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Reprinted with permission from
When people who say they are curious about classical music but don't attend concerts are asked what keeps them away, some say they are intimidated by the ritualistic aspects of concertgoing, like when to applaud, and some say they aren't sure where to start. But the most persistent complaint among potential listeners -- and regular concertgoers as well -- is that ticket prices for the best-known ensembles and soloists are so high as to discourage experimentation. Even critics, who generally get their tickets free, were taken aback when the best seats at the Metropolitan Opera topped $200 a few seasons ago. The Philharmonic's top price this season (not counting gala events) is $92, and seeing a visiting orchestra, chamber group or recitalist at Carnegie Hall can range from $25 to $150. For much less, one can sit in the upper balconies, where the sound is often fine but the performers are distant. But there are venues that offer knowledgeable listeners superb music at budget prices. One of the most notable is the Peoples' Symphony Concerts, which for a century have been giving knowledgeable listeners a break. Founded in 1900 by Franz X. Arens, an immigrant conductor who found high ticket prices objectionable even then, Peoples' Symphony started out as an orchestral series that offered a five-concert subscription for 25 cents to $1.25 and single seats for as little as a dime. These days Peoples' Symphony presents mostly recitals and chamber music in a schedule balanced between established performers and promising newcomers. This season, the Juilliard, Guarneri and Colorado String Quartets and the pianists Ignat Solzehnitsyn and Orli Shaham have already appeared in the series; tomorrow evening, Eighth Blackbird, a superb young new-music ensemble, is to perform. Tickets now cost dollars rather than pennies, but the prices remain remarkably low. A subscription to six Saturday evening concerts at Washington Irving High School costs $19, with single tickets going for $5. There is also a higher-priced series at Town Hall on Sunday afternoons: six-concert subscriptions are $19 to $52, with single tickets from $6.50 to $10.50. The pianists Garrick Ohlsson and André-Michel Schub, the violinist Cho-Liang Lin, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Johannes Quartet and the Moscow Chamber Orchestra have performed in that series this season; next month brings a visit by the baritone John Shirley-Quirk and the pianist Leon Fleisher. And to celebrate the Peoples' Symphony centenary, there is a starry concert at Carnegie Hall on May 5, with performances by some of the musicians who have played in the series regularly, with tickets priced from $5 to $25 -- about a fifth of what other concertgoers pay for an equivalent evening at Carnegie. Besides being one of the best bargains in New York City's concert life, the performances are also an unusually well-kept secret. To a degree, it has to be that way because of a delicate series of commercial transactions. Frequently performers playing Peoples' Symphony concerts for $5 a ticket or less -- and at correspondingly reduced fees -- also offer similar or identical programs in larger halls and at full price a few days later. They don't want to become cut-rate competition for their own concerts elsewhere. Moreover, the halls that present their full-price concerts usually demand exclusivity, something that they often relax for musicians playing on the Peoples' Symphony series. In return, Peoples' Symphony does not advertise. "We are very sensitive to the fact that our musicians are also performing elsewhere," said Frank Salomon who has managed the concerts since 1973. "The fact is, Peoples' Symphony would not exist if not for the extreme generosity of the artists. People like Andras Schiff, Radu Lupu and the major quartets and trios play for us on a regular basis for a fifth or a tenth of their normal fees. And I think the halls realize that we are not a conflict, because the majority of our subscribers are people who are not able to pay regular ticket prices. Most are in their late 60's or 70's, and a large percentage of our audience is made up of retired schoolteachers and artists who are holding day jobs. Now and then I run into people from our audience at the 92nd Street Y or at Avery Fisher Hall, but it's a very small minority." Performers have sometimes used their Peoples' Symphony concerts as warm-ups for more prominent appearances. The flutist James Galway, early in his career as a soloist, played an all-Bach recital at Washington Irving the night before he played it at Carnegie Hall. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the violinist Gidon Kremer have also tested programs that they later played uptown. 'We Fill the Seats' "I think an advantage we have," Mr. Salomon said, "is that we are generally sold out on subscription, although with returned tickets, it is always possible to get in at the last minute. We fill the seats, so whether they're trying out a new program or just playing a regular concert, we give them a house filled with people who are there because they love music." That audience, it turns out, is the principal reason many of the performers pay regular visits to the series. "These are real music lovers who are not necessarily well heeled," said Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist in the Guarneri Quartet. "They're very enthusiastic, very demanding and sometimes unruly, but in a nice way. We can't get away, for instance, without playing encores, and that's rarely the case elsewhere in New York. New Yorkers are sometimes blasé: when the concert ends they stand up and put on their coats, and we think, 'Were we that bad?' But no, it's just that the attitude is, 'We heard the concert, we enjoyed the concert, now let's get out of here.' But it's different at Peoples' Symphony concerts. They make you play encores, and if you don't announce what it is, they call out, 'What are you going to play?' It's fun. It's different. They're the genuine article." Mr. Ohlsson, who has played in the series every few years since the mid-1970's, also said the audience was the main attraction. "They bring a real love of music to the concerts," he said, "and that's why I do it. It's as simple as that. When they really like things, they respond. They get it. You know, public art is full of uncontrollables. As an artist, you want to have an excellent piano, a beautiful hall and an appreciative audience, and the audience is a very important part of that equation. This audience does the audience's job exceptionally well, which is not always the case." How It Started When Arens returned to the United States in 1898, he settled in New York City and quickly began planning a series to make symphonic music available at popular prices. He staked his entire savings of $2,500 on the venture, which in its first season involved hiring a 40-to-50-player orchestra (pay was $9 for three rehearsals and a concert) for five concerts at Cooper Union, which held 1,200 listeners. The series sold out instantly, and on the basis of its success, Arens rounded up a board of wealthy, socially prominent patrons to help run and underwrite the series, among them members of the Guggenheim, Vanderbilt, Frick and Roosevelt families. Even so, the organization was barely meeting its budget by 1921, when it received a $50,000 bequest from Annie Louise Cary Raymond, a contralto who had had an operatic career in the 1880's. Raymond's gift became the basis of an endowment that has grown to $2.5 million. One of Mr. Salomon's projects for the centenary is to expand that endowment, but financially, the series seems quite healthy, given its ticket prices. The budget, for 18 concerts, is about $230,000 this year. About 10 percent of that cost is covered by audience donations of about $25,000 a year. "The amount isn't huge," Mr. Salomon said, "but it represents the spirit of the organization. We get contributions from a little over half of our subscribers. Normally only 3 to 6 percent of an audience contributes to organizations from which they benefit, so this is quite extraordinary." Legends and More Over the years an extraordinary roster of great musicians have played at the Peoples' Symphony concerts. Early on, the now legendary Flonzaley and Kniesel String Quartets were presented; later the Budapest and Hungarian Quartets were regular visitors. The pianists who performed in the series represent the history of modern piano playing: among them are Benno Moiseiwitsch, Moriz Rosenthal, Josef Lhevinne, Rudolf Serkin, Jorge Bolet, Claudio Arrau, William Kapell, Mieczyhslaw Horszowski, Alicia de Larrocha and Christoph Eschenbach. Violinists have been well-represented, too, with performances by Georges Enesco, Nathan Milstein, Joseph Szigeti, Michael Rabin, Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman. The organization's mission has changed little in a hundred years, although the flourishing of freelance orchestras in New York -- and the rising cost of rehearsing and performing with them -- led to a shift toward chamber music and recitals in the first 15 years of the century, and a decisive break with orchestral music when Arens, its founding conductor, retired in 1917. Arens was born in Germany in 1856 and moved to the United States with his family when he was 10. He was apparently a promising young musician: not long after the family settled in rural Michigan, he took a job as organist and choirmaster at a local church. But when he returned to Europe to study music in Munich, Dresden, Berlin, Vienna and Paris, he realized how ill-prepared he was to meet his aspiration of becoming a conductor. "I grew up where I had no opportunity to hear great music and was 27 years old before I heard my first symphony," he wrote soon after he founded the Peoples' Symphony Concerts. "Even then it would have been impossible for me to have heard symphony concerts had the rates of admission in Munich been what they are in New York." A Different Atmosphere In its early years, the series moved back and forth between Cooper Union and Carnegie Hall several times, sometimes offering concerts at both to accommodate the growing audience. A chamber music series was added in 1910, and in 1913 the chamber concerts took up residence in the 1,500-seat auditorium at Washington Irving High School. The school opened that year on what had been the site of the National Conservatory of Music, which Dvorak directed briefly in the 1890's. Except for a brief period in the 1970's, when the concerts moved to Hunter College and Town Hall, Washington Irving has remained the series' principal home. (The current Town Hall series was added more recently, to address the concerns of older concertgoers who preferred daytime concerts.) Possibly because of the high school environs, the Washington Irving concerts have an atmosphere unlike most others in New York. Concertgoers typically begin lining up outside the building at 5 o'clock to get their pick of the unreserved seats when the building opens at 7, an hour before curtain time. And there is a certain rambunctiousness in the house. Once when a musician who was about to perform a new work took a few moments to talk about the composer and his style, the audience listened raptly for a while, but when the introduction threatened to become a lecture, a handful of people called out, "Play the piece already." Robert Mann, the founding first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet, sees the audience as a link to a receding era, a time when European immigrants settled in New York and attended performances that reminded them of their roots. "I think the audience has changed less at Peoples' Symphony than at a lot of other places," Mr. Mann said. Speaking of the manager, he added: "For one thing, I think Frank has adhered to the kinds of values that have always been the basis of these concerts. So where a lot of organizations are scrambling to create audience interest by hiring ensembles with unusual combinations of instruments or by presenting jokey events like Canadian Brass concerts, Peoples' Symphony has always had a generational flow in which people come to hear what they liked in the old days, or what they remember their parents liked." Mr. Salomon is also an artists' manager and runs the Marlboro Music Festival, the Schneider Concerts at the New School (another inexpensive series, with tickets for $3.75 if bought on subscription) and the New York String Orchestra master classes and concerts, presented annually by the New School and Carnegie Hall. "I had gone to the concerts first as an audience member," he said. "At one point Joseph Mann, my predecessor as manager of the Peoples' Symphony, wanted to present some of the musicians I managed -- one of the Musicians from Marlboro groups, then Peter Serkin and Murray Perahia. We became friends, and when his health began to fail, he asked if I would work with him and eventually take over the series. I believed in the institution and its mission, which was not dissimilar from what I was doing with Alexander Schneider's concerts at the New School. So we worked together for about a year, until his death in 1973." Running the series is not without its frustrations. Mr. Salomon would like younger listeners and families with children to use the concerts as an introduction to classical music. Some do, he said, but not enough, and since the series does not advertise, he has not been able to find a way to reach them. New Music's Appeal One way might be by presenting new music. Mr. Salomon has established a tradition of offering one concert devoted entirely to new music on his series every season, and new works turn up as well on programs otherwise devoted to standard repertory. This season's all-contemporary concert, tomorrow evening, is by Eighth Blackbird, a young group with a varied repertory and a polished, visually striking performance style. The new-music programs, though, have occasionally drawn irate letters. "One year," Mr. Salomon said, "we presented Peter Serkin, Aki Takahashi and two members of the Nexus Percussion Ensemble, and people threatened to cancel their subscriptions. But the next year subscriptions were up. And once the Meridian Arts Ensemble included pieces by Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, which was a little over the top, even for me. That time I got a letter saying, 'It's great that you introduce us to new things, but this was too much.' Perhaps I wasn't properly vigilant. But I'm mindful of the fact that people should be forewarned, so that they can stay home if they want to. And I must say, most of the audience is open and willing to listen." |
