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Great
Staging
The Performing Arts Center is a cultural gem
that more and more people – including performers
– are hearing about. |
iBy
Jacqueline Coleman-Fried |
|
Jane
Glover conducting the Greenleaf Chamber Orchestra at
the Choral Masterworks concert in the Concert Hall during
the Center's 25th anniversary season. |
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The
Performing Arts Center at Purchase College. |
Left
to right: Perry J. Lewis, chairman of The Performing
Arts Center Foundation Board of Trustees; Thomas J.
Schwarz, president of Purchase College; Deborah Childs
Kessler, board member; Bim and Donald M. Kendall; Christopher
Beach, director of The Performing Arts Center; William
Morton, board member; at the "Around the World
in 25 Years" benefit honoring the Kendalls. |
Mikhail
Baryshnikov with his wife, Lisa Rinehart, and their
children Sofia, Anna and Peter at the benefit. |
Conductor
Michael Tilson Thomas. |
Sarah Baras of Ballet Flamenco. |
Four-time
Tony Award-winning actress and singer Audra McDonald. |
The
Concert Hall. |
“What
a beautiful hall this is acoustically,” pop singer Tony
Bennett told the audience at a recent concert at The Performing
Arts Center at Purchase College. “They don't make
them like this anymore. This is the first time I've
played here, and I want to come back.” To emphasize
his point, Bennett sang one song with his microphone turned
off. The audience in the Center's 1,372-seat Concert
Hall heard him just fine.
The Center has five theatres – each designed to meet
the different spatial, aural and visual needs of specific
performing arts and performers. The Concert Hall, which is
the largest theatre within the complex, sports a stage ample
enough to showcase full orchestras and international dance
companies; the more intimate Recital Hall features acoustics
that bring out the best in solo concerts, chamber music and
smaller dance troupes; onstage drama is visible and audible
from every seat in the PepsiCo Theatre; experimental works
that call for unusual stage and seating configurations are
easily arranged in the Abbott Kaplan Theatre; and the Organ
Room allows for soulful soirees with its huge Flentrop organ
originally built for Carnegie Hall.
“The facilities are indeed top-notch,” says Lisa
Booth of Greenwich, who is on the board of directors of the
Association of Performing Arts Presenters, a 1,700-member
national service and advocacy organization that promotes the
performing arts. “It's rare to find so many venues
under one roof. The range of the programming is very broad
and the Center brings in quality artists. In that way, it
helps to educate the community about what is going on in the
arts around the world.”
The Center has enjoyed a tremendous growth spurt since its
first season in 1978-1979. “When I started in 1989,
my predecessor had done a total of 18 performances in a season,”
says Christopher Beach, director of the Center and in charge
of programming. (Beach was also founder of the Santa Fe Festival
Theatre and operation director of the Metropolitan Opera.)
“This year, I'll do 142. During my tenure, we've
introduced new series in jazz, popular music, young classical
virtuosos, family fare, lots of special events, a film series,
a greatly expanded dance series and a cabaret series. So we
have grown exponentially in every discipline. When I started,
the annual operating budget – for the operations, not
the facility – was $1.25 million; now it's about
$5.1 million. My first year here we raised $6,000; last year
we raised a million. And when I started we had a total of
125 public events; last year we had 625.”
“I think Nelson Rockefeller would be so happy to see
how the Center is thriving,” says Kitty Carlisle Hart.
He, as everyone knows, was the famously wealthy governor of
New York State from 1959 to 1973. She was vice chairman of
the New York State Council of the Arts, which Rockefeller
created, and then its chairman from 1976 to 1996. A great
public champion of the arts, according to biographer Joseph
E. Persico, Rockefeller was also deeply committed to upgrading
public higher education. “He wanted every student in
New York State, regardless of his or her background, to have
a high-quality education equal to the Ivy League schools,”
says Lisa Keller, associate professor of history and director
of the journalism program at Purchase.
To make that dream a reality, in the 1960s
Rockefeller transformed a string of small teacher's
colleges into a more ambitious set of universities that became
known as the State University of New York (SUNY). SUNY at
Purchase was to specialize in his great passion, the arts.
The idea was to create a place where young people, rich or
poor, could become professional visual and performing artists
while learning liberal arts and sciences from the finest teachers,
in the finest modern buildings. “This campus was Rockefeller's
baby,” says Thomas J. Schwarz, the current president
of Purchase College.
Rockefeller also insisted that Purchase College include a
world-class museum and performing arts center so that the
students would always be exposed to great art. “He had
wonderful art in his home, and he wanted other people to have
access to wonderful art,” says Hart. After all the construction
was completed, the school would consist of the Conservatories
of Dance, Music, Theatre Arts and Film, and Art and Design;
an undergraduate general education program; the Neuberger
Museum of Art, with its substantial collection of modern art
donated by Roy R. Neuberger; and the Performing Arts Center
with its theatres.
Fulfilling the school's artistic mission and providing
the students with “models of excellence” are the
primary reasons that Beach attends 200 performances a year
in search of “the best artists the world has to offer.”
Often it takes Beach years to sign a major artist. After all,
Purchase, NY, is not a major city like New York City or Boston,
and the Center's theatres contain fewer seats than most
big halls. But by steadily building a reputation for quality
– and applying his own beguiling brand of “persistence
and a little charm” – Beach has managed to bag
some big ones, such as pianist and music director Daniel Barenboim.
“I promised that he would be well presented and have
a great time, and he did, saying afterwards, ‘I'll
come back and do it again. I love your piano, I love your
hall, I love your crew and I love your audience.'”
Indeed, the facilities help draw major artists. Classical
pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who is due to return on May 14, 2005,
raves about the acoustics in the 600-seat Recital Hall. “It
has tremendous reverberation,” he says. “The sound
really lives. It surrounds you physically rather than coming
at you from one direction. And it has a wide dynamic range,
plus a good truth across the spectrum, from the bass tones
to the very highest notes. If you just cough, it sounds wonderful.”
That's one reason he's recorded a dozen CDs at
the Center; another is that the theatres are soundproof. “Even
with Westchester Airport less than two miles away, we never
have to stop a session because a plane is flying overhead.”
The Concert Hall's big stage appeals to Terese Capucilli,
an artistic director and a former principal dancer at the
Martha Graham Dance Company (which returns to the Center on
April 1, 2005). “There's a lot of room for scenery,
which is very important for the work we do,” says Capucilli.
She also likes the savvy audience. “They've seen
a lot of dance, because of what's brought here, and
they appreciate what they're seeing.”
Capucilli, who received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance
at Purchase in 1978, is especially grateful to her alma mater:
“I had come from Syracuse and did not have the luxury
of seeing a lot of dance,” she says. “Purchase
provided a means of wrapping myself around many different
forms of dance that I had never experienced before. Every
year we performed the works of incredible choreographers.
I have deep respect and feelings for the teachers who guided
me. Without them and the kind of performance work I did there
I don't know exactly where I would be now.”
Beach didn't always have the “wherewithal,”
as he puts it, to hire great artists like Bennett, Ohlsson
and the Martha Graham Dance Company. What made it possible
was the cultivation of individuals over the course of eight
seasons (that resulted in gifts from more than 800 donors)
by Ilene Lieberman, the Center's director of development
(she came on board in 1996 with experience from the New York
Philharmonic and American Composers Orchestra), and, especially,
the creation in 1999 of the not-for-profit Performing Arts
Center Foundation Board of Trustees. Foundation chairman and
board member Perry J. Lewis of Ridgefield, CT, who is also
the director of Clear Channel Communications, Inc., has assembled
an influential group of 21 board members, with an executive
committee that includes: Christopher T. Clark of Rye, Clare
Stone of Purchase, Donald Landis of White Plains, Margaret
Sullivan of Ridgefield, Thomas J. Schwarz of Purchase and
Manhattan, William Morton of Greenwich and Beach of Manhattan.
“I
think there's a real sense of responsibility with this
group,” says board member Deborah Childs Kessler of
Greenwich, who is also an emeritus trustee of the American
Museum of Natural History's board. “And it's
not just about money, either. It's about making the
Center better.”
The board does, however, raise plenty of money, which helps
Lieberman throw unusual galas every few years. The last one,
in 2003, raised more than $700,000. Says Morton, chairman
of Jack Morton Worldwide (which produced the opening and closing
ceremonies of the Olympics in Athens last summer), and who
co-chaired the 2003 bash along with Kessler, “We start
with a dinner and we've got three theatres going. Christopher
figures out how to time them right so you can pick and choose
two of the three, then change during intermission.”
According to Lieberman, the next such gala is scheduled for
the 2005-2006 season.
Seven to eight times yearly, board members are also encouraged
to invite arts-loving friends to dinners and big-name performances
at the Center. Beach and sometimes the artists themselves
speak to the guests. The idea is to “wow” them,
as Lieberman says, so that they become subscribers, donors
or board members. The board also gives private dinners in
their homes or restaurants. “The board has been instrumental
in increasing the awareness and enthusiasm of the communities
we serve,” says Lewis. “We are trying, through
the board, to access different towns, ages, communities and
types of people.”
While the Center is based in Westchester, 13 of its 21 board
members live in Connecticut (as does about 20 percent of the
Center's audience). Lewis hopes to gradually add new
board members from Westchester. In the spring of 2004 he named
as a board member 20-year resident of Purchase Barbara Dannenberg,
former president of the board of the Westchester Philharmonic.
“My husband and I both have felt so connected to the
Center,” Dannenberg says. “We have subscriptions
to Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic, but The Performing
Arts Center is right in our backyard. The parking is so much
better here, the seats are more comfortable and we get home
so quickly. I don't understand why more people in Westchester
don't take advantage of this place. The programming
is so diversified, there's something for everyone.”
Not surprisingly, Dannenberg plans to focus her Performing
Arts Center Foundation board work on audience development.
On
that count, there is still much for her to do: “The
Center is still underutilized,” says Lewis. One senses,
though, that Lewis, Beach and their dedicated colleagues will
make inroads very soon. “The arts feed the soul and
give us health,” says Morton, “which is very important
for the health of our community.”
“We are in this remarkable community of incredibly well-educated,
cultured people,” Beach says. “This is not just
a suburb, this is a suburb of the center of the world, New
York City. This worldly, cosmopolitan audience won't
accept anything less than the best. They figure, ‘If
I'm going to spend my money, I don't want to come
to something that's nice, and good, I want to see something
that's great.'”
And they do at The Performing Arts Center. |
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| Jacqueline
Coleman-Fried has written for The Westchester County Times
and The Fairfield County Times, among other publications. |
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| Photo
credits in order of appearance: Susan B. Markisz, Susan B.
Markisz, Susan B. Markisz. The Concert Hall: Steve Friedman. |
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