The Late Starters Orchestra by Ari L. Goldman

school and into college. “When I was nineteen, I was admitted to medical school and I put my violin away and never touched it again for fifty years,” he said. Medicine became his life. He finished medical school and opened what he described as a thriving family practice in his home state.
    He worked out of his home office, later out of a private doctor’s office, and even later out of a clinic. He told me that he treated several generations in some families. “Grandparents, parents, children. They just kept coming. And then one day, I closed my practice. I went home, found my old violin in the attic and picked it up again,” he said. “And I haven’t put it down since.”
    Milt said he had “to learn it all over again,” but that it came back, slowly, step by step. “Music is my life now. After retirement, there is nothing else.”
    He and his wife sold their New Jersey home and moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in part because they wanted to be near Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. One of their favorite activities is attending the Philharmonic’s “open rehearsals,” where, for less than twenty dollars, you can hear great music and see how it is shaped by the conductor and the musicians. The open rehearsals begin at 9:45 in the morning. “You get to go for a fraction of the price of what people pay to go to the same concert in the evening,” Milt said. “And I love to watch how the sausage is made.”
    I had not heard of the Philharmonic’s open rehearsals in decades and was surprised that they still existed. I remember going a few times in college. I called Richard Wandel, an archivist for the Philharmonic, who told me that these musical sessions were as old as the orchestra itself, which is pretty old since the New York Philharmonic, the oldest standing orchestra in the United States, played its first season well before the Civil War. Open rehearsals began in 1842 under the very first musical director, Ureli Corelli Hill. The sessions were at first intended to give the orchestra a chance to prepare before a live audience without the pressure of a formal performance. With time, they also became a way to involve people who otherwise might not attend the more expensive official programs.
    For Milt, the open rehearsals are also a way to involve his wife, who is not a musician. Milt inspired me to check them out as well. On the winter morning I attended, the audience was made up of mostly older, retired folks. Who else can take off a morning for music, except perhaps for a professor, like me, or some students? The audience filled only about half the seats in the orchestra and the balconies were pretty much empty. I had paid $18 for my seat, a seat that would cost $115 if I had decided to go to the same program that evening.
    The members of the Philharmonic, who play their concerts in formal wear, came straggling in as though they had just climbed out of bed, casually dressed in jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers. I was thinking that my fellow LSO musicians come better dressed. There wasn’t a tie or jacket on stage. I was trying to imagine Mr. J trundling onto the stage with his cello for an open rehearsal when he was in the Philharmonic in the 1950s. Given his penchant for eccentric dress, he would have shown up in a paisley shirt and plaid pants. And he would have fit right in.
    Works by Mozart, Mahler, and a contemporary composer named Thomas Adès were on the program. No one on stage budged when Alan Gilbert, the Philharmonic’s youthful music director, appeared—at a proper performance all the musicians would stand—but the audience gave Gilbert a warm round of applause. Gilbert took a short bow and then acted as if we in the audience weren’t there. He stopped the orchestra when he felt it necessary and had them repeat passages that he was unhappy with. Sometimes he’d sing a few measures out loud to