcoming Lansing Symphony Orchestra season are formidable, but the May 9 season finale is really a monster, anchored by Beethoven’s epic Piano Concerto No. 5. British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, one of the biggest international stars ever to appear with the LSO, will do the solo honors.

Grosvenor has played with all of the major U.K. and U.S. orchestras, from the London and Royal Philharmonic orchestras to the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony.

“His career has gone through the roof, and he’s playing one of the great staples of the repertoire,” LSO maestro Timothy Muffitt said.

It’s a major coup to get him to Lansing.

“We have a good reputation,” Muffitt said. “People know they can come here and have a good experience.”

— LAWRENCE COSENTINO