Far from Mid-Manhattan

New York City's claim to being the music capital of the world centers on a handful of glamorous names—the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic-Symphony. But the city's reputation also depends on the dozens of amateur, semiprofessional and modestly budgeted professional groups which every season present a staggering program of operas, concerts and recitals echoing every conceivable musical taste. Much of this music is performed in corners of the city far from the gaudy midtown entertainment axis.

Chamber music can be found in neighborhood churches or refurbished lofts; grand opera may be sung in reconditioned movie theaters with the orchestral pyrotechnics of Verdi or Bizet tamed to a single piano. Many programs are heard in some of the city's finest new recital halls, which bring music closer to home because they are in residential areas, e.g., the new auditorium of New York University's Law School in Washington Square, which serves as a musical center for lower Manhattan; the wood-lined, acoustically outstanding Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum on upper Fifth Avenue, which after three years rivals Town Hall as the city's leading recital hall. Taken all together, New York's out-of-the-way music—comparable to the busy off-Broadway theater—keeps the city astir with the ferment of new musical ideas. Some of the unusual and relatively new groups at work in Manhattan this season:

THE AFTER DINNER OPERA COMPANY is the freshest of half a dozen small opera groups and workshops (including the lighthearted Punch Opera, the experimental Opera '57 and the ambitious Amato Opera Theater, which changes its standard opera bill every three weeks). The company—headed by Stage Director Richard Flusser, 29—was launched with a capital of $250 in 1949, lost $2.68 the first season but has been making modest profits ever since. Flusser has more than tripled the original $65-a-week salaries of the six young members of the troupe. After Dinner has been successful because it staged sprightly productions of such new works as British Composer Gerald Cockshott's Apollo and Persephone, Marc Blitzstein's Triple Sec. The troupe scored a critical success in an appearance at Edinburgh last year (TIME, Sept. 10), is currently preparing to open at Manhattan's off-Broadway Phoenix Theatre with the first U.S. performance of Offenbach's 66, a 40-minute spoof of Austrians and lotteries.