Word: abyssinians
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There were 2,000 of them, laughing and waving their programs in the humid evening air. They overflowed from the pews onto folding chairs; they stood on windowsills, squeezed into doorways and gathered in the street outside. Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church had not seen such a festive crowd since the days when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. sounded forth from the pulpit. Last week the pulpit had given way to a specially built wooden stage, and what sounded forth was the New York Philharmonic...
...long championed the idea of special programming for minority audiences. During his years as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he took the orchestra out of the concert hall to such locations as the all-black Trinity Baptist Church and the federal prison on Terminal Island. The Abyssinian Church, a social and cultural landmark of Harlem, seemed an appropriate starting point for a similar effort in New York. The Philharmonic's director of educational activities, Leon Thompson, certainly approved: he also happens to be music director at the church...
Soprano Leontyne Price, who was married at the Abyssinian in 1952, got standing ovations before, between and after her splendid performances of Pace, pace from Verdi's La Forza del Destino and He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. Price knew her audience, and knew it was not to be patronized. Announcing her encore, Vissi d'arte from Puccini's Tosca, she was engulfed by cheers of recognition. The program then moved from Tosca to toe-tapping, as Gospel Superstar Betty Perkins swept onstage and picked up a microphone. The Philharmonic percussion section laid...
...tickets. Despite the financial obstacles, Mehta is eager to go into other neighborhoods, especially in the city's large Puerto Rican community. "One thing we know," he says. "We are going back to Harlem next year, that's for sure." As one enthusiast shouted from the Abyssinian balcony after the Hallelujah Chorus...
Born in Manhattan in 1904, Fats grew up in Harlem, where his father was a pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the establishment that Adam Clayton Powell Jr. later made famous. He started playing the harmonium when he was six, and his proud father took him to Carnegie Hall to hear Paderewski, hoping that Fats would become a classical pianist. Waller had other ideas, however, and when he was in his teens, he fell under the tutelage of Willie ("the Lion...