The Room Changed When the Music Started

The Room Changed When the Music Started

Many people in The City Tutors community walked into the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on January 30 without knowing what to expect.

The City Tutors had been invited to attend Evolution & Revolution, a concert presented by the NYC Orchestra Project. Forty members of our community were in the audience: young professionals, CUNY students and recent graduates, couples who made a night of it, and a mother who brought her son. They came from different schools, different programs, and different parts of the City Tutors community. For many, it was the first time hearing an orchestra live.

Before the music began, conductor Gabriel Levy offered a few words about what the audience was about to hear. As he spoke, attention gathered. Eyes moved toward the stage, taking in the arrangement of instruments and the people behind them.

For many people, orchestra can feel tied to a particular image: the grand concert hall, the distance of the stage, the formality of the setting. This evening carried a different kind of presence. The musicians looked young, because many of them were. The orchestra brought together players from different schools, some still students themselves, under Levy’s direction. The audience recognized that immediately. What stood before them felt excellent, serious, and close at hand all at once.

Then the music started.

With the first note of Mayer’s Faust Overture, the room settled. People stopped adjusting in their seats. Whatever assumptions had come in with them gave way to concentration. The music moved forward, and the audience moved with it, attentive and fully inside the performance.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 followed, familiar to some and entirely new to others. It carried urgency, momentum, and lift. Then came intermission, followed by the center of the evening: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10.

For Sadhvi, a Baruch graduate student, who was hearing an orchestra live for the first time, part of the experience was in watching just as much as listening. She found herself studying the musicians, noticing how different instruments entered and receded, how each performer seemed to know exactly when to begin, pause, and return. The synchronization struck her. She followed the melodies as they moved across the orchestra and gathered into something larger. At moments, the music even felt familiar, calling up the sound worlds of mystery films and Disney cartoons she had grown up with. By the end of the night, she felt the trip through the cold had been fully worth it.

Others described a similar feeling of immersion. One audience member said it was easy to lose herself in the symphony, to feel so drawn into the scene the music created that she only returned fully to the room at its dramatic close. Several people spoke afterward about the intimacy of the evening, the sense of closeness between the music, the musicians, and the audience. It gave the performance a particular force.

After the final applause, people stayed. Some watched the musicians pack away their instruments. Others gathered for photos, lingering as if the evening had given them something they wanted to hold onto a little longer.

That was the feeling of the night: a serious orchestra performance, shared across a wide cross-section of The City Tutors community, and powerful enough to give first-time listeners a reference of their own.