Most everything at the Frick Collection, which reopened last month after a nearly five-year renovation, is the same as it was, but better.
Hand-loomed velvet wall coverings have been replaced, making Vermeers and Rembrandts pop with fresh vibrancy. Chandeliers and skylights have been cleaned. It’s the museum we knew, with the grime wiped away.
What a relief. For almost a century, the jewel-box Frick has held a special place in the city’s heart. Why mess with perfection?
But sometimes messing around is worthwhile. The public can now enter the Frick family’s upstairs living quarters, turned into intimate galleries. And the museum has returned bearing another gift: a superb space for music, which has swiftly become one of the best places to hear chamber performances in New York City.
The Frick’s well-loved concert series has moved from an ovoid room off the garden court, where performances took place since the 1930s, to a new, 220-seat, curved-amphitheater auditorium two stories underground. In a debut burst of six concerts over two weeks, the theater was put through its paces.
Youthful Baroque ensembles blazed through early music. A long, spare piano solo by Tyshawn Sorey had its New York premiere. The Takacs Quartet and Jeremy Denk played memorably volatile Brahms. There were pieces from Tudor England as well as a just-written song for the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo.
If you went to all six performances, you heard two Steinway pianos — one from the late 19th century, one recent — as well as a fortepiano, a harpsichord, a synthesizer, a violin fitted with old-style gut strings and another with modern metal ones.
Through the very different programs, instruments and textures, the sound was clear, vividly present and resonant. There’s a crackling aliveness to music in the hall.
Every slowly decaying tone in Sorey’s “For Julius Eastman” registered. The acoustics encourage both transparency and blending — each of the Takacs players had a defined voice, but those voices also melded — which is difficult to achieve in a relatively small room like this one.
It’s also tough to make a subterranean space feel airy and bright. But the new Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium — designed by Selldorf Architects, which led the Frick renovation, with acoustical consulting by Arup — avoids claustrophobia.
With pale walls, stylish brown leather seating and a gently wavy proscenium framing the performers, the hall is spacious yet cozy, with frisky touches. (Those zigzag banisters!)
Even in a cultural center like New York, ideal homes for chamber music — gatherings of just a few players, historically in domestic salons — are rarer than you might think. Alice Tully Hall, where the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center resides, sounds good, but with nearly 1,100 seats, lacks the immediacy this repertory lives on. Weill Recital Hall, a staid shoe box at Carnegie Hall, holds fewer than 300, but if seated at the back, you can feel far from the action.
The Morgan Library’s Gilder Lehrman Hall benefits from partnerships with Young Concert Artists and the Boston Early Music Festival, but the space is precipitously raked and feels stifling, with flinty acoustics. The Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory is an ornate delight, but its limited season concentrates on vocal recitals. In this company, the Frick’s auditorium stands out.
Concerts at the museum began in 1938, just a few years after the former home of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick opened to the public. The artists presented in that early period were a who’s-who of legends like Claudio Arrau, Andrés Segovia and Gregor Piatigorsky. Seating 175, the damask-lined, amber-glowing music room encapsulated the Frick’s gentility; until 2005, by which time the focus had shifted from stars to rising artists, tickets were free and had to be requested by mail.
Some devotees were furious when it was announced that the room would be given over to exhibition space in the renovation. “Destroying the Frick’s music room — a chamber concert venue beloved for generations — is an erasure of New York City’s cultural and civic memory,” one resident testified at a Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing in 2018.
But while the music room had old-school charm, its acoustics were inert compared to the zestiness of the new auditorium. In the opening concert, on April 26, Lea Desandre’s mezzo-soprano floated atop the sparkling Jupiter Ensemble in Handel arias. The following weekend, Alexi Kenney, whose violin sported those gut strings, joined Amy Yang on fortepiano in scorching Schumann sonatas. The dazzling flutist Emi Ferguson combined with the vivacious group Ruckus for a playfully conceived but seriously virtuosic program interweaving miniatures by Telemann and Ligeti.
Even if the space no longer resembles a 19th-century salon, it is, if anything, more intimate. At the Takacs concert, a tall young man in the front row leaned forward at one point, listening intently, and his face was just a couple of feet from the first violinist.
While the fortepiano was characterful in the Schumann, and Denk’s 1880s piano blended well with the Takacs in the Brahms, one acoustical issue concerns the modern concert grand. The Steinway used during Susan Rothenberg’s Sorey premiere and Mishka Rushdie Momen’s juxtaposition of Tudor works and contemporary pieces tended to sound stony and blaring in the new hall, even in softer passages.
After spending the first few performances in the center near the front, I sat in a back corner for Rushdie Momen’s recital, and the piano sound bounced off the wall so strongly that it almost made my ear ring. Some kind of dampening panels or other intervention might help with the trouble.
But it’s hardly unusual for new halls to need acoustical tweaks. Jeremy Ney, appointed the Frick’s head of music and performance a year ago — a blink of an eye in the long-planned world of classical music — has hit the ground running with this richly varied, brilliantly played festival. Hopefully he is given the resources to continue to organize robust seasons, not a mere scattering.
And hopefully, in a landscape of museum performance programs increasingly dominated by wan site-specific productions and strained exhibition tie-ins, the series will retain the commitment of these opening weeks: great music, passionately performed. It’s as simple as that.
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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