Timms, Henry

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares99 Views

    Lincoln Center Taps Education Leader as Next President

    by

    Mariko Silver, a former president of Bennington College, will take the reins of the organization as it seeks to expand its audience and increase fund-raising.Mariko Silver, a prominent leader in education, government and the nonprofit sphere, will serve as the next president and chief executive of Lincoln Center, the organization announced on Wednesday.Silver, who previously led Bennington College in Vermont and the Henry Luce Foundation in New York, will succeed Henry Timms, who left last month after five years in the job.She will take the reins of Lincoln Center as it works to broaden its audience, navigate an uncertain economy and push through an ambitious plan to tear down the barriers between the center and the surrounding neighborhood. She will also help shape its programming; the center has recently shifted away from classical music in favor of genres like pop, hip-hop, social dance and comedy.“Lincoln Center is the beating heart of New York City,” Silver said in an interview. “I’m incredibly excited to get going and do the work of bringing more beauty, more joy, more art and more human feeling into the world.”The appointment is a milestone for Lincoln Center: Silver, 46, whose father is Jewish and mother is Japanese American, will be the first woman of color to serve as president and chief executive. It is also a homecoming of sorts: Silver grew up a few blocks from the center and studied dance and theater as a child.Steven R. Swartz, the president and chief executive of Hearst, who serves as chair of Lincoln Center’s board, said the organization was impressed by Silver’s record as a nonprofit executive. At Bennington, where she was president from 2013 to 2019, she oversaw the largest capital campaign in the school’s history, raising more than $90 million. She also serves as chair of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s board and was an official at the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Lincoln Center’s Leader, Henry Timms, to Depart After Five Years

      by

      After guiding the arts organization through the pandemic and completing the renovation of David Geffen Hall, he is leaving to lead the Brunswick Group.Henry Timms, who guided Lincoln Center through the turmoil of the pandemic and helped complete the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, will step down as its leader this summer after five years, he announced on Wednesday.Timms will become chief executive of the Brunswick Group, a global public relations firm. He said he had always intended to stay at Lincoln Center for five to seven years, and that the Brunswick Group, which advises top companies and cultural groups, had approached him about a position there at the end of last year.“I feel proud of what we’ve done,” he said in an interview in his office above the Lincoln Center campus. “But I also always believe that change is a good thing.”Steven R. Swartz, the chairman of Lincoln Center’s board, said in an interview that Timms had been a “transformational leader” who had helped drive innovation and played a critical role in accelerating the renovation of Geffen Hall, home to the New York Philharmonic, during the pandemic.“In our perfect world, we’d have him continue to do the job,” Swartz said. “But we certainly understand that he sees this opportunity as his next step and obviously wish him all the best.”Timms, 47, arrived at Lincoln Center in 2019 with a mandate to restore stability to the organization, which was grappling with financial woes and years of leadership churn. He was also tasked with resetting Lincoln Center’s fraught relationship with its constituent organizations, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet and the Philharmonic. The center acts as landlord to those groups but has little power over them, since each has its own leadership, board and budget. The center also presents its own work, sometimes putting it in competition with its constituents.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Henry Timms Wants to Tear Down Walls at Lincoln Center

      by

      For evidence that all is not business as usual at Lincoln Center these days, look no further than its stately travertine campus, which, for much of the summer, was dominated by a giant glittering disco ball, pink and purple flowers painted on the sidewalk and a flock of 200 flamingo lawn ornaments.“There are some who will reasonably eye-roll at this,” said Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, standing on the plaza recently. “I get it. But it sends a message that we are here to have some fun.”“We can afford,” he said, “to loosen up a little.”Since taking the helm in 2019, Timms has been on a mission to remake Lincoln Center. Having helped finally push through the long-delayed $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, he is working to forge closer ties with the city and to bring more diversity to the center’s staff, board and audiences.Now he wants to tear down the barriers that literally wall the campus off from Amsterdam Avenue, with its neighboring housing projects, schools and new developments. But as Lincoln Center rethinks its programming — this summer’s festival included hip-hop, K-pop and an LGBTQ mariachi group — it has drawn some criticism for presenting less classical music and international theater.For the summer, Lincoln Center hung up a disco ball on the plaza.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesThis summer’s festival — which included more popular programming than in the past and choose-what-you-pay tickets for some events — attracted more than 380,000 people, officials said, many of whom were new to the campus. Among them was Sandy Mendez, a saleswoman who lives in Washington Heights, and saw her first Lincoln Center performance, a comedy show, after coming across an advertisement at a community center. She took photos in front of the disco ball with her husband and two children.“It feels like a dance club here,” said Mendez, 42, “not a performing arts center.”It is the kind of observation that both Timms’s admirers and his detractors might make.Running Lincoln Center is not easy. The center acts as landlord to the independent arts organizations on its campus, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet and the New York Philharmonic, but has little power over them, since each has its own leadership, board and budget.Linc. Inc., as it’s known, also presents its own work, which has sometimes led to tensions with constituents. Reynold Levy, its president for more than a decade, called his memoir “They Told Me Not to Take That Job.” After he left, in 2013, Lincoln Center cycled through four leadership teams in five years before appointing Timms in 2019.The British-born Timms, 46, who previously led the 92nd Street Y, helped create #GivingTuesday and co-wrote “New Power,” a book exploring bottom-up leadership, including movements like #MeToo and social networks like Facebook. Now he is trying to apply some of those participatory principles at Lincoln Center. He said his efforts were not “some new trendy idea” but a response to the fact that the center has for too long been disconnected from the community.“We very much came with an agenda, which was we were going to tell a different kind of story about Lincoln Center,” Timms said, “to fundamentally shift the institution in terms of who leads it, who represents it, who’s on our staff, who’s on our stages, who’s in our audiences.”Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the new restaurant at Geffen Hall, has been a hit with critics and is drawing crowds.Nico Schinco for The New York Times“We have a long way to go as an organization — nobody at Lincoln Center is taking a bow,” he added in an interview at Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the new restaurant at Geffen Hall that critics have named one of the best in the city. “But relative to where we were, I feel like we’ve made good progress.”Nevertheless, the reduction in programming, and the shift away from classical music and theater to other genres, has raised questions. Joseph W. Polisi, a former president of the Juilliard School who has written a history of Lincoln Center, said that Timms’s vision was a “sea change” for the center that could come at a cost.“It leaves a gap in music programming in New York City that is not being filled — it can’t be filled,” he said. “All the artistic leaders I know are fully in support of more program diversity at Lincoln Center. Now the question is, how far does the pendulum swing?”The critic Alex Ross recently wrote in The New Yorker that the new approach seemed “fundamentally out of step with Lincoln Center and its public, both extant and potential.”The conductor Jonathon Heyward will lead a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterBut Timms pushes back on such criticism, partly by pointing out that “we have just spent four years through a pandemic, and half a billion dollars, creating a concert hall to house the New York Philharmonic” and noting that the center had hired Jonathon Heyward, who recently became the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, to lead a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.“Lincoln Center was founded as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; it was not founded as Lincoln Center for the Classical Arts,” Timms said. “You go back to the beginning and there’s a reason Mahalia Jackson was playing here. And it’s not because we’re only supposed to be about the opera and the ballet.”Summers at Lincoln Center look different now. The old Lincoln Center Festival was scrapped a few years before Timms arrived, and with it the large-scale, ambitious productions it brought each summer from around the world, including Noh theater and Kabuki theater from Japan, Indonesian dance and Chinese opera. Lincoln Center’s programming is now overseen by Shanta Thake, its chief artistic officer, who was formerly an associate artistic director at the Public Theater. She and Timms have replaced the Mostly Mozart Festival, which had focused on classical music and recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, with the more eclectic Summer for the City festival.Portia and the American Composers Orchestra at “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,” which Lincoln Center staged in Damrosch Park as part of its Summer for the City festival.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln Center“How do we build on this promise of being a performing arts center for all New Yorkers?” Thake asked. “How do we not rest on our laurels but push for what a performing arts center needs to be right now? Everybody’s willing to have hard conversations.”The coming fall and winter season will feature an array of classical offerings, including a new production of Henry Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” and a performance of Philip Glass’s piano études. There will also be more experimental fare in line with the center’s new vision, including a reimagining of “The Sound of Music” through a “utopian, Afrofuturistic lens,” featuring gospel, funk, soul and Afrobeat music.Timms has also prioritized diversity backstage: of the 109 current members of the executive and senior management teams, about 60 percent are women and nearly 40 percent are people of color. In addition, the center recently started a two-year fellowship program to develop a diverse pipeline of potential board members for the resident organizations; three have been placed as trustees and three more have elections pending.Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, who serves on Lincoln Center’s board, praised Timms as a “once-in-a-generation leader” who “genuinely understands that diversity correlates with excellence.”A summer dance party on the Lincoln Center plaza.Mohamed Sadek for The New York TimesThe ballet dancer Misty Copeland, who joined Lincoln Center’s board under Timms, commended his spearheading of the Amsterdam Avenue project, a long-neglected plan to make right Lincoln Center’s initial razing of the low-income San Juan Hill neighborhood where the performing arts complex was built.“He does not shy away from a history that may not look clean and sparkly,” Copeland said. “I don’t think I could imagine 10 years ago that this is where Lincoln Center would be.”Timms, whose mother was an illustrator from the United States and whose father was a British archaeologist, grew up in Exeter, England, where his family often attended regional theaters.“Our childhood was full of ideas and the arts,” he said. “We had access and experience and ownership. You felt like you were a part of something.”He graduated from Durham University in England and landed a job overseeing programming at the 92nd Street Y in 2008, where he helped start #GivingTuesday, a day of philanthropy after Black Friday and Cyber Monday that became a global success. In 2014, he was named the Y’s executive director.Steven R. Swartz, the new chairman of Lincoln Center, said Timms had won over the center’s board with his energy and ideas, quickly recognizing the organization’s main problems, including tensions with the constituents. “He just so quickly diagnosed what needed to be done,” Swartz said.And after years of false starts and bitter feuds, Timms built a good working relationship with the leaders of the Philharmonic — he and Deborah Borda, who was the orchestra’s president and chief executive, sometimes resolved disputes over coffee or martinis — and finally renovated Geffen Hall. By accelerating construction during the pandemic shutdown, they were able to open the reimagined hall ahead of schedule.“He was intent on moving past the history of animosity that existed between Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic,” said Borda, who stepped down at the end of June. “He put a premium on working together. He was essentially the right man at the right time at the right place.”Katherine G. Farley, who stepped down as Lincoln Center’s chairwoman in June, said Timms “has led the transformation of a traditional institution” and that he is “quick and eager to experiment.””Not everything works out,” she added. “When it doesn’t work, he’s quick to shut it down and try something else.”Like other arts institutions, Lincoln Center is still trying to recover from the pandemic shutdown, when the performing arts came to a halt for more than 18 months. The organization is spending less on programming than it did when Timms began his tenure: about $14 million in the fiscal year that ended in June 2022, down from $23 million in 2019, a decrease of about 40 percent that officials attributed in part to the fact that Geffen Hall remained closed for construction through the fiscal year of 2022.But fund-raising remains relatively strong, and the endowment has risen to about $268 million, compared to $258 million in 2019. Moody’s recently affirmed its A3 rating on the center’s $356 million of debt but revised its outlook to stable from negative, noting the completion of Geffen Hall and the center’s efforts to cut expenses and attract new audiences.And relations have eased with the constituent organizations — who historically competed with Lincoln Center for audiences, donors and attention.David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, reopened last year after a long-delayed renovation.Hilary Swift for The New York Times“He’s been very clear that it’s the job of Lincoln Center to honor and pay attention to and try to help all the constituents that make up Lincoln Center,” said Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said Timms had signaled to the constituents early in his tenure that the days of infighting were over. “Here was somebody who understood and really seemed to be listening,” he said. And Damian Woetzel, the president of Juilliard, said Timms had proven “tradition is not at war with innovation.”On a recent day, a team of Lincoln Center staff members inside Geffen Hall was conducting research to prepare for the Amsterdam Avenue project, asking visitors where they spent time on campus and what they would like to do more of: attend cultural events? meet friends? play games? exercise? A poster explained the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and said: “Help us make our campus more welcoming!”In a few hours, Timms would join a salsa band on the outdoor dance floor in a pair of coral-colored Nike Air Max sneakers.“Changing with the world isn’t just the right thing to do morally,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do strategically. And if leaders in a position like ours don’t lead this change, what on earth are you doing?” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Lincoln Center, Seeking New Audiences, Plans to Remake Its West Edge

      by

      The center hopes a major renovation along Amsterdam Avenue will help shed its elitist image and forge closer ties with Black and Latino residents.Lincoln Center welcomes visitors at its main entrance facing Broadway with an elegant plaza, a majestic fountain and an array of travertine concert halls and theaters.But the view from the center’s western edge, along Amsterdam Avenue, is far less convivial: An imposing wall stretches across several blocks, giving the feel of a fortress.Now Lincoln Center, hoping to draw new audiences and promote closer ties with nearby public housing complexes, schools and community centers, is planning a major renovation of its western side, the organization’s leaders announced on Tuesday. The project will likely entail tearing down parts of the wall, building an outdoor stage and renovating Damrosch Park, at the corner of Amsterdam and West 62nd Street.“As welcoming as we are to the east, we should be to the west,” Henry Timms, the president and chief executive of Lincoln Center, said in an interview.The project is partly a response to Lincoln Center’s complicated history. A vibrant neighborhood known as San Juan Hill, home to many low-income Black and Latino residents, was razed to make way for the center’s construction in 1959.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“It’s unclear in some places what might be behind these walls,” he added of the center’s west side. “The message is one of a different world, and I think that’s a mistake.”The renovation is the latest effort by Timms, whose tenure began in 2019, to shed Lincoln Center’s elitist image and to attract more diverse audiences, especially Black and Latino residents across the city. The center has in recent years worked to diversify its programming and expand access to its campus, including by experimenting with a choose-what-you-pay model for some events.The project is partly a response to Lincoln Center’s complicated history on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A vibrant neighborhood known as San Juan Hill, which was home to many low-income Black and Latino residents, was razed to make way for the center’s construction, which began in 1959.Lincoln Center’s leaders, invoking that history, said that getting public input for the renovation, by organizing workshops, walking tours and surveys, would be crucial. The center is working with NADAAA, a Boston architecture firm, and Hester Street, a nonprofit that specializes in urban planning and community development.In a statement, Katherine G. Farley, the departing chair of Lincoln Center’s board, said: “This process will engage the community on envisioning how we can create a beautiful and architectural welcome to our neighbors to the west, assuring that the campus beckons to everyone to come enjoy our offerings.”Across the street is LaGuardia High School, known for its music and performing arts programs, as well as six high schools inside the Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Complex.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesLincoln Center did not provide an estimated cost or timeline for the project. Timms said that it was a major effort that would help define the modern legacy of Lincoln Center and that it was a natural next step after the recent $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, which was also aimed, in part, at deepening community ties and attracting new audiences.“This is a very significant priority of the institution,” he said. “If we can get the idea right, I’m confident that we can work hard and get the necessary resources to create something amazing for New York City.”The area surrounding the western campus includes the Amsterdam Houses, a public housing complex that first opened in 1947 for World War II veterans. Across the street is LaGuardia High School, known for its music and performing arts programs, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Complex, which houses six high schools.Lincoln Center’s leaders said plans for the renovation would depend on public input, but they identified several broad aims. The area under exploration includes the stretch of Amsterdam Avenue from West 62nd to West 65th Street, as well as Damrosch Park and the northwest corner of campus, home to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.The area under exploration includes Amsterdam Avenue from West 62nd to West 65th Street, as well as Damrosch Park and the campus’s northwest corner, now home to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTimms said the spirit of the project was in line with the original mission of Lincoln Center: to make the arts accessible to all.“It’s not a new woke idea,” he said. “That was an idea at the founding — that the point of Lincoln Center was actually not to be exclusive, but to be inclusive.”Local officials praised the project, saying it was important for the city’s residents, especially those with a connection to the former San Juan Hill neighborhood, to be heard. Lincoln Center last year installed a mural on Amsterdam Avenue telling the story of the neighborhood, including its rich Afro-diasporic musical heritage.“Their stories and experiences are critical to establishing a strong foundation to a more inclusive future within the community spaces that serve this neighborhood,” Gale Brewer, a member of the New York City Council, said in a statement.Maria Guzman, a public housing resident who lives south of Lincoln Center, said she was hopeful the renovation would allow more low-income residents to experience the arts.“We used to call that wall the great divide because it felt like Lincoln Center just wanted to divide the neighborhood,” she said in an interview. “The fact that they’re finally — hopefully — tearing this wall out, I think it’s wonderful. And I think the community will welcome it.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      David Geffen Hall Reopens, Hoping Its $550 Million Renovation Worked

      by

      When the New York Philharmonic opened its new home at Lincoln Center in 1962, it held a white-tie gala, broadcast live on national television, with tickets having sold for up to $250 apiece, or nearly $2,500 in today’s dollars.It was a glittering affair, but the hall’s poor acoustics — a critical problem for an art form that relies on unamplified instruments — ushered in decades of difficulties. After the last major attempt to fix its sound, with a gut renovation in 1976, the hall reopened with a black-tie gala and a burst of optimism. But its acoustic woes persisted.Now Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic are hoping that they have finally broken the acoustic curse of the hall, now called David Geffen Hall, which reopened on Saturday after a $550 million overhaul that preserved the building’s exterior but gutted and rebuilt its interior, making its auditorium more intimate and, they believe, better sounding.But this time they are taking a different approach to inaugurating the new hall. Geffen reopened to the public for the first time not with a pricey formal gala, but with a choose-what-you-pay concert, with some free tickets distributed at the hall’s new welcome center.And instead of opening with Beethoven (as the orchestra did in 1962) or Brahms (as in 1976), Geffen opened with the premiere of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles that pays tribute to the rich Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood that was razed to clear the land for Lincoln Center. The work, commissioned by Lincoln Center, was performed by Charles and his group, Creole Soul, and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of its music director, Jaap van Zweden.“It really is like a homecoming, but there are some different family members around this time, which is a great thing,” Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, said in an interview.The reopening of the hall drew several elected officials, who saw it as a hopeful sign for a city still trying to recover from the damage wrought by the coronavirus. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York predicted that people would look back at the moment as more than the opening of a new concert hall: “They will say you got it done in the middle of a pandemic.”Senator Chuck Schumer was among the elected officials at the reopening of the hall, which was described as a hopeful moment for a pandemic-battered city. Christopher Lee for The New York TimesBoth Lincoln Center, which owns the hall, and the Philharmonic, its main tenant, see the new hall as an opportunity to become more accessible and welcoming. They are seeking both to lure back concertgoers and to reach a more diverse cross-section of New Yorkers, including Black and Latino residents, who have long been underrepresented at these events.“This is not your grandmother’s Philharmonic,” said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. “We are thinking of the totality of the artistic and human and social statement.”Instead of one big celebration, there will essentially be a month of festivities, part of an effort to showcase the hall’s versatility, to break through into the consciousness of media-saturated New Yorkers — and to avoid placing too much emphasis on a single high-pressure night that could yield quick-fire judgments on the renovation and the acoustics.Dozens of people lined up outside the hall on Saturday morning for a chance to get free tickets to “San Juan Hill.” Joanne Imohiosen, 83, who has been attending concerts since the Philharmonic came to Lincoln Center in 1962 and lives nearby, said she hoped the renovation would finally remedy the hall’s acoustic issues. “They should have figured it out by now,” said Imohiosen, who used to work as an assistant parks commissioner. “They’ve been fiddling with it for years.”After “San Juan Hill,” the Philharmonic will return with a couple of weeks of homecoming concerts pairing works by Debussy and Respighi with pieces by contemporary composers including Tania León, Caroline Shaw and Marcos Balter, whose multimedia work “Oyá” is billed as a fantasia of sound and light.There will be not one, but two galas — one featuring the Broadway stars Lin-Manuel Miranda, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Bernadette Peters, and another featuring a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A free open-house weekend will close out the month, with choirs, youth orchestras, Philharmonic players, hip-hop groups, dance troupes and others performing each day in different spaces in the hall.Much is riding on the success of the revamped Geffen Hall. The 180-year-old Philharmonic, which is still recovering from the tumult of the pandemic and grappling with longstanding box-office declines, is hoping that a more glamorous hall with better sound will lure new audiences.“The stakes are very high; everybody’s waiting and hoping that it’s going to work out,” said Joseph W. Polisi, a former president of Juilliard whose new book, “Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center,” has sections tracing the trials and tribulations of the building. “$550 million is a lot of money. It’s a very big bet.”At the core of the Philharmonic’s strategy is a desire to make Geffen Hall not just a concert venue, but a welcoming gathering place. The new hall includes a coffee shop, an Afro-Caribbean restaurant and a welcome center next to the lobby. Small performances, talks and classes on music and wellness will take place inside a “sidewalk studio” visible from Broadway.The renovation, which equipped the main auditorium with a film screen, an amplified sound system and other technical improvements, gave the Philharmonic an opportunity to reimagine its programming. “San Juan Hill” and “Oyá” showcase the Philharmonic’s new abilities, mixing music with film, 3-D imagery, electronics and light.“The new hall can do things that we’re going to do as a 21st-century orchestra,” Ms. Borda said.A critical test of the new hall will be its audiences. The Philharmonic and Lincoln Center have worked over the past several years to attract more low-income residents to performances, and Lincoln Center has been handing out fliers at nearby public housing complexes advertising upcoming events at Geffen Hall. For the opening, they made a point of inviting former residents of the San Juan Hill neighborhood, as well as schools that serve large numbers of Black and Latino students.“This is a home for all New Yorkers,” Ms. Borda said. “We want to invite them in.”Throughout the hall’s history, politicians, architects, musicians and critics have at times declared past renovations successful, only to see acoustical issues resurface soon after.Mr. Polisi, the former Juilliard president, said that this time seemed different, given the crucial decision to reduce the size of the hall — it now seats 2,200 people, down from 2,738. He said if the Philharmonic had finally remedied the sound problems, it would allow the orchestra to focus on other priorities, including building closer ties to the community and finding a conductor to replace van Zweden, who steps down as music director in 2024.“If they’re a happy orchestra now and they’re able to feel comfortable in their home, that’s also going to be a very psychologically important element for the organization,” said Mr. Polisi, whose father, William Polisi, had been the principal bassoonist of the Philharmonic.As construction workers made finishing touches on the hall this week, unpacking furniture and installing metal detectors in the lobby, the Philharmonic’s players filed into the auditorium for rehearsals. The early reviews from the musicians have been largely positive: Many say that they can finally hear one another onstage and that the sound feels warmer.Ms. Borda and Mr. Timms said they were confident that the Philharmonic would finally have a hall to match its abilities, though they said they did not want to jinx the reopening. “The thing about curses,” Mr. Timms said, “is you never claim they’re broken. You let them speak for themselves.”Ms. Borda, who first began trying to revamp the hall in the 1990s, when she served a previous stint as the Philharmonic’s leader, said she had prepared an image of an atomic explosion to send to Mr. Timms if the renovation turned out to be a disaster.“If it’s really bad,” she joked, looking at Mr. Timms, “I’m sending you this first.”Adam Nagourney More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Classical Music Has a Hazy Future in Lincoln Center’s Summers

      by

      The day had been hot and muggy. But a mild breeze was blowing at Lincoln Center by the time the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra took the stage in Damrosch Park on Tuesday evening.The pianist Conrad Tao played an elegantly unruffled Mozart concerto and a daydreamy “Rhapsody in Blue.” Apart from a sprinkling of small performances last summer, this orchestra hadn’t been assembled since 2019, but it sounded comfortable and spirited.In just three years, the group has become an anachronism. The festival whose name it bears — Lincoln Center’s premier summertime event before the pandemic — is no more. The center’s summer, once a messy assortment of competing series and festivals, has finally been streamlined under a single label: “Summer for the City.”Planned by Lincoln Center’s president, Henry Timms, and its artistic chief since last year, Shanta Thake, Summer for the City has hoisted a 10-foot disco ball over the plaza fountain and includes outdoor film screenings, spoken word, social dance, comedy shows and an ASL version of “Sweeney Todd.”Five of New York’s dance companies will come together next month for a few days of performances. And starting on Friday, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Louis Langrée, the orchestra’s music director since 2002, led the performance on Tuesday.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesBut despite that packed little orchestral season, other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals, and the new music that flows out of the classical tradition and is embodied by the International Contemporary Ensemble, long in residence at the festival but absent this year.Up in the air is the ultimate fate of the Mostly Mozart orchestra, a high-quality, carefully built and expensive group whose music director, Louis Langrée, has been on its podium since 2002. Though Thake told the orchestra on Friday that it would be a part of the summer next year, things get hazier beyond that. And while her vision for the season is still developing, this first iteration seems to have intentionally moved away from swaths of music and performance that have been central to the center’s identity for decades.Which is not to say that Lincoln Center’s summers have been just one thing. As Joseph W. Polisi, a longtime president of the Juilliard School, describes in “Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center,” recently published by Yale University Press, the initial thought was that the center’s own programming would happen primarily in the summertime, so as not to compete in fall and spring with the constituent organizations for which it serves as a landlord, like the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic.As the campus was being conceived, summer was imagined to be a good time for folk-ish operas and musicals, like “Oklahoma!” or Copland’s “The Tender Land,” or perhaps a film festival; it’s in the DNA for the center’s summer offerings to be ambitious but accessible, populist but serious.The pianist Conrad Tao was the soloist in several works on the program, including a Mozart concerto and “Rhapsody in Blue.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe flutist Jasmine Choi played in William Grant Still’s “Out of the Silence.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThough Summer for the City is taking place largely outdoors, the novelty in those early years was being inside: Midsummer Serenades — A Mozart Festival, which started in 1966 and was renamed Mostly Mozart six years later, was the first festival in New York to take place in an air-conditioned hall.The campus’s Community/Street Theater Festival of the early 1970s morphed, a few years later, into Lincoln Center Out of Doors, a free, outdoor, eclectic mélange: Ballet Hispánico and bluegrass, string quartets and a doo-wop opera, and eventually a helping of social dance as Midsummer Night’s Swing.Mostly Mozart grew to be perceived as stodgy and listless in this company. When Jane Moss — like Thake, a hire from outside classical music — became the center’s artistic leader in the early 1990s, it was believed that part of her brief was to eliminate it. After the Lincoln Center Festival, which hosted ambitious international touring productions, was founded in the mid-90s, Mostly Mozart, which had once lasted up to nine weeks, dwindled from seven to four. A musicians’ strike in 2002 was another existential crisis.But instead of spiking Mostly Mozart, Moss took a firmer hand with the programming, hired Langrée as a partner, and broadened the offerings — eventually to something closer to Slightly Mozart. In 2017, amid budget and management crises, the Lincoln Center Festival folded and Mostly Mozart was set to expand by up to 50 percent to partly compensate. The festival orchestra entered the opera pit for the first time in 2019; there were dance theater productions and the lauded New York premiere of “The Black Clown”; Langrée’s contract was renewed through 2023.During the center’s pandemic silence in 2020, though, Moss decided to step down. And here we are: Mostly Mozart, instead of being expanded, has been eliminated.In a joint interview with Timms, Thake said that this year’s Summer for the City should not necessarily be seen as the model for all to come. “It’s definitely a unique moment,” she said. “We’re coming out of a two-year pandemic. This is our first full expression of what is possible.”Starting on Friday, the orchestra moves inside to Alice Tully Hall for five programs: 10 concerts over two weeks.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesReferring to the center’s Restart Stages initiative from 2021, she added: “There had been some proven success in experimentation. What you’re seeing this year is a continued explosion of form, and putting it all under one umbrella.”Summer for the City has the spunky feel of Joe’s Pub, the cabaret space that Thake ran, along with other Public Theater initiatives like Under the Radar and Public Works, before she was hired by Lincoln Center. It also feels like a throwback to the Community/Street Theater Festival and Out of Doors tradition from the early ’70s.That can yield wonderful programming, and much civic good. Growing up just outside the city, I found Midsummer Night’s Swing — with its tango-ing, salsa-ing crowd — exciting and glamorous, the definition of a New York summer night.But those offerings existed in an ecosystem in which classical music — broadly construed as far as style, period and form — was another pillar, not a fringe.Thake insisted in the interview that classical programming has found its way into Summer for the City in more varied, informal ways: as an accompaniment to blood drives and a mass wedding ceremony, and in the form of music-and-meditation sessions in the David Rubenstein Atrium.Timms added: “In terms of volume, probably, the amount of classical music being presented hasn’t changed much. The nature of it has changed, to some degree, though not fundamentally.”Uh-huh.The two leaders implied that the reconception of the summer is pulling the center more toward the role of host, welcoming as many people as it can onto campus, while the constituent organizations handle or at least share the presenting — especially in the classical sphere. The idea, for example, is that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s small set of Summer Evenings concerts can basically take care of what was once Mostly Mozart’s cozy A Little Night Music series, as well as its other solo and chamber events.Other musical experiences that once appeared under the Mostly Mozart rubric have vanished along with the name — including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and new music.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe danger, of course, is that in reducing redundancies and internal competition, the city simply ends up with less.It’s true that the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s compressed season — which began with a week of mentoring and performing alongside student musicians — promises to showcase talented young guest artists. On Aug. 5 and 6, Langrée leads Mozart’s Requiem, a few days before Jlin’s arrangement of that work is the score for Kyle Abraham’s recent dance “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth” — the kind of artistic cross-pollination that should be the center’s stock in trade.Even more important, the orchestra’s Tully concerts are choose-what-you-pay, a ticketing philosophy that should be a model for the center’s whole year. A range of excellent music, painstakingly prepared and performed at the highest level for affordable prices: That is true populism.Instead, classical music, even in its ever-struggling nonprofit form, gets cast as the elitist hegemon for which scrappier alternatives must be found — certainly if much-vaunted “new audiences” are going to be attracted.But classical programming should not be considered a chore, or a bone thrown to a dwindling audience — a familiar one rather than “new.” No, serious performance is a jewel, of which Lincoln Center is one of the few remaining supreme presenters. Conrad Tao playing Mozart with a superb orchestra for free or cheap: That is the core of the center’s mission. Its job is to cultivate audiences for and increase access to that.Which is not to say that change is impossible. Is a resident orchestra with an appointed music director the only way to fulfill Lincoln Center’s mission? Perhaps not. But is there a way of programming such an orchestra so that it could be an integral part of a diverse, adventurous summer season? Yes. Could it be joined to opera, recitals, new music and guest ensembles in broadening what I think Timms and Thake are trying to do: to foster inexpensive interactions with great performance? Absolutely.“We’re still getting our feet under us,” Thake said. “And seeing again, how can we continue to be responsive? How can we move through this season and get a sense of what worked, what didn’t work, what’s next for all of us?” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Lincoln Center Names Shanta Thake as its New Artistic Leader

      by

      Shanta Thake, a theater executive, faces challenges that include helping the center embrace new genres and attract virus-wary audiences.Feeling the pressure to attract new audiences and rethink its offerings even before being upended by the coronavirus pandemic, Lincoln Center announced on Tuesday that it had chosen a theater executive with a reputation for working across disciplines as its next artistic leader.Shanta Thake, most recently an associate artistic director at the Public Theater, will assume the role of chief artistic officer at the center, the nation’s largest performing arts complex, as it works to broaden its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres such as hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.Thake — who at the Public spent a decade managing Joe’s Pub, a cabaret-style venue, and more recently began overseeing Under the Radar, Public Works and other programs there — said she was eager to bring more popular and world music to Lincoln Center.“The goal is expansive reach,” Thake, 41, said in an interview. “What’s missing? What have we left out? What stories aren’t we telling that feel like they’re demanding to be told in this moment?”Lincoln Center is the landlord of the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet and other independent institutions, which are responsible for their own programming. But it is also a presenting organization in its own right, putting on hundreds of events each year and running the Mostly Mozart and White Light festivals, which have been primarily devoted to the classical arts. The center and its constituent organizations have competed, sometimes tensely, for rehearsal and performance space, ticket sales and donations.Thake will oversee the work Lincoln Center presents, and said in the interview that its robust classical offerings would be maintained. “We’re not looking to erase history here,” she said.But center officials say they are still working out the future of Mostly Mozart, which was put on hold amid the pandemic, other than a few small events this week. In 2017, as it grappled with budgetary constraints, the center dissolved the Lincoln Center Festival to focus on reinventing Mostly Mozart, its summertime sibling.Thake, who starts next month, replaces Jane Moss, who played a key role in programming for nearly three decades and stepped down as artistic director last year — and who also came from a theater background. (The chief artistic officer title is a new one.) Thake joins the center at one of the most challenging moments since it opened in 1962. Its woes predate the coronavirus: It struggled for years from leadership churn and money problems.Then the pandemic wiped away tens of millions in revenue and forced the cancellation of hundreds of events. About half of Lincoln Center’s staff of 400 was furloughed or laid off, and its top leaders took pay cuts.While many workers have been rehired and indoor performances are set to resume in the fall, the center will likely be grappling with the financial fallout for years. It remains to be seen whether audiences will return at prepandemic levels, especially given the recent spread of the Delta variant of the virus.Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, said the organization had turned to Thake for her experience programming creatively across genres. “We wanted someone who could kind of help us think about some new territory,” he said.Timms said the virus would continue to pose a challenge for the center’s artistic ambitions, but added that he believed audiences were eager to return. “There will be a great deal of demand for what we do and there will be a great deal of re-imagination,” he said.As infections have eased in recent months and vaccines have become widely available, Lincoln Center has started to come back to life, building several outdoor stages and transforming its plaza into a summer gathering place by covering it in a synthetic lawn. When indoor performances resume, the center plans to require vaccines for audience members, production staff and artists. Children under 12 will not be permitted to attend performances since they are currently not eligible for vaccines.Thake said she saw her mission as, in part, to “lift up the city that is still reeling from the ongoing trauma” of the pandemic. She said Lincoln Center could play a role in helping smaller arts organizations, for example by sharing best practices for reopening venues.“Hopefully we can make it to the other side all together,” she said.Thake, whose mother is Indian and whose father is white, said she was committed to presenting artists who represent a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Cultural institutions have in general been slow to respond to demands for a reckoning over racial justice in the United States. But Lincoln Center is one of the few arts organizations to show substantial progress in bringing more diversity to its upper ranks. People of color now make up about half of its leadership team. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Lincoln Center Will Head Outside Its Closed Theaters to Perform

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeWatch: ‘WandaVision’Travel: More SustainablyFreeze: Homemade TreatsCheck Out: Podcasters’ Favorite PodcastsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLincoln Center Will Head Outside Its Closed Theaters to PerformOfficials announced plans to create 10 outdoor spaces for pandemic-era performances and rehearsals, and to work with blood drives and food banks.With its theaters closed by the pandemic, Lincoln Center plans to create create 10 outdoor performance and rehearsal spaces this spring. Here is an artist’s rendering of one.Credit…Ceylan A. Sahin Eker, via Lincoln CenterPublished More