Concert Review: The Insider's Guide to the Orchestra

InSight Concerts offer a unique listening perspective.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Roger Nierenberg led the InSight Orchestra concerts this weekend at the DiMenna Center.
Photo © 2015 The Music Paradigm.

You learn more sitting in the orchestra.

That's the theory anyway behind the work of conductor Roger Nierenberg. Mr. Nierenberg leads The Music Paradigm, which offers team-building and training seminars to executives looking to improve their leadership skills by working with a classical orchestra. On Saturday night, Mr. Nierenberg applied his principles to a regular classical music concert, leading the first of two InSight concerts in Mary Flagler Cary Hall, the downstairs performance and rehearsal space in the DiMenna Center for Classical Music.

Concert Review: The King of New York

The [kāj] Ensemble premieres 100 Waltzes for John Cage.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

John Cage in 1986. Photo by Andreas Pohlmann © the photographer.

Too often, the life of a classical music critic involves the same  procedure over and over. We sit in preselected seats, usually in the same section of an opera house or concert hall. The musician(s) are onstage directing sound toward us. And we don't get up except for a quick break for intermission, a gulp of coffee, a friendly chat with a colleague, or a trip to the loo.

The Tuesday night premiere of Kevin James' 100 Waltzes for John Cage broke all of those rules. The 75-minute piece for nine players (Mr. James' group, the [kāj] ensemble) and pre-recorded sounds (played through quadraphonic speakers) proved an active listening experience. Audience members and press alike were invited to walk through and around the performance, experiencing the landscapes of sound from multiple angles.

Mr. James drew inspiration for 100 Waltzes on Cage's own 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs, a legendary 1977 work that used a map of New York and calculations from the I Ching to provide players with 147 addresses at which to play, but no indication what they were to do once they got to the randomly chosen location. This new work used random number generation (his assistant was introduced as his "tosser of coins") to pick locations at which to "mine" sounds and preserve them.

Orchestra of St. Luke's Opens DiMenna Center

The DiMenna Center: 450 W. 37th St.
Photo courtesy the Orchestra of St. Luke's.

The Orchestra of St. Luke's has been around since 1979, but has never had a building or venue to call its own. That changed yesterday, when the OSL officially opened its new midtown Manhattan home.

The morning ceremony featured Mayor Bloomberg, mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, the orchestra, and a whole bunch of writers and reporters including that guy who writes Superconductor.

The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, (named after two donors who spearheaded the drive to raise the money for the project) is a multi-leveled $37 million dollar space built out of the shell of two off-Broadway rehearsal theaters. It is part of the complex located at 450 W. 37th St., right over the hellmouth of the Lincoln Tunnel., which also houses Mikhail Barishnykov's dance troupe.

One would think that a classical music venue next to heavy traffic patterns might be a bad idea. But, as yesterday's facility tour showed, the two concert halls, practice rooms and control center have excellent soundproofing, designed as "floating rooms" in the architect Hugh Hardy's "box-within-a-box" design. (The traffic was rendered silent.) The rooms are all equipped with removable walls of great complexity, allowing them to be reconfigured as needed for chamber music, orchestral work, or anything else that is needed.


I was on the tour group that got to hear the OSL play in one of the spaces, Cary Hall. This is the larger of the two auditoriums, a subterranean wooden concert hall with the walls covered with acoustic dowels for maximum sonic clarity. Judging from the warm sound of the Orchestra (heard as they rehearsed the Overture to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte), the room allows the large instruments to bloom with firm, round tones. The acoustics also allow clarity between instruments, making smaller voices in the orchestra (particularly the oboes) stand out.

Both Cary and its smaller brother Benzaquen Hall are designed to be used primarily as rehearsal spaces and recording studios. There will be occasional concerts for the general public, and for those, temporary seating will be added. We also saw the musicians' lounge, the central recording room (temporarily bare of equipment as the Center will be inviting producers and engineers to bring their own) and the Orchestra's library room.

A cutaway view of the DiMenna Center with the two concert halls visible.
© HH Hardy Collaborative Architecture courtesy Orchestra of St. Luke's

The morning event concluded with a short concert and ceremony in Cary Hall. Involuntary is a new composition by David Lang, for piccolos, trumpets and drum. It was commissioned by the Orchestra for the occasion. With its dueling piccolos and martial percussion, it served as a short, pert curtain-raiser.

Speeches were made, by St. Luke's president Katy Clark, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Susan Grahame. There was a bizarre ribbon-cutting ceremony with dignitaries and artists taking shears to a copy of a Beethoven score. A short program followed, featuring Ms. Graham singing "Bless This House" and the actual Magic Flute overture, conducted by Patrick Summers.