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San Francisco has the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under Nicholas McGegan, and Boston has Boston Baroque, led by Martin Pearlman. Both ensembles have released bestselling recordings and both cities mount early-music festivals that attract musicians and fans from all over the globe.
So when it comes to early music, how can New York, the cultural capital of the United States, be singing the little- town blues?
Conventional wisdom has it that the city that never sleeps is not much of an early-music town. Gene Murrow, general manager of the upcoming New York Early Music Celebration, begs to differ. He contends that New York has "a huge number of world-class musicians who have devoted their entire careers to early music," many of whom play in Philharmonia Baroque, Boston Baroque and such well-known European groups as Les Arts Florissants.
But New York's early-music ensembles must share the limelight with its overwhelming concentration of heavyweight cultural institutions. The Early Music Celebration was conceived "to try to make a bit of noise," Murrow says.
For 10 days starting Friday, the Early Music Celebration will showcase the city's musical diversity with more than 60 concerts of music from before 1800.
"Part of the rationale was to present an alternative kind of music, but also New York's wide variety of venues," Murrow explains. He points to two festival locations - Harlem's Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan's oldest house, and the Church of the Transfiguration, "a beautiful, painted English baroque church" - as examples of evocative, historically appropriate performing spaces of which even devoted concertgoers may be unaware.
New York, in fact, was the birthplace of the early-music or HIP ("historically informed performance") movement in the United States. The New York Pro Musica, founded by Noah...