The St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble launched its first concert series on October 26, 1974 at Greenwich Village’s Church of St. Luke in the Fields with the music of Handel, Mozart, and Telemann along with the world premiere of a one-act opera by Robert Baksa.

Sown right in that first concert, though, were the seeds of the orchestra today—“fluency in all styles,” as the orchestra’s President and Executive Director James Roe explains, along with the core values of collaborative music making. “The key to the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble becoming Orchestra of St. Luke’s is in that word chamber,” he adds. “Even as an orchestra, eyes are darting around the stage, people are cuing each other. The players are already doing a lot of the work so the conductor can immediately start at a higher level.”

Few orchestras, in fact, can claim such a range of collaborations around town, spanning the New York premiere (and subsequent recording) of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, an ongoing partnership with the Paul Taylor Dance Company at Lincoln Center’s David Koch Theater, and a program with the metal band Metallica at Madison Square Garden. They even have their own music production venue, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, which opened in 2011. 

For Roe, however, the orchestra’s major collaborator is clearly Carnegie Hall, which first provided the platform 40 years ago for the expanded ensemble (already established as the Caramoor Festival Orchestra) to perform larger repertoire under the St. Luke’s banner. “The pivotal moment for us and Carnegie Hall was the Handel Opera Festival in 1984 with Marilyn Horne, which showcased some truly virtuoso baroque playing,” Roe says. “Forty years later, the full orchestra has played at Carnegie Hall more than 425 times."

The orchestra’s reputation as Carnegie Hall’s house band becomes clearer once you do the math. OSL is the only organization to have a series in all three of the Hall’s concert spaces, with a regular orchestral series in Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, a chamber music series in Weill Recital Hall, and an annual Bach festival in Zankel Hall that was launched in 2019—each series offering four concerts this season.

“In any given year, we could play in up to 20 venues,” says Roe. “We play at Caramoor in the summer, and we are the orchestra for Paul Taylor Dance’s annual season at Lincoln Center—plus we have partnerships in all five boroughs. But when our players walk onstage at Carnegie Hall, they feel at home. I think it brings out a special kind of performance because they’re there so often and in so many different guises."

First of all, there’s the sheer joy of playing in the space itself. “Entering Carnegie Hall, you immediately realize this space was built for a collective embrace of beauty both visually and acoustically,” Roe says. “On stage, you see the tiers on each side of the balcony slope gently toward the stage like embracing arms. And really, it’s impossible to walk onstage and not want to elevate your playing to the level of the venue, to have some spiritual communication with the great figures who’ve been on that stage in the past 133 years."

But beyond that, he believes, the Carnegie Hall affiliation also taps into the roots of the collaborative spirit of St. Luke’s. “All our decisions are made within the context of being programmed alongside the world’s greatest orchestras—to express our own musical strengths within the whole Carnegie Hall season. So St. Luke’s brings its best every time, whether it’s Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony or J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Those are the kind of programs we’re uniquely in a position to do.”

Clive Gillinson, Carnegie Hall’s executive and artistic director, agrees. “Orchestra of St. Luke’s has been a very special partner to Carnegie Hall for four decades, and our relationship has blossomed even further in recent years with many memorable collaborations. The orchestra’s artistic versatility has led to so many important musical events over the years that are now woven into the history of the Hall.”

In December—and in conjunction with Carnegie Hall’s season-long Nuestros sonidos festival in celebration of Latin culture in the United States—the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble performed an evening of works by Astor Piazzolla. “One of Paul Taylor’s great dances is Piazzolla Caldera, which they historically danced to a recording,” Roe says. “But he asked us to perform the music of Piazzolla live. It worked so well we decided to bring it to Carnegie Hall for the festival.”

In January, there is also a performance of Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony, incorporating text by the late Samuel Pisar to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, conducted by James Conlon. 

Two other programs anchoring OSL’s orchestral offerings this season are the New York debut of conductor Raphaël Pichon in the US premiere of Mein Traum (My Dream), featuring unfinished works by Schubert (“the symphony as well as some unfinished stage works,” Roe says), as well as the final concert of outgoing Principal Conductor Bernard Labadie, who will lead the orchestra and La Chapelle de Québec in the St. John Passion. “Maestro Labadie put together a major cycle of Bach choral works, and since the St. John Passion is Bach’s most operatic piece, it seems the perfect culmination of our seven-year relationship.”

OSL has long been known as New York’s “hometown band”— really, what other orchestra has performed both on Saturday Night Live (with Vanessa Williams and Luciano Pavarotti in 1988) and at the World Trade Center site just weeks after 9/11 (with Renée Fleming and Andrea Bocelli)—but nothing claims local legitimacy like putting down real estate. The opening of the DiMenna Center in 2011 was a turning point not just for the orchestra, Roe maintains, but also for New York’s musical life.

The real advantage of owning its own space became abundantly clear during the pandemic, when major performance venues remained shuttered. “Music production was allowed by the state of New York early on,” Roe recalls, “so we immediately bought cameras and installed them downstairs.” After moving the Bach festival online in spring 2020, OSL later launched its first livestreamed series that fall with pianist Jeremy Denk and host David Hyde Pierce. “We made nearly 100 independent videos for other performers during the pandemic, including Midori, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Audra McDonald,” says Roe. “We also managed to stream our education programs directly into schools.”

OSL’s education initiatives also include its 130-member Youth Orchestra of St. Luke’s—the only youth orchestra under the umbrella of a professional ensemble in New York City—and its Free School Concert series that was founded in 1976.

Constant renewal is at the heart of OSL’s programming, whether in repertoire (with more than 80 new works to be commissioned and premiered through the orchestra’s annual DeGaetano Composition Institute), on the podium, or directly in its musical ranks, where the orchestra is constantly looking for new, like-minded musicians.

“That original group of players—and we have two members still with us from that first season—were definitely New Yorkers, with a New York entrepreneurial spirit,” says Roe. “This is an organization that could only exist and have the success we’ve had in New York.”