Barrymore Laurence Scherer on the Verdi Square Festival of the Arts - W... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574400723...

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MUSIC SEPTEMBER 9, 2009, 11:43 P.M. ET

By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER

New York

London may be famous for its squares—think Trafalgar, Berkeley, Leicester and Soho—but New York is no slouch in that department.

Times Square is the traditional center of town. Duffy Square lies just to its north; Herald Square and Greeley Square lie roughly a half mile to the south. And all of these squares, and several of the city's others, share a common idiosyncrasy—they're actually triangular. They owe their shape to the intersection of various streets with Broadway, which cuts a diagonal swath through Manhattan.

Verdi Square is the most beautiful such triangle. Formed where Broadway crosses Amsterdam Avenue at West 72nd Street, this small greenspace is named for Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), the beloved Italian opera composer whose marble statue—supported by carved figures of four of his most memorable operatic characters—stands in frock-coated dignity amid the hubbub of the passing throng. Verdi's statue was unveiled on Columbus Day 1906, the work of the Sicilian Romantic sculptor Pasquale Civiletti.

At the time of the unveiling, the nearby Hotel Ansonia was among the city's most elegant addresses, an exuberant example of Beaux Arts style and sometime home to the likes of Enrico Caruso, Arturo Toscanini and Theodore Dreiser. Half a century later, the Ansonia and its neighborhood had become downright seedy. Indeed, Verdi Square had turned into such a fearsome hangout for drug addicts by 1971 that after the premiere of the movie "Panic in Needle Park" it acquired a new nickname (though the actual Needle Park of the film was Sherman Square, yet another triangle on the southern end of the same intersection).

Happily, Manhattan's Upper West Side is one of New York's most desirable neighborhoods once again, and within the past few years Verdi Square has not just been restored to its former glory but enlarged to provide a bucolic setting for an additional entrance to the 72nd Street subway station. The square even boasts its own al fresco music festival. Currently in its fourth season, the Verdi Square Festival of the Arts offers small-scale outdoor concerts of opera, musical theater and other concert music on three September Sundays, with free seating and Kenneth Ritvo printed programs for 400. This year the first two concerts were

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given in May because of religious holidays falling on two Verdi Square Festival of the Arts Sundays this month. The season's final concert will fill the air Verdi Square, Manhattan Sept. 13 with Broadway show numbers on Sunday, Sept. 13, and next www.verdisquarefestival.com season's three concerts all return to September.

The festival was the brainchild of Lauri Grossman, a homeopath whose apartment faces the square across Broadway. Ms. Grossman had just returned from a trip to Italy when the new station kiosk was dedicated in 2002, and hearing music connected with that event she thought, "If this were Europe, there'd be music performed in that park all the time." So she emailed all her neighborhood friends asking for help in starting a festival in Verdi Square. Given the square's name, the initial idea was to present opera.

Soon Ms. Grossman had formed an executive committee, which began raising funds from corporate and individual donors as far afield as San Francisco, home of the Leonore and Ira Gershwin Trust. (Ira and his brother George had lived nearby on and around Riverside Drive.) She also contacted New York City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, who, she says, "is an opera lover and was behind us from day one."

The festival bowed in September 2006, with two operatic concerts performed by students of the Manhattan School of Music and The New School's music conservatory, Mannes College. The reception was so warm that the second season expanded to three concerts respectively featuring Young Artists of the Opera Orchestra of New York, Mannes students singing Irving Berlin and the Mannes Brass Quartet.

Recently, the festival forged an agreement with the Manhattan School to present talent for at least one of the three seasonal concerts, thus permitting the festival to plan long-term for the first time. "While many of our young artists are already accomplished performers, it's particularly important for them to perform in as many environments and before as many kinds of audiences as possible," says Manhattan School of Music president Robert Sirota. "Playing in the Verdi Square Festival is at once like participating in some Old World movable feast while being a colorful part of the fabric of Manhattan life. And that's unique."

Last September I enjoyed my first Verdi Square Festival experience, a concert of operatic favorites by Verdi, Donizetti, Bizet and Rossini, sung by three engaging Mannes postgraduate students. The European ambiance was underscored by the opening greeting of the festival's executive board chairman, George Litton (father of conductor Andrew Litton): "We need to begin precisely at 5 p.m. so that we can finish the program before all the nearby church bells start chiming at six."

To be sure, the game young singers performed that Sunday under metropolitan battle conditions, raising their amplified voices against a din of passing traffic, not to mention the rumble of subway trains directly below. As it happens, the delightful program ended well before the ecclesiastical clangor, though it was interrupted for a few moments by the emphatic crescendo of a brigade of about 50 motorcyclists revving as they waited for the 72nd Street traffic light. Fortunately, this occurred between musical numbers, and their departing thunder elicited a good-humored ovation from the opera crowd.

This season's first two concerts featured programs of opera and Dixieland jazz, performed by gifted Manhattan School artists against a similar counterpoint of buses and fire trucks. Yet this Manhattan charivari adds its own characteristic stamp to these concerts, which unfailingly offer a very pleasurable afternoon diversion. Moreover, it is fascinating to watch the steady stream of passersby to and from the subway station—some bemused, others stopping momentarily to sample the performance, and still others finding a place to sit and enjoy it to the end.

Ms. Grossman tells of one mother and daughter passing from the station at the very first festival concert. "The little girl couldn't see the singers over the heads of the audience, and she said, 'Mommy, I think I hear an angel.' The mother just looked at me and took a seat with her daughter." This, says Ms. Grossman, is the heart of the festival's purpose: "to bring this kind of music to people who might otherwise never have a chance to hear it. This is the essence of New York."

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And to judge by the enthusiastic turnout at each concert, a lot of New Yorkers agree.

—Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.

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