How could I forget?

Two items — and not small ones — that I should have included

in my honor roll of new directions for classical music institutions, in my last

post:

First, the Metropolitan Opera!

href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/news/detail.aspx?id=224">Details

have now been announced about Met productions being streamed live to movie

theaters, something Peter Gelb announced in the spring. Now it’s a reality. Not

to mention the

href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/news/detail.aspx?id=217">open

house, free for everybody on September 22 (though you have to get tickets

in advance), which includes the final dress rehearsal (free, as part of the

open house) for the opening night Butterfly.

Or the new

href="http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/news/detail.aspx?id=222">marketing

campaign, which will make the Met visible throughout

w:st="on">New York. As someone said in an

admiring e-mail this morning, “Peter Gelb gets it.” I agree.

And on September 13, the New York Philharmonic will show its

first concert this season on a giant video screen in the plaza outside Avery

Fisher Hall, “free for all,” as a press release underlines. Inside the hall,

the orchestra plays; outside the hall, anyone can see and hear them, with

chairs provided for those who get there early. This is possible, in part, because

the concert being is telecast as one of PBS’s Live From Lincoln Center shows, so the

feed can go directly to the screen outside. Not that other institutions haven’t

shown free video of performances without PBS around to help, most notably the

Houston Grand Opera, under David Gockley’s leadership

(and soon he’ll be doing the same thing in San Francisco, where he now runs the

opera company). The Philharmonic showed its special performance of the Brahms

Requiem free on a giant screen, just after 9/11, but that, too, was shown on

PBS. Still, if PBS can help the orchestra to project itself into

w:st="on">New York, that’s a very

good thing — and what’s most important is that a rather conservative

institution is now taking a step to bring down some of the barriers between

itself and its city. (One curiosity, though. There’s nothing on the

Philharmonic’s website about the

video showing in Lincoln

Center‘s plaza. If you dig

a little — if you’re on the homepage, and click on “more info” under the

laconic description of opening night — you’ll learn, equally laconically, about

the telecast. But there’s not a word about the video screen. Why not? Shouldn’t

this be splashed on the homepage? Shouldn’t at least the telecast be? The

class=SpellE>Met’s website certainly includes all the things I listed above,

though not as prominently as they might.)

One caveat, though. Opening the doors — getting out into the

city — is only the beginning. The biggest change has to be in what classical

music institutions actually present. Performances have to feel like living art,

or more generally like real human experience, and not like religious rites or

some kind of gushy romance novel, where the content doesn’t get much beyond “isn’t

it beautiful!”

My apologies to the Met and Philharmonic for not including

them in my original post! What was I thinking of?