Newsday, September 2004

San Francisco has the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under Nicholas McGegan, and Boston has Boston Baroque, led by Martin Pearlman. Both ensembles have released bestselling recordings, and both cities mount early music festivals that attract musicians and fans from all over the globe.

So when it comes to early music, how can New York, the cultural capital of the United States, be singing the little-town blues?

Conventional wisdom has it that the city that never sleeps is not much of an early music town. Gene Murrow, general manager of the upcoming New York Early Music Celebration, begs to differ. He contends that New York has "a huge number of world-class musicians who have devoted their entire careers to early music," many of whom play in Philharmonia Baroque, Boston Baroque and such well-known European groups as Les Arts Florissants.

But New York's early-music ensembles must share the limelight with its overwhelming concentration of heavyweight cultural institutions. The Early Music Celebration was conceived "to try to make a bit of noise," Murrow says.

For 10 days starting Friday, the Early Music Celebration will showcase the city's musical diversity with more than 60 concerts of music from before 1800.

"Part of the rationale was to present an alternative kind of music, but also New York's wide variety of venues," Murrow explains. He points to two festival locations—Harlem's Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan's oldest house, and the Church of the Transfiguration, "a beautiful, painted English baroque church"—as examples of evocative, historically appropriate performing spaces of which even devoted concertgoers may be unaware.

New York, in fact, was the birthplace of the early-music or HIP ("historically informed performance") movement in the United States. The New York Pro Musica, founded by Noah Greenberg in 1952, was "the first world-class early-music group in this country," Murrow says. The Pro Musica circle included Frederick Renz, director of Early Music New York, whose 30th anniversary gala—Handel's Royal Fireworks and Water Musick, with a band including 12 oboes, six bassoons, nine trumpets and horns, and three pair of timpani—promises to be a highlight of the Early Music Celebration.

Variety of ensembles
In contrast to the Boston and San Francisco early-music festivals, New York's is not a curated event. "We could have raised money and invited a small number of groups; that's a perfectly viable model," Murrow says. Instead, the committee "decided to present a cross-section of what's happening in New York, from amateur ensembles to the crème de la crème of New York early-music groups." Many events are free or by donation, and concertgoers can also create their own subscription series.

Besides, does anyone still believe that New York is a second-tier early music center? New York City Opera's ongoing Handel series (including Orlando, slated for later this season ) is among the most acclaimed and consistently rewarding offerings in town. Paul Kellogg, the company's general and artistic director, cites audiences' "steady and loyal" support for baroque opera, and the ease with which City Opera supplements its regular orchestra with continuo players and other early music specialists.

Joseph Melillo, Brooklyn Academy of Music's executive producer, reports that BAM turned away hundreds from 2002's sold-out Monteverdi cycle. He recalls the "revelation" brought by performances of Lully's Atys under William Christie in 1992: "that New Yorkers loved this music, and wanted to see fully staged Baroque opera."

Good and plenty
Early music, in any event, has emerged from the ghetto it inhabited even 20 years ago, and can be heard frequently at cultural New York's toniest addresses. Visits by Europe's leading period-instruments orchestras studded last year's Lincoln Center season. In December, the Metropolitan Opera presents Handel's Rodelinda with a sumptuous cast, including countertenors David Daniels and Bejun Mehta. All over town, from Columbia's Miller Theatre (with its splendid Renaissance choral offerings) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (with an April tribute to gambist and conductor Jordi Savall), early music is thriving.

Indeed, the sounds and practices of early music have become ineluctably part of the musical mainstream. The 2004 Mostly Mozart Festival featured Les Violons du Roy, a modern-instruments orchestra that uses baroque bowing techniques. At the Met, even Verdi's Nabucco is sung with the kind of individualized embellishments that were fundamental to 19th century musical practice. The days of grim, foursquare interpretations passing themselves off as unassailably "authentic" are largely over, and experts agree that improvisation, while aleatory, is no less "original" for that.

Looking forward to the Early Music Celebration's more unusual offerings, Gene Murrow remarks, "What I've found in talking to audience members who come to early music concerts for the first time is that this is a very direct and personal kind of communication. After all, music exists to give expression to feelings and thoughts that can't be conveyed in words, and early music seems to do a really good job of this."