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SEQUENZA21/
340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

Zookeeper:   
Jerry Bowles
(212) 582-3791

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David Salvage

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Galen H. Brown
Evan Johnson
Ian Moss
Lanier Sammons
Deborah Kravetz
(Philadelphia)
Eric C. Reda
(Chicago)
Christian Hertzog
(San Diego)
Jerry Zinser
(Los Angeles)

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Jeff Harrington


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11th Other Minds Music Festival Opens Thursday
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Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for review. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019


Thursday, February 24, 2005
Got Lyric?

Have you heard of the Lyric Chamber Music Society of New York?

It�s not really a new-music series, but it�s not a stuffy Mozart-and-Brahms series either. In fact, I don�t know quite how you�d categorize it. This season�s eight concerts feature classical, jazz, and world music, and the repertoire ranges from Haydn, to Russian folk music, to Daniel Levitan. Last night, the Lyric featured the New York Percussion Quartet. While the NYPQ played a pretty forgettable program, the concert itself brought home to me how unique the Lyric really is.

Not many people go to Lyric concerts, but that�s because not a lot of people are supposed to: intimacy is an essential factor to the Lyric experience. Most of the concerts are held in a small, beautiful room at the Kosciuszko Foundation in which the audience practically sits on top of the performers. During the concerts, the musicians always talk to the audience about the music, and the Lyric�s director, the musicologist and pianist Joan Kretschmer, chimes in with short, informed commentaries before intermission and directly after the concert. During any of these talks, audience members can (and do) ring in with their own questions or comments. Afterwards, everyone is invited to a fancy reception where they are encouraged yet again to interact with the musicians.

All this demands a little bit of patience if you�re too used to the slick, professional feel of a typical New York concert. Not everyone who ends up speaking at a Lyric concert is a good speaker, and sometimes what they have to say can make you pull your hair out in exasperation. But what you get in return is a communal, unpretentious atmosphere too rare in classical music these days, an atmosphere that transcends the individual concert and makes seeing a concert by the Lyric a little experience in itself.

Excluding their family concert series at the West Side YMCA, the Lyric has only two concerts left this year. While neither of them features any work by living composers, savvy concert-goers should keep this valuable series on their radar screens in years to come.

 



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