IT was like movie night in a dorm. As they waited in flimsy seats for the lights to dim, several people in the audience read books. “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” a Hitchcock classic, appeared on the screen, but without sound.
Symphony Space on the Upper West Side celebrates its 30th anniversary next year.
In the same theater, 24 hours later, some of New York’s leading contemporary musicians took part in a program devoted to the connection between music and weaving. Philip Glass was in the audience, hearing, for the first time, a piano and flute transcription of his Piano Concerto No. 2. Unannounced, he joined other composers and performers on the program to talk about the piece.
“Use the mike,” an audience member yelled.
“Schubert!” shouted a woman at encore time.
Two nights, two events at Symphony Space. The center is like a gawky teenager grown to chic adulthood: It has all the spiffy trappings of a modern arts center, but under the makeup and grown-up clothes, a winningly goofy adolescent — or maybe an Upper West Side oddball — still lurks.
It has been five years since a major renovation united the old Symphony Space and the Thalia movie theater into a sleek complex at the base of a new apartment building on Broadway and 95th Street. Next year Symphony Space will celebrate its 30th anniversary.
In that time it has evolved into a multifarious performing arts presenter. Or maybe a funky, community-based rental space. For some it’s the home of “Selected Shorts,” story readings distributed to 150 stations nationwide by National Public Radio. But wait — it’s also the place where people line up for hours for Wall to Wall marathons dedicated to the likes of Bach, Copland, Stravinsky and Sondheim.
Actually, isn’t Symphony Space where Bloomsday is celebrated every June 16, the day in 1904 on which James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is set? And what about tomorrow, when it becomes a dance showcase, presenting a four-hour sampler called “From Tap to Toe”?
Symphony Space is all of this, and it plays host to a sea of other activities too. So many events of such a disparate nature take place there that it is difficult to get a grip on just what Symphony Space is. The large number of low-cost and subsidized rentals — at least a third of its events — further dilute its identity, although its commitment to rentals means that audiences can experience a multitude of offbeat but worthy performances by the relatively unknown.
It must also compete with major institutions hard by on the north, east and west: the Miller Theater at Columbia University, the 92nd Street Y and Lincoln Center. Officials of these institutions speak warmly of Symphony Space yet have a hard time agreeing on its profile.
“They play a very important role in world music,” said Jane S. Moss, vice president of programming for Lincoln Center. Hanna Arie-Gaifman, director of the 92nd Street Y’s arts center, said: “It’s intellectual. It’s a mixture. Look, it’s the place of ‘Selected Shorts,’ right?” George R. Steel, executive director of the Miller Theater, called it a “beloved neighborhood institution.”
Now Symphony Space officials say they want to sharpen its focus while retaining the warm, salonlike feel and availability to the public that make it distinctive.
“We are trying to work for unity” of audience, said Isaiah Sheffer, Symphony Space’s co-founder and artistic director. “It’s a grab bag, but it’s not a motley grab bag,” he said. “I think we’ve had considerable success.” He acknowledges that its different audiences have yet to merge, but at the same time sees its great diversity as a strength. “I am happy when somebody in Fairway over the meat counter thanks me for our wonderful Mongolian concert,” he said.
Mr. Sheffer said he was trying to create that unified audience by hybridization, like introducing a one-hour related opera on Bloomsday or, during Wall to Wall Debussy, reading letters by that composer. The center is also beefing up its theme series.
“I think there’s great stuff going on, but there hasn’t been enough clarity and focus to how they’ve been organized,” said Laura Kaminsky, a composer and dean of the music conservatory at Purchase College. “It’s a bit random.”
Ms. Kaminsky, who grew up in the neighborhood and was a volunteer at the first Wall to Wall in 1978, was hired last year to program Symphony Space’s musical offerings. “It’s a really comfortable, welcoming, unpretentious place,” she said. “That sense of it being of the people and having a kind of ebullient, vibrant artistic soul really spoke to me.”
Her plans for next year are ambitious. They include series dedicated to contemporary piano music, including an Elliott Carter program played by the pianist Ursula Oppens; the music of Meredith Monk and her circle; string works, including an evening by the fiddler Mark O’Connor; and jazz concerts pairing established and emerging musicians, featuring Jon Faddis.
Symphony Space has scored other modest coups for the 30th-anniversary season. The American Symphony Orchestra is moving there, as are Arturo O’Farrill and his Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, which had been based at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Film series programmed by Jonathan Demme and Jim Jarmusch, among others, are also planned. Symphony Space is working on putting its music programs on the radio. In July it will offer its second “Summer Stock on Broadway” production, the play “Surface to Air” by David Epstein, directed by James Naughton.
Building a One-Stop Arts Center
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It will continue as a leading purveyor of vintage movies, world music and contemporary music, like the Glass concert the other night at the Thalia, presented not by Symphony Space but by Cutting Edge Concerts, a series run by Victoria Bond, a composer and conductor. On Saturdays at 11 a.m., most weeks, its children’s series becomes a major destination for neighborhood parents and their children. Symphony Space also organizes Upper West Fest, a three-week arts festival in the neighborhood.
For the anniversary a celebration of “greatest hits,” with past luminaries, is planned for Jan. 10, along with a cantata being written by Mr. Sheffer and composed by Lanny Meyers.
Effectively, the goal of recent efforts is to make Symphony Space more like the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “I hope people will come to feel that Symphony Space is a trusted destination,” said Cynthia Elliott, its executive director, “so that you say on a Friday night: ‘I’d like to see something good. Let’s go to Symphony Space.’ ”
For better or for worse, Symphony Space will always be an expression of its Manhattan neighborhood, one now heavily populated with artists, writers and performers. Its roots are distant. Vincent Astor built the original space in 1915 as a market. Several years later it became the Crystal Palace skating rink with the Sunken Gardens restaurant below. The Crystal Palace eventually became the Symphony movie theater, and the restaurant morphed into a smaller movie theater, the Thalia, with its entrance on 95th Street. The Thalia was the beloved child, showing foreign films and classics, famous for a floor that sloped down from the screen.
In 1978 Mr. Sheffer and his neighbor Allan Miller, a conductor turned filmmaker, rented the Symphony theater for a Bach marathon and used donations from it to open a bank account for a new outfit called Symphony Space. The building was bought that year. In 1985 Symphony Space began a long legal fight with developers to keep control of the building, which ended with victory in 1996. The board worked out a deal with another developer, who bought the air rights, which allowed Symphony Space to own the theaters while a high-rise was built above.
The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation donated $1.2 million, and the name was attached to the renovated 830-seat Symphony theater. The software entrepreneur Peter Norton, beguiled by radio broadcasts of “Selected Shorts” he heard in California, donated $5 million for the center. The actor Leonard Nimoy gave $1.5 million for the renovation of the Thalia, which seats 172 and is now called the Leonard Nimoy Thalia. Most musicians consider the acoustics poor in both theaters, but the spaces seem intimate and must serve the spoken word, dance and acoustic and amplified music and film.
A sleek cafe was included. It serves Zabar’s coffee — Zabar’s is this season’s sponsor and major donor — as well as tuna tartare, candied foie gras, homemade burekas (a baked puff pastry), beers up to $12 and a bottle of 2000 La Castellada white for $102. A zipper was added two years ago to the top of the marquee.
In all, $24 million was raised for the renovation and to create an endowment, which stands at $12 million. Since the renovation, the budget has roughly doubled, to $6 million. The number of events has also roughly doubled, to about 500 a year. Unlike many other performing arts institutions, Symphony Space sells the vast majority of its seats as single tickets rather than through subscriptions, and averages about 70 percent capacity for live performances, which is not bad for cultural centers, Ms. Elliott said.
Considering the volume of its offerings, Symphony Space spends relatively little on publicity and marketing, she said. She contends that it still manages to draw audiences from around the city.
But its ties to the neighborhood are what make it distinct: concertgoers who remember the original Thalia; Zabar’s customers who buy lox and a ticket; performers who live just blocks away. Peter Schickele, of P. D. Q. Bach fame, is in that last category.
“Even though it’s not my favorite place to play acoustically, it is one of my favorite places to play because of the feel of the audience,” Mr. Schickele said. “I guess it still has a funky quality that I like.”
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