Far from Mid-Manhattan

New York City's claim to being the music capital of the world centers on a handful of glamorous names--the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic-Symphony. But the city's reputation also depends on the dozens of amateur, semiprofessional and modestly budgeted professional groups which every season present a staggering program of operas, concerts and recitals echoing every conceivable musical taste. Much of this music is performed in corners of the city far from the gaudy midtown entertainment axis.

Chamber music can be found in neighborhood churches or refurbished lofts; grand opera may be sung in reconditioned movie theaters with the orchestral pyrotechnics of Verdi or Bizet tamed to a single piano. Many programs are heard in some of the city's finest new recital halls, which bring music closer to home because they are in residential areas, e.g., the new auditorium of New York University's Law School in Washington Square, which serves as a musical center for lower Manhattan; the wood-lined, acoustically outstanding Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum on upper Fifth Avenue, which after three years rivals Town Hall as the city's leading recital hall. Taken all together, New York's out-of-the-way music--comparable to the busy off-Broadway theater--keeps the city astir with the ferment of new musical ideas. Some of the unusual and relatively new groups at work in Manhattan this season:

THE AFTER DINNER OPERA COMPANY is the freshest of half a dozen small opera groups and workshops (including the lighthearted Punch Opera, the experimental Opera '57 and the ambitious Amato Opera Theater, which changes its standard opera bill every three weeks). The company--headed by Stage Director Richard Flusser, 29--was launched with a capital of $250 in 1949, lost $2.68 the first season but has been making modest profits ever since. Flusser has more than tripled the original $65-a-week salaries of the six young members of the troupe. After Dinner has been successful because it staged sprightly productions of such new works as British Composer Gerald Cockshott's Apollo and Persephone, Marc Blitzstein's Triple Sec. The troupe scored a critical success in an appearance at Edinburgh last year (TIME, Sept. 10), is currently preparing to open at Manhattan's off-Broadway Phoenix Theatre with the first U.S. performance of Offenbach's 66, a 40-minute spoof of Austrians and lotteries.

THE AMERICAN OPERA SOCIETY has thoroughly entrenched itself with its excellent Town Hall concert performances of such rarely heard operas as Bellini's I Puritani, Offenbach's La Perichole (before the Metropolitan made it a pop hit), Handel's Julius Caesar. Founded in 1951 by two cousins in their early 20s, Allen Sven Oxenburg and Arnold U. Gamson, the company scored its first notable success in 1953 with a performance of Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea, has since had no trouble selling out the four operas it performs each season. Musical Director Gamson achieves remarkably large effects with a small chorus and orchestra; Impresario Oxenburg hires such top soloists as Cesare Siepi, Jennie Tourel, Eileen Farrell. Last week American Opera presented France's Denise Duval and Metropolitan Opera Baritone Martial Singher in a crisply paced, wittily sung performance of Poulenc's buffoonish Les Mamelles de Tiresias.

THE NEW YORK PRO MUSICA ANTIQUA was founded by Choral Conductor Noah Greenberg and Recorder Player Bernard Krainis to perform medieval and Renaissance music, in 1953 presented a three-concert series at the Y.M.-Y.W.H.A. The highly talented group of six singers and four instrumentalists (each of whom plays at least two ancient instruments) has since added regular concerts at the Metropolitan Museum's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium and the Cloisters. Greenberg and Krainis devote much time to obtaining and copying old scores, finding old instruments or having them built, e.g., a Gothic harp, a Renaissance organ. The group rehearses a dozen times for each new program. Samples from this week's scholarly repertory: Street Cries of London by Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625), Sancta Maria by John Dunstable (?-1453), Henry VIII's Helas, Madame.

THE TELEMANN SOCIETY consists of Recording Engineer Richard Schulze, 28, and his wife Theodora, 26, a music teacher. He plays recorder and clarinet, she the recorder, oboe and harpsichord. The Schulzes started making beautiful (baroque) music together in college (University of Chicago), decided to perform publicly in Manhattan in 1955, calling themselves the Telemann Society after German Composer Georg Telemann, a contemporary of Bach and writer of an incredible amount of facile church music. With the aid of professional instrumentalists, they have played for three seasons in Carl Fischer Hall, the Carnegie Recital Hall and Town Hall with modest critical notices, have cut their seasons' losses to $1,500. In their Carnegie Recital appearance last week, attended by some 150 people, they played Telemann's Concerto in B Flat for Two Recorders and String, filled out the rest of the program with some Bach and their own variations for recorder and harpsichord on Greensleeves.

Music IN OUR TIME began last year as the inspiration of New York Violinist Max Polikoff, who felt that the public was starved for new music and that contemporary composers deserved a wider hearing ("Death doesn't enhance them, only possibly their music"). With the aid of Manhattan Y.M.H.A. Education Director William Kolodney, Polikoff set up an eight-concert Sunday-afternoon series on modern music with a minimal $5 subscription fee, attracted enthusiastic audiences to the Y.M.H.A.'s Kaufmann Auditorium. This season the series has expanded to ten concerts, all of them performed by first-rate players. Although Polikoff has scheduled more American than foreign works, this week he is offering a selection of contemporary music from Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland. Impresario Polikoff also invites the composers being played to come and defend their music in open forum. Among those who have accepted so far this season: Roger Sessions, Luigi Dallapiccola, Carl Ruggles.

THE WASHINGTON SQUARE CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES started experimenting three years ago with a New York University-sponsored series of three Friday-evening concerts which was so successful that it was expanded to four concerts last year and six this year, featuring such famed groups as the Kroll and Budapest String Quartets (the Budapest sold out the 500-seat hall). Dean Paul A. McGhee of N.Y.U.'s Division of General Education hopes to enlarge the series further by 1958, believes there is an audience for chamber music in lower Manhattan. This week at N.Y.U., the Totenberg Instrumental Ensemble, headed by distinguished Violinist Roman Totenberg, will play Bach, Hindemith's Trauermusik,. Vivaldi's Winter Concerto (from the Four Seasons).

THE NEW YORK FLUTE CLUB was founded in 1920 by the late great Flutist Georges Barrere, regularly attracts some 150 loyal flute lovers to its Sunday afternoon concerts at Carl Fischer Hall. At each concert a different well-known flutist is invited to perform, either solo or in chamber-music ensembles, e.g., last week Claude Monteux, son of the conductor, accompanied by Composer Henry Brant at the piano, in a program of new and traditional works, including Milhaud's Sonatine, a Haydn Sonata in G and Brant's own Partita in C. Why there should be such a persistent demand for a flute club--as opposed to clarinet clubs or bassoon clubs--not even the club officers have been able to determine. Says one: "There's just something about the flute, I guess."

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