Concerts: Putting the Art Before the War Horse

“We begin where other managers end. We sit in with the artist and develop ideas. Our interest is the same as his: to bring people to the concert hall.”

Any concert manager worth his 10% feels the same way, but when Jay Hoffman and George Schutz speak of their work, there is a decided absence of self-serving tone. Hoffman, 32, and Schutz, 28, comprise one of the busiest, most imaginative and most unorthodox management teams in New York. They have just wound up a highly successful month-long Mozart Festival at Manhattan’s Philharmonic Hall under the sponsorship of Lincoln Center. Skeptics would have considered Mozart box-office suicide during a dreary New York summer. Yet the festival presented 26 consecutive concerts featuring more than 100 orchestra, chamber and solo pieces—all without top-name performers. At a maximum of $3 a seat, Philharmonic Hall got 54,000 admissions that blossomed into 26 delighted audiences.

Full Houses, P.D.Q. For four years, Hoffman and Schutz have been producing offbeat concerts successfully on the premise that there is a sizable audience willing to buy programs first and names second. To reach that audience, they adopt tactics that would horrify conventional concert managers, who like to play it safe by riding war horses. Typically, they select the music first, then find accomplished but lesser-known performers to play it. Their first venture, in 1962, was a concert of all six Brandenburg concertos, which one critic forewarned them was nothing but “a lot of Bach and potatoes.” But it was all gravy for Hoffman and Schutz, who sold out the hall even after adding a second performance.

Since then, they have put over such unlikely packages as a Christmas series of four different versions of Handel’s Messiah, a “Japan Week” featuring the Toho String Orchestra (with Japanese buffet served at intermissions) and a satiric program of baroque music, P.D.Q. Bach (TIME, Jan. 7), which was so successful that it came back twice to full houses, P.D.Q.

Apart from original programming, Hoffman and Schutz have won the concertgoers’ applause with a few other convention-breaking ideas. They have frequently scheduled performances at 5:45 on Sunday afternoons. Explains Hoffman: “Have you ever walked around in New York on a Sunday afternoon? At 5:15 there are hordes of people walking the streets with nothing to do. These are the post-museum, predinner people. We can fill a need for these people.”

By the same reasoning, the two run a series of concerts that begin at 11:30 p.m. for “the neglected night people” and “young dating couples who’ve had a later dinner and comes 10:30 they don’t know what to do.” The first of these concerts, a program of 18th century music, sold out all 2,840 seats in Philharmonic Hall at $2 a ticket. Only 800 admissions had been bought in advance; the rest were sold from the box office on the night of the performance.

Tiny Telemcmn. Operating in their cheerfully freewheeling fashion from offices in a drab mid-Manhattan brownstone, the two managers have gone from a line-up of eleven events in their first year to 72 in the coming season—among them a “Tiny Telemann Festival,” honoring the baroque composer, and four programs of Viennese music, to be played by Viennese pianists. Now their expanding interests are rapidly encompassing the dance, drama, films and children’s programs. Whatever it is, Hoffman insists, “if you have a good-quality product, you can find an audience for it.”