MET OPERA GALA, MAY 7

Mezzo’s Melancholy Fog

The Met’s 50th-anniversary gala was nothing but moments: I’ll find it hard forgetting the glowing ping of Javier Camarena’s high Cs, the bronzed nobility of Piotr Beczala, the worn-velvet ease of Stephanie Blythe and David Daniels’ Handel duet, the fearless molasses-y depths of Anna Netrebko’s low notes. But coming at a difficult point in the program — just after Dmitri Hvorostovsky roused the crowd with his dramatic surprise return to the stage — Joyce DiDonato provided a fittingly mellow coda, her voice a melancholy fog in an aria from “Werther.” ZACHARY WOOLFE

CHIARA STRING QUARTET, MAY 11

Gritty Yet Soulful

Pierre Jalbert runs through a series of effects In his “Canticle (String Quartet No. 6),” written for the adventuresome Chiara players and given its New York premiere at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: violinists doubling on crotales (small bells), struck or bowed; the cellist caught up in harmonics; violinists and violist using small glass rods as bouncing bows. The work is alternately contemplative and gritty, Mr. Jalbert said from the stage, “reflective of the time we currently live in,” but it ends in utter serenity, in a movement headed “Soulful, mysterious,” with the first violinist bowing a bell and the other players bowing their instruments in a fading pianissimo. JAMES R. OESTREICH