Cheap Seats.(price of classical music concert tickets)(Essay)

The image of the classical concert hall as a playground for the rich is planted deep in the cultural psyche. When Hollywood filmmakers set a scene at the symphony, twits in evening wear fill the frame, their jaws tight and their noses held high. The monocle returns to fashion for the first time since the death of Erich von Stroheim. One day, an intrepid art director will come to a concert and discover that the classical audience is well populated by schoolteachers, proofreaders, students, retirees, and others with no entry in the Social Register. They can afford to attend because classical events aren't nearly as expensive as most people assume, especially in comparison with the extravagant pricing schemes for elite pop acts. (Prince infamously charged more than three thousand dollars a seat for a series of shows in 2007; standing room was a mere three hundred.) The cheapest seats at the Metropolitan Opera are fifteen dollars, slightly more than the bleachers at Yankee Stadium. Chamber-music concerts at the Frick, the Met Museum, Tully Hall, and Bargemusic are in the twenty-to-fifty-dollar range; most new-music events go for ten to twenty. Concerts at churches and music schools are usually free. Students can get in to the New York Philharmonic for the price of a movie.

How much music can you see for a hundred dollars? In the second week of January, I decided to find out, looking for the cheapest available tickets.

My first stop was the Family Circle, the uppermost balcony of the Met. From that lofty perch, fifty-five feet above the orchestra level, I took in the company's new productions of Massenet's "Thais," with Renee Fleming and Thomas Hampson, and Puccini's "La Rondine," with Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna. For "Thais," I had a partial-view box seat on the right side. I could tell that Fleming had entered when I heard a flurry of oohs and ahs on my left. As a rule, you come to the Family Circle not to see or to be seen but to listen. If you arrive in gym clothes or leave your shirt untucked, no one will smirk. The intermission chatter is generally smarter than it is in the socialite sectors. A few avid fans carry vocal scores. One night, a young operagoer confidently announced--a week before the announcement was made--that George Steel would take over New York City Opera.

You may not be able to see much, but you can certainly hear. Down on the parterre level, where the critics sit, the orchestra dominates, and smaller-voiced singers are in danger of being drowned out. Up in the Family Circle, the sound has excellent balance and presence: the voices float straight up, bounce off the ceiling, and mingle cleanly with the orchestra. There's a primal thrill in hearing Fleming's soprano--still secure and plush, despite the stylistic mannerisms of recent years--retain its allure across a distance of a hundred and fifty feet. At the same time, the acoustic can mercilessly expose a singer's flaws. I've never been a fan of Alagna's tenor, and in "La Rondine" he sounded woefully dry and pinched--almost worthy of a boo or two. When there's booing at the Met, it usually emanates from the Family Circle.

The equivalent bargain at the New York Philharmonic is the open rehearsal. Periodically, the orchestra sells tickets to a rehearsal, at a price of sixteen dollars. Usually, the orchestra plays the program straight through, although some conductors make last-minute adjustments. (At the Boston Symphony, patrons have been known to complain when James Levine ventures to rehearse during the rehearsal.) On a Thursday morning at the Philharmonic, I saw the young French conductor Ludovic Morlot lead Debussy's "La Mer," Tristan Murail's 1980 work "Gondwana," Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 11, and Messiaen's "Oiseaux Exotiques," the last two with Olli Mustonen as the soloist. The Murail--a richly layered pandemonium of a score, in which the orchestra is regularly subdivided into a hundred separate strands--was strong stuff for 10 A.M., and the audience seemed a little nonplussed. But Morlot, a leader with a clear beat and a precise ear, succeeded in bringing out the secret sensuality of Murail's hyper-complex language. The composer, who was present, won an enthusiastic smattering of applause when he went to the podium to discuss a few unresolved issues.

The audience at the Philharmonic might be described as hard-core classical: mostly people fifty and older. Later that day, a different crowd showed up to see the singer, songwriter, and composer Gabriel Kahane perform at Le Poisson Rouge, the lively Greenwich Village club that mixes classical music with other genres. Kahane is twenty-seven, and his listeners seem roughly the same age. He is well on his way ...