Fighting The Paradigm (Contest Alert!)

Our program this coming week is what a lot of people might call "comfort food" - a good old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes orchestra program featuring a flashy overture, a well-worn concerto, and a proven audience-pleaser of a symphony. Others, of course, might call such a program boring and unimaginative, and while I wouldn't agree in this particular case (simply because of the quality of all of the works on the program,) it brings up a much larger issue that orchestra programmers grapple with every year.

I'm usually the first to roll my eyes at yet another overture-concerto-intermission-symphony program, mainly because I just think there are so many better options available in 2009. And no, they don't all have to include some thorny world premiere that half the audience hates. Look at last week - we played the warhorse to end all warhorses, but spent the first half on a collection of almost-forgotten early-20th century Russian works, each of which was guaranteed to take the audience to a different place and time. Was it the world's most daring program? Certainly not. But it was damned effective, I thought.

By major orchestra standards, we actually don't do a whole lot of overture-concerto-intermission-symphony (hereafter referred to as OCIS) programs these days, mainly because of Osmo's apparent predilection for tone poems and ballet scores. That's not to say that our week-to-week programming is particularly daring (especially compared with the leading progressive orchestras like the LA Phil,) but it does mean that you're a lot more likely to hear ten minutes of rolling, undulating Nielsen as a curtain-raiser on our stage than you are to hear The Marriage of Figaro or The Barber of Seville.

Still, all the research I've ever seen indicates that audiences pick the concerts they attend based on two things: repertoire and soloists. (Conductors have an impact, especially if the orchestra has a popular music director, but for the most part, audience members aren't familiar enough with the conducting world to really have an opinion one way or another on most guest conductors.) And since the word "soloist" implies "concerto," you're simply going to be locked into 1/3 of the OCIS paradigm for a lot of the weeks of your season.

And since most concertos aren't long enough to fill out an entire half of a program on their own, you need another shorter work to play, and there's your overture, or some facsimile thereof. (This is where a lot of orchestras, ours included, try to buck the OCIS model by picking a curtain-raiser by a living composer or even commissioning an entire new work. But this practice is now so widespread that composers have begun to resent always being asked to write little 10-12 minute miniatures, rather than full-length orchestral works.)

And honestly, audiences just seem to expect a big, climactic piece after intermission, so whether you're playing an actual symphony, a Strauss tone poem, or a Stravinsky ballet, you've just pretty much committed to boring old OCIS. And when you've got 20-30 weeks a year of traditional orchestral concerts to program, it gets awfully difficult to fight your way out of the paradigm.

Throw in the additional facts that a) a lot of fairly imaginative programming ideas are going to get you into hot water with your musicians (Exhibit A: ask 100 orchestra musicians what they think about playing film scores instead of Beethoven,) and b) truly daring programming (like what Esa-Pekka Salonen did in Los Angeles for much of the last two decades) is likely to scare off a good chunk of your crowd unless you're fortunate enough to be located in a gigantic metropolis with an industrial-strength hype machine, and you've got a long uphill climb to escape the malaise of OCIS. (And that's before we even begin to get into regional considerations like the fact that Minnesota audiences demonstrably hate Mahler, or that Philadelphia's concertgoers still consider Bartok avant-garde.)

Still, I believe firmly that OCIS is the past, not the future, and that the sooner we make it the exception rather than the rule, the sooner we'll discover our path to future success as an industry. So here's what I want to do. We're going to have a little contest down in the comments: I want you to come up with five separate concert programs (preferably without an overarching theme,) no more than one of which adheres to the strict OCIS model. And I don't just want these to be your personal dream programs, either - put yourself in the shoes of a music director, and take into account all of the roadblocks and conundrums I've laid out above. Give me five programs that we ought to be able to sell tickets to, but that point the way forward for orchestras in the 21st century.

If we get enough entries (I'm gonna say five or more, and one entry per person, please,) we'll make this a real contest, and I'll come up with an appropriate prize for the entry Sarah and I like best. Also, I'll pass along every reasonably good entry we recieve to Osmo and the rest of our programming braintrust, so you might even wind up having an impact on our future programs!

Sound good? Okay - get to work...

--------------------------------

Late addendum: Wow, less than 24 hours in, and the ideas are rolling in! This is now officially a contest with prizes - the winner, as chosen by Sarah and myself, will have his/her choice of either four prime seats to a Minnesota Orchestra concert of his/her choice (anything in the 2009-10 season,) or the newly released complete box set of all nine Beethoven symphonies recorded by Osmo and the orchestra in digital SACD quality. We'll even get Osmo to autograph the set before we send it off. I figure having a choice of prizes should cover us even if the winner is an out-of-towner.

Now that we have prizes, we need a cutoff for submissions. So let's say get your ideas in by this Friday, October 16, and Sarah and I will pick a winner over the weekend...