When I told my mother I was planning a column to help readers in lower Manhattan choose a “home team orchestra,” she sounded a note of reason and practicality, as she so often does. “Why don’t they go uptown to the Philharmonic?” she asked. “They could stop off at Zabar’s.” But Mom can also be prescient, and in this case she foresaw trouble where I did not. For Downtowners, finding a home team orchestra would prove more difficult than I imagined.
For all music lovers, but especially those with children, affiliating with an orchestra as if it were a sports franchise can bring the experience of serious music into the real world, where it belongs. Imagine your son “rooting” for the horn soloist in a difficult Mahler passage, or your daughter passing judgment on the cute rookie first-chair cellist — participating in the team’s artistic development while experiencing the art itself. Even for kids into hip-hop or slam poetry, an orchestra can be the foil that adds meaning to other aesthetic pursuits.
Orchestras invite this kind of fan loyalty through highly individual styles of management, performance and programming. Most sparsely populated states can support just one musical home team. “It’s almost like the orchestra’s music director becomes the governor of cultural affairs,” conductor Joann Falletta once told me. “It’s exhilarating, but the responsibility can be frightening as well.” How bold, how challenging can a concert program be before it scares away audience members who have no place else to go?
Here in New York, one of two or three cities considered world capitals of music, orchestral performances are far more frequent and varied. You’d be perfectly justified in assuming that there is a Downtown orchestra with a Downtown style waiting to roll out the carpet for your family; after all, Greenwich Village was a bastion of the arts before Noah built the ark. On the Lower East Side, there’s the Henry Street Settlement, an early leader in combining the performing arts with social services. On the far West Side, Westbeth artists’ housing has its own performance space. In between there are Pace, NYU and New School University. There’s dance at the Joyce and elsewhere. Clubs and the avant garde are thriving.
But you’d be wrong. There’s not a serious resident orchestra in sight down here.
Mom wasn’t surprised, but I was. In Munich, a cosmopolitan city with a population that approximately equals Manhattan’s, there are seven major resident orchestras. In Manhattan, there is one: the New York Philharmonic, oldest and arguably foremost among the nation’s “Big Five” (with counterparts in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and Philadelphia). If you’re looking for a home team orchestra, you could do worse: the Philharmonic maintains a performance standard that never slips from the top rank of world-class orchestras, hosting international stars as guest soloists and charging less for tickets than a Broadway show does.
But you do have other options. A short subway ride away, the dynamic Brooklyn Philharmonic — one of the most underrated and adventurously programmed orchestras in America — is in residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Or reverse the usual bridge-and-tunnel commute by taking the PATH to Newark, where music director Neeme Järvi and the New Jersey Symphony are accomplishing miracles in the luxuriously comfortable and acoustically vibrant New Jersey Performing Arts Center. My recent field trip there provided one astonishment after another, with superlative accounts of the Britten violin concerto with soloist Janine Jansen and of Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Britten’s memory.
For an orchestra that captures the Downtown vibe, consider the American Composer’s Orchestra. “It’s true we’re not located downtown,” says executive director Michael Geller. “But we definitely cultivate a Downtown audience of sophisticated, intelligent listeners.” The ACO is surely one of the only orchestras with a music technology advisor on its board of advisors — along with many of the most prominent composers in America. And though I haven’t yet had the pleasure of hearing them, I wouldn’t miss their next concert at Carnegie Hall — a steamy evening of erotic art songs keynoted by Stephen Paulus’s cycle “Erotic Spirits” with soprano Deborah Voigt.
Watch this space for my breathless review. For a start on choosing your orchestra, check out www.americancomposers.org; www.brooklynphilharmonic.org; www.newjerseysymphony.org; and www.newyorkphilharmonic.org.
Michael Clive writes on the performing arts, cultural trends and the media, and is creative consultant to the PBS series “Live From Lincoln Center.” This is his first column on classical music for Downtown Express.
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