“Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (November 8–February 16, 2026): Philadelphia is about to play host to “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,” organized to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the movement with the publication of the André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is the last stop of the traveling show, which has been displayed in all four of the European cities associated with the greatest of the Surrealists: Paris (Breton), Brussels (Magritte), Madrid (Dalí and Miró), and Hamburg (Max Ernst). The exhibition will feature two hundred works by more than seventy artists, structured around themes of mythology, desire, and esotericism, alongside a section unique to the PMA focused on the immigration of Surrealist artists to the United States and Mexico during World War II. “Dreamworld” presents an unprecedented opportunity to contemplate, as Breton put it, “psychic automatism in its pure state.” —AG
Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall (November 6): The scrappy Mets to the New York Philharmonic’s Yankees, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s delivers consistently impressive programming for an organization of its size and scope, from a performance of Carmina Burana in early 2024 to Raphaël Pichon’s grand Schubertiade, Mein Traum, last season. Pichon returns to Carnegie Hall to conduct OSL this Thursday in a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. From OSL, I generally expect a piquant twist, and that arrives here with Friedrich Silcher’s obscure 1846 setting of a poem to the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Excerpts from Beethoven’s rarely heard incidental music (König Stephan, Leonore Prohaska) round out this intriguing bill. —IS
Paul Taylor Dance Company at Lincoln Center (November 4–23): A fluid athleticism informed much of the work of Paul Taylor, a varsity swimmer who first took up dance in the late 1940s while a student at Syracuse University. Following his death in 2018, Taylor’s New York–based company under the directorship of Michael Novak has continued to perform his exuberant repertoire along with several new commissions during its annual residency at Lincoln Center. The company now returns to the David H. Koch Theater for a three-week run accompanied by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. The programs mix Taylor standards such as Esplanade and Company B (performed together on the evening of Saturday, November 8) with world premieres by the resident choreographers Lauren Lovette and Robert Battle, a New York premiere by Hope Boykin, and Jody Sperling’s homage to Loïe Fuller. On November 15 and 22, the company will perform two family-friendly matinees of seventy-five minutes with no intermission, while discounted tickets have been underwritten for opening night and for younger patrons throughout the run. —JP
New York 2020: Architecture and Urbanism at the Beginning of a New Century, by Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove (Monacelli): As doorstops go, what could be more enlightening than New York 2020, the sixth (and, we are told, final) installment of the architect Robert A. M. Stern’s monumental history of New York buildings? With a rotating cast of collaborators, Stern has brought to life the city’s history through its architecture, creating a vital record of the built environment that surrounds us. In New York 2020, the authors take us on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood tour, documenting the city’s rapid transformation in the post–9/11 years. Particular highlights are the new classical buildings, many on the Upper East Side, that Stern himself has done so much to popularize. Here is an essential reference work that is simultaneously a grand tour. —BR
Dispatch:
“Detroit delivers,” by Thomas Philbrick. On a performance of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
By the Editors:
“The Case Against Buckley”
James Panero, The University Bookman
From the Archives:
“Proved upon the pulse,” by Eric Ormsby (May 1998). On Keats, by Andrew Motion.
