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Critic’s Notebook
When listeners were given the power to program an orchestral concert, the effects were astonishing.
By Zachary Woolfe
I love the canon of classical music and hate it.
To be precise, I hate the way we assume that audiences will always get excited about what’s new and unusual. If you pay attention to marketing departments, you may notice a reluctant tolerance for certain new sounds at the beginning of a concert. Fundamentally, though, other people need the rules, more than ever, as their ticket-buying habit over the past few years suggests. More in love with chestnuts such as “The Planets” and Beethoven’s Ninth.
So it was a small but sweet triumph over that narrative when, on Saturday at David Geffen Hall, the audience did just the opposite. In the end, family members and lesser-known people faced a fair fight, and who do you think won?
The battleground was Symphony of Choice, a sort of pre-season performance of the three-week, 13-concert Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. That’s the awkward call for what was once the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, before the center’s warm-weather offerings were lumped together in combination as Summer for the City two years ago.
The rationalization of the series and festivals that competed in the past has made the calendar clearer. But it also meant the demise of ambitious classical programming in favor of the kind of smaller-scale, pop-culture-focused occasions that Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s artistic director, has been working on. since 2021, produced when he was running Joe’s Pub at the Public Theatre.
In the midst of quiet discos, mindfulness sessions and comedy evenings, it seems as if classical music is now viewed with a slight irritation, as a tedious and costly waste of resources. People already know Lincoln Center for its operas and symphonies during the normal season. It is believed, so the center’s audience will rarely expand over the summer thanks to more than that, especially if those symphonies cannot be packaged as “experiences. “
That’s why Symphony of Choice got me thinking when I first heard about it. The aim of the Festival Orchestra, recently under the direction of the young conductor Jonathon Heyward, is to offer a preview of its programme over the coming weeks. The trick is a participatory popularity contest.
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