Spurred on by a growing number of offbeat performance venues and enterprising young classical musicians, New York is experiencing a boom in small, largely below-the-radar concert series. There are opera nights at a Lower East Side dive bar, chamber music concerts at a boxing gym beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, contemporary music at a cabaret in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and avant-garde fare in a silo on the banks of an industrial canal.
The rise of an alternative classical scene recalls the 1960s and 70s, when downtown lofts and art galleries helped give rise to minimalism and performance art. The current crop of classical series resembles a similar trend happening in jazz and world-music circles, as the club epicenter has spread from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Classical musicians often say they are drawn to simpler, less pretentious encounters with audiences.
“It’s just like going to see a band,” says Anne Ricci, a soprano in describing Opera on Tap, an opera recital series that she co-founded in June 2005 at Freddy’s Bar and Backroom, a former bowling alley and cop bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that now presents live music.
“Audiences are allowed to be loud, they’re allowed to talk, get up and re-fill their beers. It helps the singers recover a sense of spontaneity that can easily be lost in the classical repertoire.”
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Another good example of this scene is a series of concerts put on by Mark Rowsome at The Wandering Minstrel in Stratford, Ontario. Mark has finished off a big old kitchen on the back of an old house and hosts numerous small chamber concerts there for audiences of no more than 50. Here is one of my earlier reviews of the work there.
This movement seems to be a demonstration of two things. First, it is another demonstration of the Long Tail that Chris Anderson so elegantly wrote about. While many of the effects of this thing happen in electronic media, there is plenty of room for narrow-casting in other less electronic venues. Second, all the blather about the importance of public funding for the arts seems to be disproved here. If one develops a market for something that people want, it will work. Government funding here simply confuses the issue.
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