Getting older can be a delightful experience for performers of classical music. At Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, June 6, the Senior Concert Orchestra will perform a program of works by Mozart and Elgar, among others, conducted by David Gilbert. The orchestra, composed of retired professional musicians from the New York area, has been performing since 1966 as an offshoot of the Senior Musicians’ Association, part of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. The Carnegie Hall audience will experience the pleasure of hearing orchestral musicians playing solely for the joy of it, a rare phenomenon.
Decades ago, Frank Jankovitz—one of the Senior Concert Orchestra’s founders—identified longevity with creative wisdom. And last year, in a study from the British Psychological Society’s Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, orchestral musicians explained that playing in an orchestra was the “essential means by which they could socialize with like-minded people, and experience camaraderie, teamwork, solidarity, and friendship.” Hence they felt a “lifelong passion for music and music performance.”
This kind of passion can be heard for free on Wednesday (tickets are available at the box office before the concert). If you like what you hear, and have the means, you might think of making a voluntary donation to Local 802’s Fund for Disabled Musicians or its Emergency Relief Fund.
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Jerusalem: The Scandal of Particularity
On May 24th, COMMENTARY’s editor-at-large Norman Podhoretz received the Guardian of Zion Award from the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies at Bar-Ilan University. The Guardian of Zion Award is one of the most prestigious in its field; past recipients include Charles Krauthammer, Cynthia Ozick, Daniel Pipes, Elie Wiesel, and Ruth Wisse. The full text of Podhoretz’s lecture—Jerusalem: The Scandal of Particularity—is now available at COMMENTARY’s website. (And make sure to read Rick Richman’s take on the lecture at Jewish Current Issues.)