Feelings: The New York Youth Symphony at Carnegie Hall with The Flying Machine

Mischa Santora, Music Director Carmen DeLeone, Host The Flying Machine: Joshua Carlebach, Richard Crawford, Colin Gee, Jessica Green & Gonzalo Munoz directed by Nolan Haims presented by and at Carnegie Hall Determined to give their audience something “different,” The New York Youth Symphony approached me with the request to help them create an afternoon of classical music that would engage and hold the attention of a sold out house of young children at their upcoming family concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall. The widely praised Symphony, arguably one of the finest youth orchestras in the world, had been contracted by Carnegie Hall to present one in their annual series of family concerts. The words “Family Concert” for the Symphony's leadership conjured bad memories of tired Peter and the Wolf presentations and didactic, dry presentations by out of touch and bored musicians. The Symphony wanted something different, and they wanted something visual. Starting pretty much from scratch, we began sketching out ideas for a concert that would not only present the Symphony’s repertoire of Stravinsky, Barber and Dvorak (among others) in an exciting and fun manner, but actively involve the audience, the players and conductor. At the same time, it was vital to keep the overall goal of education in mind as we worked through the performance’s overall theme of the feelings that music can portray. One of the first things I did was to bring in the brilliant Brooklyn-based theatre troupe, The Flying Machine. A group of five highly physical actors, comedians, dancers and acrobats, the troupe is well-trained in the techniques of Jacque Lecoq and Commedia dell’Arte. Shuttling back and forth between brainstorming sessions with The Flying Machine, music meetings with the Symphony’s conductor, Mischa Santora, and script-writing sessions with Carnegie Hall’s education department, I eventually sculpted a structure for the one-hour performance that was to revolve around Stravinsky's story ballet, Petrushka. A seminal work in terms of characterization in music, Petrushka tells the rather simple story of a circus puppet spurned in love by a beautiful ballerina marionette and ultimately killed by the ballerina's brawny lover. To present the wide range of feelings that music can express, we brought the puppets and emotions of Petrushka to life on the stage of Carnegie Hall. The actors of the Flying Machine continually appeared during the Symphony’s attempts to play pieces of their repertoire interacting with the audience and the members of the orchestra. This culminated in the Symphony’s playing of an abridged version of Stravinsky’s ballet while The Flying Machine enacted the emotion-filled story downstage.