Lower Manhattan Orchestra to Premiere Original Work Tonight
Tonight (Friday, April 10), Lower Manhattan’s own Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra (KCO) presents “Singing of Democracy: In a Sea of Seething Currents” at the Battery Maritime Building (10 South Street, near the Staten Island Ferry). The program is a musical reflection that is both timely, coinciding with this year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and timeless, drawing upon texts ranging from Plato to Walt Whitman.
“The 2026 semiquincentennial is likely to inspire a lot of bombast,” predicts KCO founder and music director, Gary S. Fagin, “and I wanted to offer a counterpoint to that. By focusing on original words and texts and ideas, which were about fellowship and equality and democracy, I hope to use that inspiration to contribute to the dialog we are having at this moment.”
“Writers like Plato and Whitman, along with Alexis de Tocqueville and Henry Longfellow, seem prophetic, because much of what they said describes precisely what we are seeing today,” Mr. Fagin says. “They all predicted, in slightly different ways, that overreach by executive authority is the greatest danger to freedom.”
Among this pantheon, Mr. Fagin’s highest praise is reserved for Whitman, because in addition to a diagnosis, he offered a prescription: “Whitman believed the salvation of democracy was always the wisdom of the people. He called the common people, ‘the life-blood of democracy.’ ”
In his “Democratic Vistas” (1871), Whitman borrowed Plato’s analogy about a “ship of state,” and wrote, “we sail a dangerous sea of seething currents… in vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander’s, beyond the proudest sway of Rome.” But then he offered, “to him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between democracy’s convictions, aspirations, and the people’s crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this essay.”
Mr. Fagin’s musical distillation of observations about democracy from Plato, de Tocqueville, Longfellow, and Whitman (with a dash of Abraham Lincoln thrown in, for good measure), is titled, “Each and All” (a phrase drawn from “Democratic Vistas”). It will feature vocalists Katherine Riddle (soprano), Rosena Hill Jackson (mezzo-soprano), Chauncey Packer (tenor), and Ben Davis (baritone).
Also on the program is a discussion between Mr. Fagin and Karen Karbiener (an NYU Professor who also serves as president of the Walt Whitman Initiative), surveying the state of American Democracy. The evening will be rounded out with works by Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Ricky Ian Gordon.
Formed in 2008 by Mr. Fagin, a longtime Seaport resident, the KCO is a professional ensemble of the region’s most accomplished musicians. The group has performed in the Winter Garden, Trinity Church, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and other Lower Manhattan venues. Tomorrow night’s performance at the Battery Maritime Building is a unique opportunity to hear superb classical music in a beautiful Beaux-Arts building listed on the National Register of Historic Places—and in a space not often open to the public.
The performance will take place in the West Concourse of the Battery Maritime Building, which features a 30-foot-wide arched window overlooking New York Harbor, amid Art Deco-inspired murals and nautical lamps that recall the glamour of a 1930’s ocean liner. “KCO likes to perform in historically resonant spaces,” Mr. Fagin says. “The Battery Maritime Building is the perfect home for this program, literally and metaphorically. As we invoke the theme of a ship of state navigating a dangerous sea of seething currents, looking out onto the harbor will make for a deeply resonant moment.”
Tickets for Friday’s KCO concert are $40 ($20 for seniors and students). Go to knickerbocker-orchestra.org for more information and tickets.