by FoM
I've seen a lot of music in just about every imaginable venue in this town, but one place I, regrettably, never made it to was Amato Opera, which shut its doors in 2009 after 61 years on the Bowery. Anthony Amato, the company's founder and guiding spirit, passed away this past Tuesday at the age of 91. As Margalit Fox noted in Wednesday's Times, Amato was also the company’s stage director, music director, prompter, vocal coach, diction coach, caterer, broom pusher and emergency tenor, among other things. This was no mere vanity project: in the years before opera training programs, Amato Opera was an important incubator of performers, many of whom went on to sing with major companies such as the Met and City Opera.
Zachary Woolfe commented in Friday's Times about the passing of both Amato and Olga Bloom, who died last month, and the impact these fly-by-the-seat-of-your pants presenters have had on the musical life of New York. Woolfe argues that their death marks the end of the era when artistic presenters could maintain their own homes, opting instead to be itinerant in the name of "flexibility." (He cites City Opera and the Brooklyn Phil as examples.) "The idea of arts institutions having stable homes," Woolfe writes, "however eccentric they might be, is becoming a thing of the past."
I've seen otherwise. In 2008, I wrote about some of the city's other small opera houses, all of whom are still thriving (including Amore Opera, founded on the ashes of Amato opera.) Just last night, I saw the extraordinary Dryden String Quartet perform the music of Beethoven, Shostakovich and Mozart in the auditorium of Washington Irving High School, where the Peoples' Symphony has been presenting budget-priced concerts for the better part of a century. (They started out at the Cooper Union in 1900.) And, Bargemusic is still going strong.
The small guys are doing just fine, Zach. It's those big guys we need to figure out a better solution for.