Angel’s Share: Classical comes to life at Green-Wood Cemetery

The Death of Classical series arrives at the historic graveyard this month with Fauré’s “Requiem”—and a whiskey tasting

Is there any better place to hear a death mass than in a cemetery?

From October 21 to 23 Green-Wood Cemetery will partner with the concert series Death of Classical to put a fresh spin on Gabriel Fauré’s hauntingly beautiful “Requiem,“ a work for choir and orchestra of the shortened Catholic Mass for the Dead.

Composed between 1887 and 1890, this work of sensuous lyricism is one of the best-loved pieces in the entire choral repertoire. Which, in itself is nice. Now imagine hearing it al fresco, lit by candles, with a 10-piece orchestra and a 35-person choir New York, nestled among Green-Wood Cemetery’s 478-acres of rolling hills, glacial ponds, monuments and mausoleums.

Then add whiskey.

Death of Classical is the brainchild of Andrew Ousley, who envisioned a series of pop-up concerts performed in crypts, catacombs, and, well, Green-Wood Cemetery. The novelty of the venues is meant to spark interest and appeal to younger generations that have been less inclined to take in traditional classical fare.

All the more enticing: Each performance comes with an hourlong whiskey tasting before the music starts.

Once upon a time, large audiences were willing to sit quietly and focus on listening to music in an acoustically lively concert hall. No longer. In 2012, only 8.8 percent of Americans attended a classical music performance, compared to 11.6 percent a decade earlier, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Rather than mourn the death of classical music, or dance on its grave, Ousley found a way to re-engage audiences.

And it appears to be working: Since its inception in 2017, every Death of Classical concert has sold out.

“What people of my generation expect out of a cultural experience has changed,” says Ousley, 38, the son of an opera singer who also sings and plays guitar. “Classical music has a longstanding tradition of lamenting its own imminent demise. By performing it in a crypt, a catacomb or a cemetery, we have proven it’s still alive and well.”

In order not to die, classical music is evolving.

“Younger people want a larger experience than just the performance, so we include time where they can eat something, have a drink and socialize with friends or meet new people,” Ousley says. “They want something unique and visually interesting, as well as sonically interesting: the Instagram effect. The idea is to create a better experience around classical music without compromising or ‘dumbing down’ the music itself.”

Photo: Kevin Condon

Sharing with the angels
The inspiration for Death of Classical came at the end of 2015, when Ousley discovered the extraordinary and acoustically resonant Crypt Chapel underneath the Church of the Intercession in Harlem. Realizing that the crypt presented an opportunity to do something truly unique, Ousley did “a concert or two there, just for fun. We got a ton of coverage and the shows sold out in five seconds. Somebody from Green-Wood Cemetery read about them, and that was the beginning of our partnership.”

The October performance of the Fauré “Requiem” at Green-Wood Cemetery marks the third and final concert of this season’s series, titled “The Angel’s Share.” Ousley chose the name from a term used to describe the portion (share) of a whiskey’s volume that is lost to evaporation while aging in porous oak barrels. The saying goes that the angels take their cut from every barrel. It may be a little, or it may be a lot, but, as any distiller will tell you, the angels never go thirsty.

“Green-Wood Cemetery has a remarkable number of angel statues, and has also commended its fair share of souls to find their eternal rest amongst the cherubim,” Ousley says. There are, to be exact, 570,000 such souls—and they might just get their own angel’s share of whiskey at the event: Concert goers will taste spirits for an hour, and then head up the hill where the performance takes place. For the Fauré concert, the spirits will be supplied by Appalachian Gap Distillery, Ume Plum Liquor, and Flying Embers hard kombucha and seltzer. Pour some out, if you go.

“I can say for a fact that the concerts are ridiculously awesome,” says Ousley. “We’ve been featured in pretty much every major media outlet in the country.” The New York Times placed them among their top classical concerts of the year; New York Magazine praised The Angel’s Share series as “sensitively programmed events in which music and architecture almost meld.”

In this case, the pairing seems heaven-sent: Fauré himself described his “Requiem” as “a lullaby of death,” and, indeed, it was performed at his own funeral in 1924. The piece largely skips the traditional invocations of Judgment Day, (the “Dies Irae”), focusing not on the hellish fear of death, but on the promise of eternal peace and consolation. As such, Green-Wood Cemetery provides the perfect venue. Founded in 1838, it is one of America’s earliest and best examples of the garden cemetery movement, which aimed to take the experience of death and grieving out of grisly urban churchyards by offsetting loss with the sublime beauty and tranquility of nature.

And as long as Death of Classical continues presenting ambitious, fearless programs in these offbeat, unexpected places, making orchestrated music thrilling to a new audience, then classical music itself can continue to have a steady heartbeat.