St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble Launches the "Children's Free Opera of New York"

Due to a city-wide financial crisis, New York City Public schools pulled back arts education significantly at the beginning of the 1976–77 school year, forcing students to begin their year “in tense mood of austere crisis” (New York Times). As quoted in The New York Times on Monday, September 13, 1976, a school superintendent declared: “We will be able to provide little more than a teacher for every class…We will have no science teachers, no music or art teachers, no guidance counselors, no librarians.”

Following this devestating news, St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble presented Philemon and Baucis at the 92Y for NYC school students on Friday, November 5, 1976—beginning an educational music program that continues to this day, now known as OSL’s “Free School Concerts.”

“The St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble is one of those groups which, every time you think you have it pegged, bobs up with something new that makes the pegs start falling out. This month, for instance, the three‐year‐old ensemble initiates, the Children’s Free Opera of New York…which, by the end of May, will have reached 70,000 school children without a nickel’s cost to anybody but the sponsor” —The New York Times

View the 1978 program for the “Children’s Free Opera of New York”
(Courtesy of the BAM Hamm Archive via the Shelby White & Leon Levy BAM Digital Archive)

View the 1986 program for the “Children’s Free Opera of New York”
(Courtesy of the BAM Hamm Archive via the Shelby White & Leon Levy BAM Digital Archive)

Read the full article about the 1976 financial crisis at The New York Times

Read the full story about the “Children’s Free Opera of New York” at The New York Times