By Ken Smith

Virgil Thomson once observed that every town in America had a five-and-dime and a student of Nadia Boulanger. He'd probably add a chamber-music society to that list today. Through chamber music, communities too small for an opera company or symphony orchestra can still support music at the highest level. At a time when funding cuts have threatened arts institutions of all stripes, chamber music has proven to be one of the most resilient.

This was not always the case. Thirty years ago, when the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center played its first concert, the idea of presenting a full season of chamber music was considered rather eccentric. "The perception," admits the Society's founding director Charles Wadsworth, "was of four old guys sitting around in tattered tailcoats playing string quartets in tempo allegro arthritico."

Wadsworth set out to change that. Approached by Lincoln Center's president, William Schuman, to make chamber music a permanent part of the new arts complex, the pianist assembled a core group of musicians devoted to collaborative performing of a wide range of repertory. With a new hall funded by philanthropist Alice Tully, his organization immediately captured the attention of New York's musical establishment.

For the first time, a chamber-music ensemble focused not just on quartets or trios, but on works for strings and winds in all possible combinations. The first roster consisted of only nine members, but Wadsworth never hesitated to invite such superstar guests as violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman, vocalists Hermann Prey and Shirley Verrett, and guitarist John Williams. Early seasons featured appearances not just at the Society's Lincoln Center home but at the highbrow Century Association and the trendy Paula Cooper Gallery. The Emerson String Quartet was in residence in the early '80s, and conductors Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas brought box-office clout to an extensive Haydn/Stravinsky Celebration in 1981.

The glitter soon attracted other presenters, both in New York and around the country.

"We were all on the same bandwagon," says Wadsworth. "We would get calls for advice from local chamber-music societies sprouting up all over the country with the same schematics as our own." But toward the end of Wadsworth's 20 years at the helm, the Chamber Music Society had started to become a victim of its own success. Concert attendance was falling, critics dubbed it the "Sight-reading Society of Lincoln Center," and the institution lost its luster amid the plethora of organizations created in its image.

A healthy commissioning program had been high on the Society's agenda from the beginning. Under Wadsworth, the three Bs might have referred equally to Barber, Berio, and Boulez. Under his successor, cellist Fred Sherry, advocacy for contemporary music-of the dreaded East Coast serial variety, in particular-hit an all-time high. This was not the shot in the arm the Society had hoped for, and when Sherry passed the torch to clarinetist David Shifrin in 1992, there was a lot of remedial work needed in audience development.

"Our strongest mission was to increase audience size," admits Shifrin. "But at the same time, we didn't want to pander, to just play the `Trout' Quintet every year. It was a matter of trust, and of balancing what people want to hear with what we want to play." By all accounts, the balancing act has paid off. Ticket sales have returned to the glory days of the '70s. This year's 30th-anniversary season has everything from the Society's perennial year-end Brandenburg concerto cycle to commissions by George Rochberg and Tobias Picker, from an all-Beethoven evening by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio and the Orion String Quartet to a rare performance of Messiaen's From the Canyons to the Stars featuring pianist Peter Serkin.

Programming under Shifrin is refreshingly collegial. "I feel I can ask them to learn music they don't know, and they have the right to ask me for opportunities to play what they want, with the people they want to work with." Which explains why last season opened with bassist Edgar Meyer and his bluegrass-infused collaborations with mandolinist Mike Marshall and banjo player Béla Fleck. Or how Serkin could talk a "chamber music" society into doing the Messiaen piece, which requires 44 players. Or how Rossini's Petite Messe Solonelle appeared a few seasons back, conducted by David Golub in a version for chorus, two pianos, and harmonium.

To support such programmatic flights of fancy, the Society has taken bold steps in audience development and education, largely through the efforts of composer Bruce Adolphe, who has run comprehensive adult classes in conjunction with the regular concert season since 1992. Adolphe has also developed three family series, ranging from musical skits with regular characters, to mini plays focusing on one major composer, to traditional concerts featuring the music of living composers. One of Adolphe's own pieces, Marita and Her Heart's Desire, performed by members of the Society, was released on Telarc in fall 1998.

Outside of New York, the Society's profile has greatly increased in terms of touring and recording. Touring, once handled by outside management, became an in-house priority under Shifrin, with the Society working to tailor programming more directly to the presenters' needs. The move was a financial triumph, boosting revenue from $100,000 in 1993 to $400,000 in 1994.

On the recording front, the Society began a relationship with Delos in the early '90s, but there are plans to bring operations in house as well. The Society is taking a cue from the New York Philharmonic's archival recordings, David Finckel and Wu Han's ArtistLed label, and the live recordings distributed by the Portland-based Chamber Music Northwest Festival, which Shifrin also runs.

"The Chamber Music Society didn't invent chamber music, but it did give it a home," says Shifrin. "We have to remind ourselves constantly what our mission is-the finest performers, playing the greatest repertory, with the most thorough preparation-and to identify the great canon of chamber music, reexamining it to see what might be overlooked, and expanding it by commissioning new works. The important thing is that we remain on the front line."