primephonic: classical music in the digital age

LOFTOPERA
NATIONAL SAWDUST
BARGEMUSIC
BAM
ROULETTE
COMPOSER STATUES
Bargemusic presents about 200 concerts a year. Tickets
are $40 to $45, with discounts for students and seniors.
The seats are arranged in many configurations, but it’s all
chairs.
Peskanov added, “I love playing here myself. It’s great to
have such close communication within such an intimate
space. I often ask how many people have heard a piece
for the first time—something typical like Mozart—and a
lot of people raise their hands. So for them I have played
a world premiere.”
LOFTOPERA
Unlike most of the other classical music venues in Brooklyn,
LoftOpera has taken a very conscious turn away
from new music. “We always wanted to take a populist
stance and also bring people to the classics,” said Brianna
Maury, the general manager and cofounder. Their
audience is mostly first-time opera goers, and producing
works whose names people recognize adds a bit of
familiarity. “These beautiful masterworks are also more
accessible than new music,” she said.
LoftOpera was founded by Maury, her stepbrother Daniel
Ellis-Ferris, and his classmate at The New School Dean
Buck, basically on a dare. (“We dared ourselves to do
a production of Don Giovanni in 2013 and it sold out.”)
It has since grown from two events a year to four, with
productions like Così fan tutte and Tosca, and coming up
later in 2017 Pagliacci and Bluebeard’s Castle. Each one
is an original production, with six performances. There
is seating for about 500 on benches and all tickets are
$30.
Each production is in a different venue in Brooklyn,
typically hidden-away spaces in Bedford-Stuyvesant and
Bushwick—areas Maury says are “not really gentrified the
way other parts of Brooklyn have been.” The locations
add to the sense of adventure. “We want to strip away
the pretense of going to a place like Lincoln Center,”
said Maury. “Maybe to get here you’re on a subway line
you’ve never taken before.”
The singers and orchestra are recruited by music director
Sean Kelly, who also teaches voice in the U.S. and
Italy. Musically, they have, for the most part, enraptured
New York critics.
They’ve enraptured audiences as well. Maury said her
novice audiences (almost all Brooklynites, with a smattering
of visitors from the Upper West Side of Manhattan),
many of whom have only heard music in clubs
before, sit quietly because “they’re listening so intently
that they’re on the edge of their seats. They clap at all
the right places—actually, they hoot and holler after the
arias, which is how it used to be in the old days.”
Many first-time opera goers come for date night, and
that is very much by design. LoftOpera markets itself on
event sites like Thrillist, Flavorpill, GILT City, and Fever as
a romantic, classy, yet affordable date. As a result, “We
get couples making out in the audience,” said Maury. “We
have even caught people having sex in the bathrooms.
That’s how we know we’re successful.”
It’s the sort of thing that would get you thrown out of
Lincoln Center. Welcome to Brooklyn.
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