I HAD never seen anyone walk through a church so fast.
Mark Rimple of Trefoil in a free lunchtime concert at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Midtown, one of numerous midday performances around the city.
Donato Cuzzato performing at Central Synagogue in Manhattan, where organ music mingles with strains from the street.
Juilliard School students play to office workers on lunch break in the atrium at 180 Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan.
A midday audience of fans and tourists listening to the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan.
It was 2:42 on a Monday afternoon, and the last sweet note of a piece by the obscure 18th-century composer Amédée Rasetti had just rung out in the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church near Lincoln Center. Almost as soon as the applause began, audience members began darting to one corner of the room, and it took a moment to see what everybody was after: doughnut holes!
My stomach had rumbled a bit through the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players’ lunchtime reading of the Rasetti piece, a lighthearted, Mozartean trio for piano, bassoon and flute. So I queued up and got my snack of tea and Munchkins, which really hit the spot.
The evening performance is the standard event in the classical calendar, when moneyed patrons patronize, premieres get their premieres, and reviewers review. But an equal, if humbler, part of the musical landscape is the weekday afternoon recital, when artists take to churches, corporate atriums and even big concert halls to play for lunching workers, retirees and all other daytime music lovers. And with tickets to evening events at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center typically exceeding $30, noontime shows have another attraction: They’re usually much cheaper, if not free.
In sheer range and quality these events rival their evening counterparts. Over two weeks of daytime concerts, I was entertained in some of the most beautiful houses of worship in New York by world-class professional musicians; saw the New York Philharmonic with the pleasant buzz of my morning coffee still lingering; and dodged palm trees and 9-to-5ers as part of a music-theater performance at the World Financial Center downtown.
Sweets not withstanding, the real nourishment at Good Shepherd-Faith was the music. The Jupiter players do afternoon and evening concerts on 20 Mondays a year, and in tribute to Jens Nygaard, who founded the Jupiter Symphony in 1979 and died in 2001, they offer both familiar and nonstandard repertory. This year’s brochure lists August Klughardt, Bernhard Henrik Crusell, Woldemar Bargiel and other barely known composers alongside Tchaikovsky and Schumann.
Most major classical organizations shy away from such material, fearing it will intimidate listeners, but for Mei Ying, who was Mr. Nygaard’s companion and is the manager of the Jupiter, it can engage them even further.
“I look at it as Music Appreciation 101,” she said. “Brahms, who is so huge to us today, has overshadowed so many wonderful composers that also worked in his time and were his friends and colleagues, people like Friedrich Gernsheim and Anselm Hüttenbrenner. We’ve done their pieces, and the audience gets to see not only that Brahms is alive, but that there were other people in his time who are alive.”
Just as new to me was the eerily beautiful medieval music performed by the vocal and instrumental trio Trefoil the week before Christmas. As part of the weekly Midtown Concerts series at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, the members of Trefoil played 14th-century Italian nativity music in the church’s intimate chapel at 1:15. They began by slowly walking up the aisle, and from my spot in the 6th of 15 rows I could hear each voice distinctly as it passed, in clear, otherworldly harmonies.
The 35-minute program was free, and every spot was taken, with the last three rows expeditiously “reserved for latecomers.”
I dropped $2 in the donation basket for the concert series, as I did at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan the next afternoon. Most of the events there and at St. Paul’s Chapel nearby are classical, but the most recent show featured the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, a group of elders who played Duke Ellington and old-time New Orleans music to fans and tourists. The oldest player is 92, but the band members weren’t the ones who needed loosening up. “Put your hands together — act like you’re in a Baptist church,” Ruth Brisbane, the singer, told the crowd, which grew slightly less timid in response.
Just because such concerts take place at lunchtime doesn’t necessarily mean food is involved. It is, of course, not appropriate to eat in a church. And if you see the New York Philharmonic in one of its 12 concerts on Friday mornings or afternoons this season, the sandwiches and brownies for sale at intermission should stay outside the auditorium at Avery Fisher Hall. Two weeks ago, at a sold-out 11 a.m. program of Mendelssohn, Mozart and Elgar, it might have been difficult for the ushers to enforce that rule. Unlike many Lincoln Center performances that are nominally sold out, just about every seat was actually filled. (Tickets, starting at $26, were slightly cheaper than for the same program the night before.)
Many concerts, however, are in public spaces where eating may even be expected. The Juilliard School has long had a Tuesday-afternoon series at 180 Maiden Lane, an office tower near South Street Seaport, where students perform in an open court for people who only have so much time before their bosses expect them back at their desks. This week offered a concert rarity: a solo harp recital.
Grace Cloutier played transcriptions of Bach and Britten, making casual but educational remarks before each piece. I experienced glissando after airy glissando in close range while munching (discreetly) on an avocado chicken wrap that I brought.
In addition to having access to some of the greatest professional musicians in the world, New Yorkers are blessed with some of the most talented students as well, whose homework can be our entertainment. At Juilliard public series like the one at Maiden Lane are an important part of the curriculum.
“One of the educational requirements for students is that they get performance experience,” Derek Mithaug, director of career development at Juilliard, said. “These kinds of concerts tend to attract a wide range of audiences, and they are a wonderful opportunity to connect to people who would not normally come into a concert hall.”
Mr. Mithaug books students at parks and office buildings all over the city, and said these performances feature some of the school’s most experienced players because they must be vetted by faculty members before representing the school in public.
For businesses the joy of music is not the only benefit. Real estate developers can obtain zoning bonuses for creating privately owned public spaces that can be used for arts events. And a classy music series is valuable public relations, said Judith A. Jedlicka, president of the nonprofit Business Committee for the Arts.
“A hotel chain might come and say, ‘We’d like to be different from our competitors, and we’d like to do it with the arts,’ ” Ms. Jedlicka said.
American Express, Merrill Lynch and Brookfield Properties sponsor an extensive series at the World Financial Center, and one afternoon last month in the cavernous Winter Garden there the avant-garde string quartet Ethel presented a semitheatrical concert with a solstice theme. Augmented by four pianists and a few actors, the quartet meandered through the Winter Garden as rivers of people came and went, some barely seeming to notice the music.
Informal contexts like this have a higher threshold for noise than do formal concert halls. Inside the gorgeous Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue, where Donato Cuzzato played the unusual organ — it includes shofar and klezmer clarinet stops — I was barely fazed by the honks and screeches coming in from the street. Sacred or profane, it all just seemed a part of the city.
At the same time, daytime concertgoers can be the best behaved of all. At Good Shepherd-Faith, where the Jupiter clientele is mostly retirees, all sat in rapt silence once the music began. I have never witnessed such decorum even at the Metropolitan Opera, where tickets cost up to 15 times as much.
At first I thought people might have fallen asleep, something I’ve seen plenty of times at the Met. (And at the Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall.) But every eye was focused on the musicians and every face was lost in thought. They were all there for the most important part of their day, the music.
The free snacks were just the icing on the doughnut hole.
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