Safe with Sound

Edinburgh may have more class and Salzburg more tradition, but no festival has a longer season or a larger attendance, or offers a wider variety of music than the public concerts this summer in New York City's Central Park. The programs run from Memorial Day to mid-September, have so far drawn 400,000 people--including a record 80,000 at a single New York Philharmonic performance--who have heard jazz, band music, folk-rock, opera, orchestral music, and even a Dutch street organ huffing Strauss waltzes. None of this activity absolutely guarantees that the park will be forever immune to the fever of fear and violence that it has felt in other summers, but City Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving, with support from foundations, business firms and the municipal treasury, has taken a big step in making the park safe with the sounds of music--and good music at that.

The liveliest new sounds in the park blare out five nights a week from a skating rink, where such stars as Duke Ellington, Judy Collins and The Animals have sold out the 4,250 seats (at $1 each) so often that the producers have had to schedule double performances in 16 shows, are already planning another series next year with expanded seating. Another new attraction is the Manhattan Opera Company, whose English-language productions include an Aida that is set in the present-day South, with Ramfis as Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and Aida his Ne gro servant. Dance buffs will get their chance in two weeks when the park's Shakespeare troupe, now in its twelfth season, yields its stage to a nine-day festival of ballet, ethnic and modern dance. Hoving's hoopla has perked up the park's staid old standby programs too. When he staged the Goldman Band's opening as a Gay Nineties costume party with 5-c- beer and hot dogs, 35,000 people turned out, giving the band the biggest audience of its 49 seasons. Other orchestral fixtures in the park, catching a spillover interest from Philharmonic concerts, are getting crowds of up to three times larger than usual.

Sometimes the melange of music from competing camps in the park can be distracting. One recent performance by the Municipal Concerts Orchestra was so bombarded by the thumping, amplified rock 'n' roll of The Young Rascals near by that, for many listeners, Schubert's Unfinished became Schubert's Unheard. More often, however, musical textures from silk to denim mingle as harmoniously as their motley adherents, thousands of whom are experiencing for the first time the special pleasures of music against a backdrop of lakes, trees and the glittering towers surrounding the park. As Municipal Concerts Conductor Julius Grossman says, "The more sophisticated and the less sophisticated are coming in. It's becoming the thing to do."

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