Omus Hirshbein, longtime director of performing arts at the 92nd Street Y in New York City who also worked at the National Endowment for the Arts and at the New York concert series Free for All, has died. In a Tuesday (1/3) obituary for Opera News, Brian Kellow writes, “Omus, who died in New York City on December 31, at age 77, following a painful struggle with Alzheimer’s, represented a long-gone era in classical music. He was a brilliant, quixotic, optimistic man who maintained a remarkably pure and simple programming philosophy—that audiences deserved the best possible quality in music, and that it was his job to see that they got it…. Omus’s own life in music had begun as a pianist. He came from a highly cultured family: his father, Peretz Hirshbein, was a leading Yiddish playwright, author of the pastoral classic Green Fields, and his mother, Esther Shumiatcher Hirshbein, was a noted poet…. Omus’s performing career did not take shape, but in 1964, he went to work at the Hunter College Concert Bureau, where he presented a stunning array of concert artists, including Janet Baker, Régine Crespin, Eileen Farrell, Margaret Price, Victoria de los Angeles, Alicia de Larrocha and Peter Pears, who sang a recital accompanied by Benjamin Britten. In 1974, Omus moved to the [92nd Street] Y and set about breathing life into a music program that had been all but given up for dead….” Hirshbein left the 92nd Street Y in 1994 to “head up the music division at the National Endowment for the Arts. His last major project was Free for All, a series of free public concerts he produced with Jacqueline Taylor at Town Hall. This was dear to his heart, since he believed high ticket prices had severely diminished New York’s concert audience.”
Posted January 5, 2012
