Enjoy hot dogs, whiskey and classical music at … Green-Wood Cemetery?

By Brian Braiker

Like what you’re hearing? Subscribe to us at iTunes, check us out on Spotify and hear us on Google, Amazon, Stitcher and TuneIn. This is our RSS feed. Tell a friend!

The “angel’s share” is a distiller’s term for the amount of booze (such as cognac, brandy, or whiskey) that is lost to evaporation when the liquid is being aged in oak barrels—thus going up to the heavens, a delicious offering.

“Angel’s Share” is also the name of a series of opera and chamber music concerts that are held in Green-Wood cemetery—sometimes on its rolling green hills for larger audiences, and sometimes tucked away in its catacombs, which date to the 1850s.

The concerts are produced by a non-profit organization called Death of Classical, created in 2020 by Andrew Ousley, who launched the music series to prove a point: Some people may say that classical music is dead, but if you host gorgeous and moving experiences where the dead have made their permanent homes, the living tend to turn out in droves.

“The art form, the music, is immortal. This is timeless music,” says Ousley, who is this week’s guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” “People say, ‘Classical music is dead.’ And it’s not classical music. It’s the infrastructure around it. And the way it’s marketed, presented, talked about. That dies.”

Ousley is attempting to mitigate that. He’ll be bringing Death of Classical back to Green-Wood Cemetery for a new season, beginning May 27, with a special event called “Hot Dogs, Hooch, & Handel,” which will feature, well, hot dogs, a whiskey tasting and the music of the baroque composer George Frideric Handel.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Death of Classical (@deathofclassical)

It’s just that cheeky mix of high- and low-brow that has come to define the Death of Classical experience: Charles Feltman, the inventor of the hot dog is buried in Green-Wood. And who’s to say you can’t enjoy a hot dog in a cemetery before taking in an hour of Handel, performed live in one of the borough’s most lovely green spaces?

“Part of the reason to do it in these spaces is the proximity focuses you emotionally,” says Ousely. “You simply cannot avoid the reality of mortality but the goal is not to make that into something dark and weird. It’s to make it something beautiful and shared.”

The son of an opera singer mother and preacher dad, Ousley comes by his eccentricities honestly … and looks the part. On the podcast he discusses his upbringing on the podcast and how he came to fall in love with classical music in the first place—his day job is in classical music marketing and PR. He describes the genesis of Death of Classical, and what to look forward to in the new season.

“I never played classical music but I love the music itself,” he says. ”It has made my life better and I feel like it’s a force of beauty in the world.”

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.