David Allen profiles Multi-Story Orchestra, an initiative that is making classical music more fun to play and more fun to attend, by taking it into new and un-sanitised places.
You step out of the train station at Peckham Rye, a gritty area of South London that’s the latest haunt of young people looking for low rent and cheap nights. Walk by some depressing shops, pass the cinema, and go down a dubious alleyway teeming with revelers. Turn into the innocuous back entrance of a parking garage and climb the stairs. Head up a ramp or two, and there it is — between mottled concrete pillars and capped by a low roof lies an impromptu semicircle of benches, surrounding an orchestra’s seats.
In winter, the top levels of this otherwise active parking garage are unused, generic and forgettable. But in summer, an arts organization called Bold Tendencies steps in. Since 2011, it has hosted the Multi-Story Orchestra, an insurgent group of freelancers founded by the composer Kate Whitley and the conductor Christopher Stark.
They play heroically, they play loudly, and they’ll play anything, from Beethoven and Brahms to Louis Andriessen and Gérard Grisey. They draw diverse crowds of around a thousand 20- and 30-somethings who pay about $8 and take advantage of a bar behind the stage (or bring their own drinks). On Saturday night, the orchestra’s Beethoven and Copland had insatiable vigor and clear intent... Keep reading on New York Times
You step out of the train station at Peckham Rye, a gritty area of South London that’s the latest haunt of young people looking for low rent and cheap nights. Walk by some depressing shops, pass the cinema, and go down a dubious alleyway teeming with revelers. Turn into the innocuous back entrance of a parking garage and climb the stairs. Head up a ramp or two, and there it is — between mottled concrete pillars and capped by a low roof lies an impromptu semicircle of benches, surrounding an orchestra’s seats.
In winter, the top levels of this otherwise active parking garage are unused, generic and forgettable. But in summer, an arts organization called Bold Tendencies steps in. Since 2011, it has hosted the Multi-Story Orchestra, an insurgent group of freelancers founded by the composer Kate Whitley and the conductor Christopher Stark.
They play heroically, they play loudly, and they’ll play anything, from Beethoven and Brahms to Louis Andriessen and Gérard Grisey. They draw diverse crowds of around a thousand 20- and 30-somethings who pay about $8 and take advantage of a bar behind the stage (or bring their own drinks). On Saturday night, the orchestra’s Beethoven and Copland had insatiable vigor and clear intent... Keep reading on New York Times