“There are moments in the life of any concertgoer when place, program, and performance align so completely that one feels less like an audience member and more like a participant in a living, unfolding artwork. Such an evening unfolded at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and music director Leon Botstein presented Egypt in Music and Art as part of the museum’s Sight and Sound series—an inspired pairing with the Met’s luminous exhibition Divine Egypt.

The program opened with Johann Strauss II’s Egyptian March. TŌN’s strings played with a silken, blended sound, never losing the lightness that keeps Strauss afloat. The woodwinds chattered and arabesqued with delicious precision, while the brass offered just enough ceremonial blaze to suggest a European imagining of pharaonic grandeur without tipping into bombast. Their ensemble was taut; inner rhythms were clean, and the rubato felt natural, like a living march rather than a mechanical one.

From Strauss’s salon-Egypt, the transition to W.A. Mozart’s overture to Die Zauberflöte felt less like a change of subject than a deepening of theme. Botstein and his players made the overture feel like an initiation rite: after the final E-flat blaze, one had the sense not merely of an introduction completed but of a threshold crossed. We had moved from the polite exoticism of Strauss into a realm where Egypt signifies something deeper—trial, purification, and the possibility of a higher order.

The evening’s central revelation was Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5, the ‘Egyptian.’ Pianist Terrence Wilson proved an ideal guide through this landscape. His tone combined steel and velvet; passage work sparkled, yet the singing lines never lost their vocal quality. The slow movement was the heart of the performance. Wilson shaped the Nubian-inspired melody with a long, unbroken line, supported by TŌN’s delicately balanced strings and winds. The result was both sensual and contemplative, like a nocturne glimpsed from the deck of a ship anchored on the Nile.

The playing combined youthful energy with a seriousness of purpose; the musicians were not simply executing notes but engaging in a broader conversation with history, iconography, and philosophy.” —Edward Kliszus