Lincoln Center’s Audiences Deserve Music Worthy of Them

I love the classical music canon, and I hate it.

To be precise, I hate the way we assume audiences will invariably choose it over what’s new and unusual. If you listen to marketing departments, there may be grudging tolerance for some fresh sounds at the start of a concert, but basically, people want the standards — more than ever, as their ticket-buying behavior over the past few years suggests they are only more enamored of chestnuts like “The Planets” and Beethoven’s Ninth.

So it was a small but sweet triumph over this narrative when, on Saturday at David Geffen Hall, an audience did exactly the opposite. Finally, the familiar and the less so were put to a fair fight — and who do you think won?

The battlefield was Symphony of Choice, a kind of preview performance at the start of the three-week, 13-concert season of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. That’s the slightly awkward name of what was once the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, before the center’s warm-weather offerings were consolidated as Summer for the City two years ago.

Streamlining previously competing series and festivals has made the schedule clearer. But it has also meant the disappearance of ambitious classical programming in favor of the sort of smaller-scale, pop-culture-oriented events that Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer since 2021, produced in her last job, as the director of Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater.

Amid the silent discos, mindfulness sessions and comedy nights, you get the sense that classical music is now viewed with faint irritation, as a stodgy and expensive waste of resources. People already know Lincoln Center for operas and symphonies during the regular season, the thinking goes, so the center’s audience isn’t going to be expanded in the summer through more of that — especially if those symphonies aren’t packageable as “experiences.”

Which is why Symphony of Choice gave me pause when I first heard about it. The goal was for the Festival Orchestra, newly under the direction of the young conductor Jonathon Heyward, to offer a taste of its programs over the next few weeks. The gimmick was a crowdsourced popularity contest.

The orchestra played snippets of two symphonic movements without announcing the piece or composer, and the audience voted by cellphone. The winning movement was then played in its entirety.

This continued over three rounds, to form a kind of Frankensymphony, with the finale of Schumann’s Second at the end as an encore. The first round went to, well, Mozart, whose beloved “Haffner” Symphony’s Presto beat out my choice, a sprightly Allegro con spirito from the Symphony in C by Marianna Martines, Mozart’s Viennese contemporary.

In the second round, the first excerpt was a lovely slow movement that even a novice would have been able to identify as from the Classical era. Then the orchestra played something quite different: also slow in tempo but a bit thornier, certainly much more modern, and burningly urgent, even in a short passage. It had my vote. To my surprise and delight, the second excerpt won. Louis W. Ballard (1931-2007), the dean of Native American composers, beat Haydn with his 1974 piece “Incident at Wounded Knee.”

Under the tall and graceful Heyward, who is also the new music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and whose M.C. work got more relaxed as the performance went on, the ensemble sounded crisp and genial. And, in one of Lincoln Center’s best ideas of the past few years, this — like all the orchestra’s concerts — was choose-what-you-pay, which meant that I gave just $5 to sit in one of the country’s premier halls and hear a full helping of serious music. That is real populism.

The audience, a healthy mix of young and old, was still very mixed at the Festival Orchestra’s official opening night on Tuesday; lots of applause between the movements of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony was a heartening sign that many newcomers to classical music were in the house.

I admire the impulse to precede the “Pastoral” — and begin the season — with something new and substantial, but why would you kick off the summer with a piece as murkily long and lethargic as Huang Ruo’s 40-minute “City of Floating Sounds,” a listless dirge played in near-darkness? Its stretched-out drones, with harmonies shifting like a slow-rotating, dimly colored kaleidoscope, seem to aim for something like the tidal quality of John Luther Adams’s “Become Ocean,” but “City” lacks that work’s grandeur and detail.

Before the concert, it was possible to download an app and walk toward the hall, following one of the recommended paths or making one of your own, while listening to the piece. People were randomly assigned slightly different mixes — favoring the flutes, for example, or the strings — so that the piece gained richness and a sense of completion as you encountered others. But the music didn’t improve on deeper acquaintance.

The Festival Orchestra’s rendition was a little unsteady, especially in the brasses, and the “Pastoral,” too, felt unsettled, with Heyward egging on players who responded in fits and starts. There was some sensitive soft playing, but not the fully unified approach that can make the aftermath of the fourth movement’s storm such a joyful release.

More memorable was a tinier concert on Friday, by the flutist Claire Chase. Lincoln Center has repurposed the underground driveway beneath its Broadway-facing grand steps as a performance space, and some mood lighting and cafe tables can’t distract from the fact that you’re sitting on asphalt in a barely glorified tunnel. With a performer as excellent and charismatic as Chase, though, it was hard to care.

Over five pieces, Chase moved smoothly through an array of flutes and moods — ethereal, sepulchral, stark, solemn, fierce — before ending with extended passages from Terry Riley’s new “The Holy Liftoff,” its dreamily repeated, upward-moving riff achieving a stirring consonance that was almost Coplandesque. More events like this, please, but bolder and bigger than an hour of solo flute in a porte-cochere.

And beyond summer, Lincoln Center needs to reassert itself as a presenter in its own right, rather than merely as a landlord for its constituent organizations. (Remember Great Performers? The White Light Festival?)

But for that to happen, there must be changes at the top. Henry Timms, who hired Thake during his term as the center’s chief executive, is stepping down this summer. The board has the chance to replace him with someone committed to a truly full range of the performing arts.

Symphony of Choice gave me a glimmer of hope that audiences want to be challenged, not just pandered to. They deserve a Lincoln Center worthy of them.