One of the most interesting and satisfying concerts of the classical music season was last week at Carnegie Hall. The conductor Raphaël Pichon, a rising star in Europe, led a version of “Mein Traum,” his collage of works by Schubert and some contemporaries, an intermissionless program that broods and rages before turning transcendent at the end.
The baritone Christian Gerhaher was haunting in the bruising song “Der Doppelgänger.” As the evening drew to a close, the soprano Ying Fang sang “Nacht und Träume” with breathtaking purity. The performance cast a rare spell.
It was the first time that Pichon, 40, had conducted in New York. You might expect that an in-demand young maestro would choose to make such an important debut with the Metropolitan Opera or the New York Philharmonic, or while visiting with a touring powerhouse. But Pichon led “Mein Traum” with a rather less famous, local organization: the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this season.
Less famous, but more open. In an interview a few days after the concert, Pichon said he had consulted Pablo Heras-Casado, the principal conductor of St. Luke’s from 2011 to 2017, before agreeing to the collaboration.
“The most important thing he told me,” Pichon recalled, “is there is no routine in this orchestra. When they decide to start a project, they’re fully dedicated. The musicians want to create this space of freedom, of experimentation.”
Without the rigid week-after-week subscription structure of the Philharmonic and other major orchestras, St. Luke’s has the versatility to take on unusual ideas like Pichon’s. Its core musicians, who include some of New York’s finest freelancers, are tenured, but the ensemble’s schedule leaves them ample time for other commitments; Benjamin Bowman, the concertmaster for “Mein Traum” at Carnegie, is also a concertmaster of the Met Orchestra.
St. Luke’s offers its players a tempting combination of security and adventure, keeping them busy with a range of experiences unequaled in the city.
“Because of the flexibility of our contract with the players, we can do whatever project there is,” said James Roe, the president and executive director of St. Luke’s, who started his career as an oboist in the orchestra.
Those projects encompass both high culture and low. St. Luke’s is the only group to have regular series in all three of Carnegie’s spaces. (A performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony a week after “Mein Traum” was its 439th appearance at the hall.)
The orchestra is the pit band when the Paul Taylor Dance Company has its annual residency at Lincoln Center. It frequently collaborates with the MasterVoices chorus, and presents contemporary-music events at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, its rehearsal and administrative home near Hudson Yards.
Those are the critically acclaimed presentations St. Luke’s touts. But the orchestra also earns a couple of million dollars each year, around a fifth of its revenue, doing what is known in the business as fee engagements, a nice way of saying remunerative orchestra-for-hire gigs — like backing a pop or rock star. St. Luke’s has a five-night stand coming up playing the score for “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” when the movie is screened at Radio City Music Hall, the kind of populist spectacle that can seem worlds away from Pichon’s early-19th-century remix.
“What keeps the consistency of the music-making is the intentionality, regardless of what we’re playing,” said Alexander Fortes, a St. Luke’s violinist who is also a member of the orchestra’s board. “If you treat everything with the same intensity you’re giving to a big Schubert project, suddenly it’s inspiring and worth doing, and makes us all better musicians.”
The orchestra takes its name from the Church of St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village, where it gave its first chamber concerts in 1974. It grew to symphonic scale a few years later, when it began a summer residency at Caramoor, in Katonah, N.Y., that continues today.
A three-tier system of membership arose from those intimate origins. There is still the core St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, then what’s called the orchestra — which has grown to include about 65 tenured positions — and a third group of about 50 to 60 untenured players who can be called on when larger forces are required.
The variety and flexibility — and all those “Lord of the Rings”-style money makers — that have been part of the St. Luke’s DNA from the beginning have also meant that the orchestra “presents to the world a certain vagueness of image, identity and purpose,” as James R. Oestreich wrote in The New York Times in 1998.
Roe and the organization have tried over the past decade to counter that perception with more tightly conceived programming, avoiding competing with the major orchestras that tour to Carnegie by specializing in early music and less traveled parts of the repertoire. (“Mein Traum” is a prime example.) The fee engagement market has softened, so St. Luke’s has focused on producing a greater proportion of its own work: increasing its presence at Carnegie, guiding emerging artists through a composition institute, offering more performances at the DiMenna Center.
DiMenna, a $37 million project brought to fruition in 2011 by Roe’s predecessors, Marianne C. Lockwood and Katy Clark, has been a transformative signal of the orchestra’s ambitions.
“Turning 50 is such a big milestone for an orchestra that began as informally as we did,” Roe said. “I think now we’re looking to create an organization that will outlast us.”
Under his leadership, the orchestra’s budget has more than doubled, to $10 million; its endowment has roughly quadrupled, to $23 million. Its last contract with its musicians — for five years, beginning this past fall, rather than the three years of previous agreements — was signed after a single negotiating session.
It should be noted that St. Luke’s presenting Pichon’s New York debut was in part an accident of history. He and Pygmalion, the period-instrument group he founded and runs, were about to fly to the city to perform at the Park Avenue Armory when the first pandemic lockdown began in March 2020.
But Roe carefully pursued and persuaded Pichon in the years after those plans dissolved, displaying the strengths of an organization willing to seize the moment. In 2016, Roe arranged for a private rehearsal-cum-audition for the conductor Bernard Labadie, who had recently stepped down from his ensemble Les Violons du Roy; Labadie was then named principal conductor of St. Luke’s before ever leading the orchestra in public.
The ensemble’s conductors don’t have the administrative or hiring responsibilities of a big-orchestra music director, which has helped the group attract renowned figures like Roger Norrington, Charles Mackerras and Donald Runnicles for relatively short stints. Labadie’s tenure ends this spring with the “St. John Passion” of Bach, whom he’s brought to the forefront of St. Luke’s programming with an annual festival.
Roe said he wasn’t in a hurry to appoint a successor, and that he wanted the orchestra to experience a range of guest maestros over the next few seasons, as well as to provide a New York foothold for artists like Pichon and Louis Langrée, the former music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, who led St. Luke’s at Carnegie in November.
“We don’t plan on naming anyone anytime soon,” he said. “But if love strikes — if there’s a real spark — we will definitely jump at the opportunity.”