Another Revolution In Philadelphia?

Sorry for going AWOL these past several days. The last couple of months have been insanely busy for me, and I felt the need for a couple of days of decompression once I made it through the worst of my winter schedule. Having now achieved three consecutive good nights' sleep in a row (possibly a personal record,) I'm fully rejuvenated, and I'll be making up for lost time over the next week or so...

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This is the time of year that a lot of orchestras unveil their plans for the next season, and it's always interesting to see what other bands around the country are doing. (The Minnesota Orchestra actually trotted out the bulk of our '08-'09 schedule in late November, and we already have renewal materials and brochures in our subcribers' mailboxes, which tells me that our marketing staff is drinking way too much coffee. For those wondering when you'll be hearing something about next season's Inside the Classics concerts, you'll have to be patient a while longer. Look for an announcement in this space sometime in the first week of April. It'll be worth the wait, I promise.)

Ordinarily, these announcements don't contain a lot of surprises. One of the things people rely on orchestras for is consistency, and when you're trying to sell 2,500 tickets to every concert you play, you want to be fairly sure that at least a good chunk of your programming has mass appeal. (Remember that, since we play a new concert every week, we don't have time to wait for word of mouth to build the way long-running theatrical shows and even touring chamber music ensembles do.) So, while orchestras are always quite good at trumpeting any little innovative programming decision they may have made in the course of charting their season, the reality is that, most of the time, you can count on plenty of Beethoven and Brahms, plus a healthy smattering of whatever local specialty audiences in a given city have come to expect and enjoy (around here, that would be Dvorak.)

But in Philadelphia, where the orchestra is notoriously cautious and its audience maddeningly conservative in its musical tastes, something big seems to be afoot in '08-'09. Philadelphia Inquirer critic Peter Dobrin thinks so, anyway:

The orchestra has researched its audience as part of a larger study by nonprofit consultants WolfBrown, and has responded by crafting "collections" - series of concerts aimed at constituencies with distinct tastes and levels of expertise. The "masterworks" collection, for instance, focuses on warhorses - a curiously under-deployed ambassador for introducing novices to classical music.

If you're an expert, you can assemble a package of concerts that are exactly like the ones you've been hearing since Aunt Bippy took you backstage to meet Stokowski. But other concerts will use projection screens to show close-ups of playing musicians. Some will be followed by parties, or feature talking on stage.

To give you some idea of the scale of change, consider the fact that only half the orchestra's presentations next season will follow the traditional concert format. That's practically a revolution.

Well, I don't know if I'd go quite that far (and also: Aunt Bippy? really?), but it is a major step, and if you'd read me those three paragraphs and then asked me to name the orchestra that was being written about, it would have been a very long time before I got around to guessing Philly. I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, attended dozens of Philadelphia Orchestra concerts, and studied violin and viola with three of that band's most prominent musicians, so it's an ensemble I know about as well as an outsider can. And believe me when I tell you that this is not a city, or an orchestra, that has a reputation for embracing change. Philly is all about history, and pedigree, and intense pride in its own hyper-aggressive individuality, and the best way to get a Philadelphian riled up (other than, y'know, wearing a Mets jersey while ordering your cheesesteak at Pat's) is to suggest that something about the city could maybe, possibly, be better than it already is.

The audiences at Philadelphia Orchestra concerts are usually a reflection of that same civic attitude (or atty-tood, as they would say south of Spring Garden Street.) They tend to be considerably older and less musically adventurous than the crowds we see at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, and while they do turn out in reliable numbers for the orchestra's concerts (especially since the beautiful and lavish Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts opened on South Broad Street several years ago,) this probably has much to do with the fact that Philadelphia is the fifth-largest city in the US, with a population of 1.5 million just within the city limits, and millions more in the surrounding suburbs. (In other words, while the Philadelphians only need 0.04% of their metro population to buy a ticket on a given night in order to fill their hall, we in Minneapolis need 0.08% of our metro population to show up to fill ours, which seats roughly the same number of people.)

Attending a Philadelphia Orchestra concert has always felt to me like a very formal experience, as well. A far higher percentage of Philly audiences dress up for concerts than we see here in Minnesota, and there is definitely a distinct whiff of old money in the room. (We have old money here, too, of course, but it tends to be - how can I put this? - less ostentatious.) And while the audience at the Kimmel Center can be quite effusive at times, I've never heard the kind of roaring, cheering applause that we regularly get on Saturday nights in Minneapolis, especially if the repertoire on the program is anything composed later than 1935. (One friend of mine from Philly loves to tell the story of overhearing an elderly patron complaining at intermission about "all this new music they're playing nowadays... this Mahler, I don't know...")

So why, given all this, would the venerable Philadelphia Orchestra be making such (comparatively) radical changes to its programming? Obviously, I don't know for sure, but my guess would be that the orchestra feels that, despite the nearly full houses it plays to, it could be reaching a much broader swath of the public if only it were a bit more welcoming to those who didn't necessarily grow up attending concerts. It's hardly blowing the doors off the industry with any of its new innovations (although I'm guessing that the video screens are going to come in for some seriously withering glances from some of the old guard,) but some of their ideas will likely serve as models for orchestras across the country. We're all constantly looking for ways to reinvigorate our programming and bring new audience members into the fold, even as we try desperately to hang onto the hardcore fans we already have.

It's a delicate balancing act, and more so in Philadelphia than it would be in a lot of other cities. But every fan of orchestral music ought to be rooting for success in Philly next season, partly because if we know new ideas work there, we can be reasonably sure that they'll work anywhere; but mainly because the cost of failure could be another decade of cowardly turtling and status quo strategizing across the entire industry.