40th Philharmonic in Central Park
We went to the 40th annual performance of the New York Philharmonic in Central Park on Monday the 19th. In 1965 the Parks Department and the New York Symphony decided to put on a free concert. They expected a “modest” turnout. Over 70,000 people showed up. There’ve been playing free summer concerts ever since. (Five people in Monday’s performance also played in the first concert.)
It rained on and off all day Monday and I’m guessing a lot of people expected the worse and didn’t show. But by six or seven the sky cleared up and, according to the New York Times and the Parks Department, about 35,000 people made it. (The forty-year average is around 125,000).
Of course I meant to bring my camera… but forgot it.
And although 35,000 sounds like a lot of people for one park (actually, not one park, but one 55 acre clearing in a larger 843 acre park) it feels like an intimate experience. We, like most people, were in a small group (Me, Katy, Larry, and Michelle) and sat shoeless on picnic blankets. We had a couple of bottles of wine, yummy cheese (of which I ate at least a pound) fresh French bread, olives, regular crackers, weird twisty cheese crackers, and cookies (”Entertaining Cookies” the box proclaimed!). We ate, drank, chatted (softly—this was a performance after all), laughed (quietly) and, like most people there, were pretty much oblivious to the fact that we sat amongst a sea of people.
The music was Smetana’s (a Czech!) “Bartered Bride” Overture, a Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” But honestly, I couldn’t even begin to “rate” the performance. Both because I know nothing about classical music and because we were so far from the stage that we couldn’t make out individual people let alone the subtleties of bowing and blowing. The music we heard came from a loudspeaker located about a 100 feet from our ten square foot patch of lawn. Truth be told, we would probably have had a better aural experience with a boom box and a good CD. But, that really was not the point.
Despite the rain earlier in the day, the weather was perfect; the sky was clear; the only light, apart from the far off stage, came from the picnickers’ candles and the occasional swinging green glow-stick–just four friends spending the evening with 34,996 other like-minded New Yorkers.
Plus there were fireworks at the end.
Sometimes this place is worth all the hassle.