Something interesting and unusual is going on in New York\u2019s musical world, and it has been going on for 125 years. So why doesn\u2019t everybody in the city know about it already? How long does it take for a great secret to get out?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine a concert series that caters to people who love music but have very little cash to spare. Tickets might cost in the range of $9 to $10\u2014that is, about half the price of a movie these days, and less than a tenth of a Carnegie or New York Philharmonic seat. Yet the bargain-basement prices would not be reflected in the line-up of musical artists. On the contrary, the performers would be selected from the cream of the international crop. People like Yefim Bronfman, Steven Isserlis, and Joshua Bell would be pleased to lend their services, at vastly reduced prices, to these appreciative but comparatively impecunious audiences. And the audiences, in turn, would show their appreciation by being silent as mice during the concerts and deafeningly loud during the applause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Too good to be true? Then you obviously haven\u2019t been to one of the Peoples\u2019 Symphony Concerts<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This organization, which was founded in 1900 by the conductor Franz X. Arens, has had only three directors in its century-and-a-quarter of existence: Mr. Arens from 1900 to 1914, Joseph Mann for the fifty-nine years from 1914 to 1973, and Frank Salomon for the fifty-one years from 1973 to the present. In a few months, in 2025, that fifty-one will become fifty-two, and PSC will complete its 125th<\/sup> anniversary season. Among the artists lined up for the three series this year are the soloists Paul Lewis and Augustin Hadelich (both of whom I\u2019ve praised in this blog), ensembles like Takacs Quartet and the Knights (ditto), and even new music celebrities like the composer Timo Andres, appearing with the Calder Quartet. The concerts take place in PSC\u2019s usual venues\u2014that is, Washington Irving High School downtown and The Town Hall midtown\u2014and are priced at their usual rate of $56 or $58 per series of six. If you want to get fancy and have a seat with a slightly better view, you can pay $84 per series at Washington Irving, or $90 at the slightly plusher Town Hall. And if you can\u2019t make up your mind to go until late in the series, you can still get a single concert seat at the quite reasonable cost of $30.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had dropped in on one or two of these performances before, at the single-ticket $30 rate, but it wasn\u2019t until this fall that I made up my mind to see what the whole project was about. The first concert I went to, featuring the always-thrilling Takacs Quartet, took place on October 19 at a substitute location, the High School of Fashion Industries on West 24th<\/sup> Street, because the Washington Irving auditorium was temporarily unavailable. No problem: it was a delight to experience that venue, with its lobby displays of student clubs and its WPA-era murals inside the theater. The d\u00e9cor matched the old-lefty audience: the elderly guy next to me particularly wanted me to notice the mural\u2019s rendering of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which he referred to as if it were part of his and my joint labor history. This same old guy is the one who first told me about the $56 series price. \u201cThey just send you a wad of tickets and you get to use them up as the concerts come along,\u201d he said happily. My particular gent appeared to be on his own, but many in the audience were clearly long-term friends or at least old acquaintances gathering for the millionth time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That Takacs concert, consisting of Haydn, Britten, and Beethoven, was thoroughly satisfying, even if the acoustics were not quite as good as they would have been in, say, Berkeley\u2019s Hertz Hall or Carnegie\u2019s Zankel. But the sound quality itself mattered less than the feeling of life in the room: living musicians playing live music to lively audiences. Even better, I thought, was the Paul Lewis concert at The Town Hall a week later, on the afternoon of Sunday, October 27. From my comfortable seat in the balcony I could look down on Lewis\u2019s hands and see every moment of his all-Schubert program; I could also hear every delicate note with no trouble. As he always does, Lewis played with consummate skill but no pretension. He spoke not a word, until he shyly announced a slow Schubert movement as his encore, and he responded to the thunderous applause with his usual graceful, modest bows. When Schubert sonatas are performed before your very eyes (and he will have performed the whole cycle for this audience, by the time he finishes), I feel that one’s attention is being sharpened in a way it is not when you just listen to the recordings. The recordings are great, of course\u2014one wouldn\u2019t want to live without Mitsuko Uchida\u2019s or Richard Goode\u2019s recordings, or for that matter those of Paul Lewis\u2014but there is something special about seeing and hearing the magic take place on the spot, right there in front of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frank Salomon introduced both of these concerts in a way that suggested we were all his extended family\u2014that we would be interested in the anecdotes about his personal history with PSC, and acquainted with the names of the long-ago and recent participants. He tended to act as if his predecessor, Joseph Mann, had just walked out of the room, though it had been over a half century since the reins were handed over. When I wrote to him after the Takacs concert inquiring about that pesky apostrophe in Peoples\u2019 Symphony Concerts (I myself would have punctuated it People\u2019s, if I meant \u201cfor the people,\u201d though I acknowledged that they might be referring to \u201cthe peoples of the world\u201d), he answered: \u201cWhen I joined PSC in 1972 working with my predecessor Joseph Mann, it was made clear to me that the apostrophe had to go after the \u2018s.\u2019 Yes, peoples\u2019 of the world\u2026\u201d I like a man who knows a good tradition when he sees it, and who perpetuates it to the best of his ability. I like and admire the Peoples\u2019 Symphony Concerts hugely, and if I lived in New York fulltime, I would certainly buy all three series every year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Something interesting and unusual is going on in New York\u2019s musical world, and it has been going on for 125 years. So why doesn\u2019t everybody in the city know about it already? How long does it take for a great … Continue reading