DANCE & MUSIC NEWS

NEXT SUMMER: The first annual “Lincoln Center Festival 96,” to be held in and around the theaters at the New York City landmark, July 22-Aug. 11, will offer more than 200 performances from artists and attractions from nine countries. Included will be a number of world and U.S. premieres and at least one U.S. debut, that of the 65-member, period-instruments ensemble, the Orchestre Revoluttionaire et Romantique, led by John Eliot Gardiner. Among the other participants: Lyons Opera Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the gagaku orchestra Reigakusha from Japan, Kronos Quartet and the Thang Long Water Puppets from North Vietnam. There will be opera staged (Virgil Thomson’s “Four Saints in Three Acts”) and unstaged (Beethoven’s “Fidelio”), as well as a retrospective of the works of American composer Morton Feldman. Said festival Director John Rockwell, “This is a festival of large-scale and wide-ranging events. . . . There are sub-themes, minifestivals, connections, which ought to create a whole that’s frisky and energizing and out of the ordinary.” Reported cost of the festival: $8.5 million.

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BRIEFLY: Daniel Hege, former music director of Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra and assistant conductor of the Pacific Symphony, has been named assistant conductor to David Zinman at the Baltimore Symphony. . . . Opera Pacific has ended its ninth season with a balanced budget, company chairman Thomas Hammond reports. In the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, the company had expenses of $5,500,098, and income of $5,623,605. At the same time, general director David DiChiera reports, performance-ticket sales broke previous company records, with overall paid attendance reaching 90% of capacity for the 24 performances of four productions mounted in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in 1994-95. . . . For the penpenultimate performance in its 26-year history, the Cleveland Quartet plays the New York premiere of John Corigliano’s first String Quartet, written especially for the farewell season of the ensemble, this afternoon in Alice Tully Hall. Two more performances are scheduled: Saturday night at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where the quartet (violins William Preucil and Peter Salaff, violist James Dunham and cellist Paul Katz) has been in residence for 20 years, and Severance Hall in Cleveland, next Sunday.