We have a spot downtown that serves “Mommy Swallows” (pear and rum soup), “Miami’s Uncut Surprise” (grilled sausage dipped in camembert), and most appealing of all, “Grandpa’s Wrinkled Nutsack” (a couple tablespoons of walnuts and pecans, lovingly packaged for the patron). One can request these and other decorously named entrées as part of, oh, an ordinary night on the town. One cannot, however, listen to classical music on a transistor radio anywhere in the greater metropolis.
And yet. We do, thanks be to God, have the New World Symphony, an island of sanity in a sea of aesthetic carnage. Twelve blocks north of where bath-salt junkies chew the faces off hobos, and a quick drive south of where “B-Girl” Ukrainian ex-models drug and flirt tourists out of their life savings, sits the New World Center, a Gehry design that is equal part school, discotheque, cinema, and (of course) performance hall. On the eastern lawn, hundreds of visitors bring their picnics each week to hear the symphony play. The New World Fellows play in the round inside the concert hall, but microphones throughout the space broadcast their performances to the lawn; a live video feed cuts among several cameras to show the Fellows mid-phrase. During the week, the same lawn hosts popular films, all projected on the great east wall – anything from To Catch a Thief to Lord of the Rings.
At the heart of it all, the New World Fellows, a group of brilliant young artists selected to study in South Beach and perform under Michael Tilson Thomas for a couple of years before heading out to bigger halls. The Fellows are doing what they love, and it shows: they play with passion on stage, and receive their fans afterward with warmth, and enthusiasm, and a smiling willingness to pretend for your sake that the brilliant thought you just shared about the adagio was genuinely insightful.
The Fellows handle the bulk of the repertory, and invite big names (for example, this season: Emanuel Ax and Renee Fleming) to fill out the year.
The musicians are meant to take the fellowship in their 20s, so NWS has the free, fun, feeling of a kind of musical Rhodes Scholarship. At the BSO or the NY Philharmonic, the performers always look like they’re bringing up the rear of their mother’s funeral procession; not so at New World, where the musicians share in-jokes and little flirtations as they pass through the lobby together, or take their seats on stage, or wait for the conductor. It’s charming, and refreshing, and a welcome reminder that music was once meant to be fun.
From time to time, they’ll even turn the concert hall into a kind of nightclub, where Fellows cut loose (within reason… there’s only so much party that’s possible when you’re holding a bassoon) to the sick beat of a DJ who may or may not have laundered his t-shirt this week.
