Gotham Chamber Opera Folds

Company ceases operations, effective today.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

It ended not with a bang, or a whimper, but with a press release.

The Gotham Chamber Opera, which was among the front rank of New York opera companies not based at Lincoln Center, has closed its doors and ceased operations.

The Mighty Have Fallen

J & R Music World Shuts its Doors. 
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Requesciat in pace: J & R Music World

Last year on Superconductor I ran a story about the dwindling list of brick-and-mortar stores left in New York to buy classical music on CD. Yesterday, we lost another one.

J & R Music (and Computer) World, which started as a basement record story and evolved into a  block-long multi-story music and electronics emporium selling everything from blenders to MacBook Pros has shuttered its doors as of Wednesday. They join a long list of closed music retailers: Virgin MegaStore, Tower Records, HMV and Sam Goody to name just a few.

From the Ashes of 9/11

New York Philharmonic to Present Free Resurrection Symphony.

Alan Gilbert will conduct Mahler's Second Symphony on Sept. 10, 2011.
Photo by Chris Lee © 2011 The New York Philharmonic.

This week, the New York Philharmonic has announced A Concert for New York, a free performance at Avery Fisher Hall to commemorate the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The location: Avery Fisher Hall. The program: Mahler's Symphony No. 2, also known as the Resurrection Symphony.

The Second is written on an enormous scale, and performances can last over 90 minutes. Mahler's sweeping vision of the afterlife calls for titanic forces, offstage trumpets, soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, and a choir. The first movement originated as a tone poem called Totenfeier. It is a massive, ominous funeral march. Of the five movements, the first three are instrumental.

Gustav Mahler in 1909, when he 
led the New York Philharmonic.

The fourth movement is a setting of "Urlicht", a song from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which provided source material for Mahler in his first four symphonies. The finale starts with Friedrich Klopstock's poem The Resurrection and then dives into Mahler's own text. The last movement depicts the last trumpet, the Day of Judgment, and the dead (literally) rising from their graves.

First performed in 1895, the Resurrection was written as a tribute to the conductor Hans von Bülow. It was first performed in New York in 1908 durig Mahler's tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic. The composer himself conducted.

Ever since that historic concert, the work has enjoyed a long association with with great Philharmonic conductors, including Dmitri Mitropoulos and Leonard Bernstein. This performance will be conducted by Alan Gilbert, the first Resurrection in his tenure as the orchestra's music director.

Tickets for A Concert for New York will be available to the general public this summer. Additionally, the performance will be broadcast on a large screen in Josie Robertson Plaza. Finally, PBS will televise the concert on Great Performances on Sept. 11 as part of the comemmoration of the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

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.