After Hours: Thursday Edition

Okay, Thursday crowd, your turn to put in your two cents on this week's ItC concerts. We covered an awful lot of ground in the first half of the program, and also created a mashed-up, multi-composer performance for the second half, so tell us whether those elements worked for you, or just seemed overwhelming. (We're also always anxious for feedback on things like the lighting changes that we used to highlight the changing of seasons on the second half...)

If you're interested in reading and hearing more about all the music we featured in the concert, check out our extensive Cutting Room Floor post, which has everything we didn't have time to get into from the stage, including a brilliant performance of Piazzolla, and a video interview with composer Angel Lam.

As always, thanks so much for your continued support of this series. We set an all-time attendance record for the Casual Classics/Inside the Classics franchise this season, and exceeded every goal we set, thanks to all of you in the audience. We're making the big jump to weekends next season, reprising one of our most popular early ItC programs in November, and then featuring some of the greatest repertoire ever written for a symphony orchestra beginning in January 2011. So come on back, and we'll see you next fall!

After Hours: Wednesday Edition

If you were with us at Orchestra Hall on Wednesday evening, here's your chance to tell us what you thought of the concert. We covered an awful lot of ground in the first half of the program, and also created a mashed-up, multi-composer performance for the second half, so tell us whether those elements worked for you, or just seemed overwhelming. (We're also always anxious for feedback on things like the lighting changes that we used to highlight the changing of seasons on the second half...)

If you're interested in reading and hearing more about all the music we featured in the concert, check out our extensive Cutting Room Floor post, which has everything we didn't have time to get into from the stage, including a brilliant performance of Piazzolla, and a video interview with composer Angel Lam.

As always, thanks so much for your continued support of this series. We set an all-time attendance record for the Casual Classics/Inside the Classics franchise this season, and exceeded every goal we set, thanks to all of you in the audience. We're making the big jump to weekends next season, reprising one of our most popular early ItC programs in November, and then featuring some of the greatest repertoire ever written for a symphony orchestra beginning in January 2011. So come on back, and we'll see you next fall!

If You Can Make It There...

One of the great things about being a musician in the internet age is the constant two-way connection you can make with your audience. Where professional critics once stood alone in assessing the quality or relevance of a performance, now anyone with a keyboard and five minutes to set up a blog can have his/her say. There are downsides to this, as everyone knows, but in a relative niche market like classical music, the benefits far outweigh the annoyances.

On a related note, our orchestra has been in New York this week, where we played our annual Carnegie Hall concert on Monday night, pairing Michael Steinberg's arrangement of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge with Sibelius's monumental Kullervo. (And of course, a rousing encore of Finlandia for good measure.) To be honest, I wasn't sure what the New Yorkers would make of this program and the way we play it. These are two works in which Osmo demands a lot of very aggressive, even brutal playing, and while many people consider that kind of edge-of-your-seat music propulsive and exciting, those raised on the deliberate, contemplative style of conductors like Karajan or Maazel might sometimes find our approach jarring.

But so far, every word I've seen written about the Carnegie Hall concert has been a rave, and it's been fun, as always, to discover what new classical music blogs have popped up in New York since I last checked in. Here are some links to the write-ups I've found so far - I'll add more to this post as they pop up. (And yes, I'll include any negative reviews as well, but so far, there don't seem to be any, which is a nice feeling...)

Late Addendum, March 15: The estimable Alex Ross of The New Yorker has checked in with one of the best reviews our orchestra has ever received. Coming from Ross, who I respect like virtually no other writer working today, this means a great deal. The link is at the bottom of the list...

The New York Times: "Mr. Vanska has led the Minnesota Orchestra to impressive heights since becoming its music director in 2003, and the ensemble sounded fantastic on Monday. From the sweeping opening melody of the Introduction, the playing was detailed and intensely expressive, carrying the listener along..."

Musical America: "The truly awesome perfection of ensemble was jaw-dropping... To hear the five string bodies converse fortissimo with such unanimity and split-second force was jaw-dropping, but the pianissimos—a Vänskä speciality—arrested the listener’s attention no less. More than once I exclaimed to myself, 'My god!'"

ConcertoNet: "The real hero, though was Osmo Vänskä, a conductor who never shirks from “becoming” the dynamics he is conducting. A player told me his baton technique is faultless. But Mr. Vänskä’s essence is that his excitement–for the painfully enigmatic Beethoven and the instinctually emotive Sibelius–was expressively infectious."

Classics Today: "There's no denying the fact that Vänskä, a superb Beethoven conductor generally, has the Minnesota strings in top form. They tore into this awkward piece like a pack of happily unanimous demons."

The Classical Source: "Vänskä led a performance of the choral version of Sibelius's “Finlandia” that was breathtaking, concluding what was easily the finest concert I've heard so far this season."

The New Yorker: "It was the saddest, loveliest thing I have heard in a long time. For the duration of the evening of March 1st, the Minnesota Orchestra sounded, to my ears, like the greatest orchestra in the world."

After Hours: Thursday Edition

Your turn, Thursday audience! Chime in down in the comments to tell us what you thought of tonight's performance, and what you'd like to hear more or less of at future concerts. As always, your feedback helps us shape future seasons of the series - in fact, these Debussy concerts were designed and written to address comments we'd gotten from past shows requesting more music and information that places the featured work(s) in context, and fewer first-half examples that would be repeated on the second half. Let us know if we hit the mark on that one.

As always, thanks so much for your attendance, and your enthusiasm. It's truly a pleasure to be on stage in front of a crowd that's really engaged and excited about what you're doing, and y'all never disappoint. I hope we'll see you all again six weeks from now, when we wind up our ItC season with a mix-'n-match program of music all about the seasons...

(P.S. If you'd like more information on some of the side topics we covered during the first half of the show, check out our Cutting Room Floor post just below Wednesday's After Hours post...)

After Hours: Wednesday Edition

If you were with us at Orchestra Hall tonight for the first of our Inside the Classics concerts featuring music of Debussy, here's the place for you to let us know what you thought of the show! We covered an awful lot of ground in the first half (largely in response to feedback we've gotten at previous concerts requesting more contextual music and information, and a little less of the featured piece,) so tell us whether that approach worked for you, or whether it just made your head spin after a while. Also, we're always interested in hearing your reaction to the video component of the performance - it's not something we do very often, but we hope it made it easier for you to follow all the twists and turns of Debussy's wildly complex music!

Anyway, thanks to everyone who showed up - now have at that Comment button...

(P.S. If you'd like more information on some of the side topics we covered during the first half of the show, check out our Cutting Room Floor post just below this one...)

Name Recognition

As I've mentioned before, a lot of the time between Inside the Classics concerts is spent gathering and analyzing data from people who attend, or are thinking about attending, our series. From the beginning, ItC was conceived to be something of an incubator for new orchestral ideas, and it does us very little good to be throwing new concepts at the wall unless we have a way of measuring which ones are sticking. Thus all the research, and the pleas for feedback, and our virtual obsession with who is coming to our concerts and why.

To that end, we're currently working with a great Chicago-based company that specializes in such research and has been running polls and focus groups for us to measure the effectiveness not only of what we do on stage, but also the various posters, flyers, ads, and mailings we put out to try to generate interest. It's always fascinating to read the diversity of opinion that gets offered up in these situations - in a room of 7 or 8 people, you're likely to have 9 or 10 opinions. (This is why we use professionals to analyze it all - they've seen it all a thousand times before, and they're expert at picking out and explaining the trends that are hiding in the mass of data.)

This past week, we had a big meeting to go over the latest focus group data, and as usual, my favorite part of the morning wasn't so much reading about the larger trends that we'll actually look at as we form our future concert seasons, but the individual comments and quips from audience members. For instance, it's abundantly clear from all the research we do that Sarah's name and identity are firmly lodged in the mind of everyone who's ever seen an Inside the Classics show. When it comes to me, however...

...not so much. It could be a function of years of pre-conditioning of audience members to make the conductor the primary focus of their attention, or it could be that I actually say Sarah's name several times over the course of any given ItC show, whereas mine might come up only once. It could even be (gasp!) that Sarah is simply a more memorable onstage presence than some dorky violist with a microphone.

But whatever the reason, the research is clear that, while people tend to be very complimentary of the role I play in our concerts, and say very nice things about the onstage chemistry between Sarah and me, they seem to have a very hard time remembering my name. Which doesn't actually bother me in the least - I'd much rather they remember the music they heard, or the fact that they want to be sure to return the next time Sarah's conducting - but it has led to my acquiring some interesting nicknames among the ItC planning team.

One woman in the most recent round of audience research referred to me as "The Other Fellow." Another went with "the character." Yet another said, "I was very intrigued when a viola player got up... because they don't get to speak very much!" (This person has clearly never seen the Minnesota Orchestra viola section in rehearsal.) And my favorite: one gentleman, after struggling to remember my name mid-sentence, finally went with "Viola Boy." (This last one so delighted our Marketing VP that she immediately dashed off an e-mail to inform me of my new nickname.)

As I say, I could actually care less whether anyone remembers my name, so long as they remember that they liked the show. And I have to admit, I've started looking forward to reading whatever new noms de spectateurs I'm graced with when new research data arrives. Not sure anyone's gonna top Viola Boy, though. I might need a superhero costume to go with that one...

Image borrowed from the awesome ViolaMan.net...

Wine, Music & Snobbery

If you live in the Twin Cities, and have any interest at all in good food and the restaurants that serve it, you probably don't need me to tell you who Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is, or that she has a new book out which purports to make sense of the oh-so-highfalutin' world of wine. She's been all over the local airwaves in the days since the book hit stores, which has been an interesting thing to see and hear, since it turns out that she speaks very differently than she writes. (Isn't it always interesting when that's the case? Because I think that most of us tend to write in much the same style that we speak in. I certainly do.)

Anyway, I bring Dara up because she's also a blogger, and she had an interesting post up shortly after her media blitz began, mentioning that not everyone seemed to be happy with her take on wine and how to buy/rate/enjoy it. She didn't really mince any words in response:

"One of my greatest anxieties in writing my book was that I’d be a magnet for what I think of as the Gotcha-Squad of Wine Weenies. Who are wine weenies? They’re those baseball-stat-nerd-like people intent on making wine as confusing and elite as possible, because it makes them feel good...

"I feel I should just get this out on the table: Look Wine Weenies, you and I are not going to be friends. You want to be right, and I want to help the people you went to high school with have less stress in their lives when they bring wine to your house. The battle is on!"

Now, that's all somewhat tongue in cheek, of course, but it did get me thinking about the way I tend to react on the occasion that Sarah and I hear from someone who attended an Inside the Classics concert and came away positively outraged by everything they saw and heard. These aren't people who disliked one element of the show, or who thought I talked too fast, or that Sarah's theory explanations were boring, and just wanted to let us know since we asked for feedback. They aren't even people who attended a show, decided it just wasn't their thing and shot us a note saying so.

No, these are people just barely containing a boiling cauldron of rage brought on by our concert format, people who believe that on the rare occasion that anyone must speak from the stage at an orchestra concert, that speech must be couched in the gravest possible language, imply nothing but the utmost respect for every note on every page of every piece on the program, and generally impart to the audience just how serious and important classical music is.

We hear from at least one of these people after nearly every ItC concert we do. Usually, they're Orchestra Hall regulars who have been coming to traditional concerts forever, have never heard of Inside the Classics, and bought the ticket accidentally because they like the piece we were featuring and didn't bother to read anything else in the brochure/ad they were looking at. And the way I've always reacted up to this point has been to be as apologetic as possible for having wasted the person's evening, to acknowledge the obvious truth that ItC shows aren't for everyone, and if necessary, to point out how few of them we do in a given season compared with all the concerts in which neither Sarah nor I says a word.

But Dara's got me thinking. Maybe what we really need isn't apologies, but pushback. We could start handing out manifestos in the lobby before every ItC concert that begin, "Look, Concert Weenies, you and we aren't going to be friends..."

Eh, maybe not. Our PR staff probably wouldn't be big fans of that approach. But the irony in both the complaints we get and the flak Dara's taking over her tear-down-the-ivory-wine-cellar approach to grape juice is that the supposed offenders are actually big fans of the traditions they're accused of sullying. Sarah and I both love traditional orchestra concerts. Dara loves great wine. What we don't love is the idea that, if you haven't spent half your life reading extensive treatises on music or wine, you aren't worthy or capable of truly appreciating the experience.

I'm actually one of those baseball stat nerds that Dara mentioned. I toss around terms like OPS, VORP, and Win Share like they mean something (which they do, actually) and I get very exercised whenever I hear a broadcaster refer to Nick Punto as "scrappy," which is stat-geek for "not very good at baseball." This is how I choose to enjoy the National Pasttime. I get a lot out of it, and objectively, my obsession with the numbers means that I probably know more about the analytics of the game than most other people at the ballpark. But it would never occur to me to think that this somehow makes me a better baseball fan than the guy who's just trying to enjoy a day game with his kid and thinks Nick Punto sets a terrific example by always giving 100%.

Basically, there's nothing wrong with being an expert until you start looking down on everyone who isn't and assuming that the only reason they're not is because they're too dumb to think up to your level. And it's a shame how many people still want to put classical music (and wine) up on that pedestal...

Anna Russell 23, Pedestals 0

Why We Ask

Because the Inside the Classics series is meant to be something of an incubator for new ideas, we tend to do an awful lot of audience research, and we spend a lot of time discussing things like how to attract newbies to Orchestra Hall, how to be responsive to audience concerns without completely turning the series over to the tyranny of public opinion, and how to balance the needs of one concertgoing demographic against another.

Orchestras (or at least, the staff and managers who run the off-stage part of the operation) have these discussions all the time, but as a musician, it's been a new experience for me to be involved in that side of the business. At first, I found it somewhat off-putting, not because of the occasional negative comments I had to read about what Sarah and I were doing, but because I just didn't understand the point of constantly asking audience members about every little aspect of the concertgoing experience, when all we really needed to know (or so I thought) was whether they'd had a good enough time to buy a ticket to the next show.

What I was missing, of course, was that, despite the fact that symphony orchestras are the ocean liners of the arts world (massive, unwieldy, and glacially slow at changing direction,) you can make a big difference in the quality of experience you give your customers without making massive, systemic changes. Little improvements can have a big impact, but only if you know which little improvements people want. And you won't know if you don't ask.

Still, it can be difficult to parse the data we get when we do ask. For instance, every time we do an ItC concert, we always get a few comments that go beyond simple dissatisfaction and border on quivering rage at the talk/play format of the concerts, or the purposefully casual tone we've cultivated for the first half. And while those commenters are entitled to their point of view, there's really not a lot that we can do for people who just hated everything about the experience, other than to point out that the Minnesota Orchestra plays close to 200 concerts every year during which I don't say a word. (I'll admit, I find it a little bit funny that some people manage to get so worked up about a series that takes up approximately 3% of our annual concert schedule.)

Other times, we'll get comments about aspects of the experience that we literally have no control over. Probably the most frequent one of these is people who find parking in downtown Minneapolis to be inconvenient and expensive. Since we don't own, operate, or control any parking ramps, and the city of Minneapolis doesn't care about our opinion on such things, all we can really do is sympathize, and point out that certain concert subscription packages come with parking vouchers. (And actually, I'll toss in an extra tip: the underground lot at the Hilton hotel on 11th Street, right across from Orchestra Hall, will run you about half the cost of all the city-owned lots during evening hours...)

But even if we have to wade through a raft of comments that aren't terribly helpful to us in planning the next concert, we usually happen upon quite a few that are. And from my perspective, individual comments tell me less than the trends that emerge across all our audience feedback. For instance, every time I interview a member of the orchestra on stage during an ItC show, a bunch of people tell us it was their favorite part of the evening, which is why you're seeing it more often now than you did in our first season.

And when a whole lot of you told us after season one that you wanted more contextual music and less of the featured work on the first half, we made a point of trying to do that. (Though judging by some of the comments we got last weekend, we're still not quite nailing that balance - rest assured, we'll keep working on it.)

All of which is to say, thanks for allowing us to pick your brains after all our concerts, and for understanding that we can't possibly respond to every suggestion we get. (Quite frankly, a lot of your opinions cancel each other out.) The constant tweaking and adjusting that we do in this series is one of the really fun parts of putting it together every year, and we hope that it keeps the experience fresh for you as well.

After Hours: Friday Edition

Well, now. Two shows and one abjectly terrifying live radio broadcast in the books, and here we are at After Hours. Your turn, Friday crowd: whether you attended tonight's concert at Orchestra Hall, or listened in on Minnesota Public Radio, let us hear your reaction down in the comments. (One caveat for you radio listeners - please let us know that you heard the show on MPR rather than in person, just to help us gauge how we did at adapting what is normally a highly visual concert experience for radio.)

We really have been blown away by how strong the support for this series has been, especially this year, when money is tight everywhere and we're all looking for ways to cut back on spending. So whatever you thought of our take on Beethoven, thanks for being a part of it, and I hope we'll see you all back at Orchestra Hall in January...

After Hours: Thursday Edition

Okay, Thursday crowd, here's the place for you to let us know what you thought of tonight's Beethoven Pastoral show. This concert was a bit of a departure for us - fewer visual gags (mainly because of the radio thing,) a bit more of the in-depth music stuff - but we hope it was a fun night out for all of you that joined us.

We really do want every kind of feedback to help us plan future shows, so let fly in the comments, and tell us what you loved, what left you cold, what flew a mile over your head, and what hit you square in the solar plexus. And as always, thanks for buying the ticket - in times like these, that simple act means more to those of us on stage than you can possibly imagine.

Gratitude, With A Dash of Hucksterism

I don't know whether it's the hectic pace that this fall seems to have brought to Orchestra Hall, or just the fact that Sarah and I are three years into our Inside the Classics careers at this point, but we've done shockingly little blogging about our season-opening concerts coming up this week.

Actually, a big part of the reason for the lack of pre-concert promotion is that we're feeling less pressure to personally beg people to come to our concerts this season, and for that, we have all of you to thank. In what is arguably the toughest year in several generations for performing arts organizations, you guys have boosted us to a whopping 95% subscriber renewal rate, and a better than 15% boost in subscription sales year over year! And that's before we even begin to count the single-ticket sales for our Beethoven show, which are looking unprecedented for this series. So before I say anything else, I just want to say that y'all are absolutely the best, and we're blown away by the support you continue to show this orchestra in general, and Inside the Classics in particular.

That having been said, we've still got some seats left for this Thursday and Friday (yes, Friday - it's a little experiment we're trying,) and if some of you who haven't made it out to a concert before wanted to snap those up in the rush line, well, that'd make our day. We can promise you a broad take on Beethoven that you likely haven't heard before, a very unexpected detour into the early days of the American avant garde, and one of the sweetest coloratura soprano voices that you've ever heard at Orchestra Hall. And now that my beloved Philadelphia Phillies have pretty much sewn up a second consecutive World Series title, there's clearly no need to waste your time staying in and watching Game 2...

If you can't join us in person, however, we're very excited that, for the first time ever, an Inside the Classics concert will be carried live by Minnesota Public Radio (KSJN 99.5fm in Minneapolis/St. Paul, or find your local affiliate here) and you can listen in across the Upper Midwest, or online at Classical MPR's website. This is a live stream only, so tune in Friday night at 8pm Central (9E, 6P) and help us make our first broadcast the kind of event that MPR will want to repeat!

As always, we'll be soliciting your feedback after each of the concerts in our After Hours blog posts, and this week, for the first time, we'll also be asking you to chime in at the concert hall, as our videographers will be scouring the lobby for comments at intermission and after the shows. And for those of you who'd rather produce your own video feedback, we've set up a special page for you to upload your comments. (There are even prizes! And I'm pretty sure you're eligible for them even if you upload a video laying out everything you hated about the concert.)

All kidding aside, we really do take the comments we hear about ItC seriously, and we've used a lot of your feedback to develop the always-evolving feel of the concerts. So thanks again for all the support you've shown us up to this point, and we'll see you at Orchestra Hall this week to start it all over again...

We Have A Winner!

Wow, you guys! When I put up that little contest that week, I had no idea how many of you would take the time to enter, and I never expected submissions of the quality we got! Good on all of ya - you made picking a winner awfully difficult.

Speaking of which, here's how we went about that. Rather than discuss each submission, Sarah and I each made up a list of our three favorite entries, then checked to see if anyone had made both of our lists. Someone had, and that someone chose to identify himself as Cary Grant's character from The Philadelphia Story. So congratulations, CK Dexter Haven! Here were his five programs...

Program 1
Handel: Water Music in D, HWV 349
Handel: "Let the Bright Seraphim" (Air from "Samson", HWV 57)
Stravinsky: “No word from Tom. . . .” (Recitative, air, recitative, and cabelleta from “The Rake’s Progress”)
(intermission)
Handel: “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” (Air from “Messiah”)
Handel: “Rejoice” (Air from “Messiah”)
Stravinsky: Symphony in Three Movements

Program summary: Juxtoposing well known Handel pieces with neo-classical Stravinsky. In addition, all the soprano arias & airs are sung in English. And I'll take any excuse to get to listen to Manny Laureano play "Let the Bright Seraphim."


Program 2
Adams: Naïve & Sentimental Music
(intermission)
Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuez
Debussy: Iberia, from Images pour orchestre (or alternately . . . Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio Espagnol)

Program summary: The Rodrigo concerto serves as the anchor. Before it, the 2nd movement of the Adams includes a very prominent guitar solo, thereby tying it back to the Rodrigo. More importantly, I think the Adams piece is not only one of his most accessible, it is one of his best. I'd prefer to end it with the Debussy, but in case that scares the box office, the Rimsky should be more user friendly. The two pieces after intermission share the Spanish theme. This kind of puts the OCIS design on it's head, and I think that SICO is NOT psycho . . . (sorry, couldn't resist the obvious pun)


Program 3
Mozart: Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major ("Eine kleine Nachtmusik"), K. 525
Barber: Adagio, from String Quartet in B minor (transcribed for string orchestra)
Herrmann: Suite for Strings, from “Psycho”
(intermission)
Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 77 (alternately . . . Brahms: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77)

Program summary: the whole first half is devoted exclusively to strings. The Mozart is the biggest crowd draw, and is paired with the Barber (another well known piece) and the Herrmann which people know, but not in the concert hall context. After all the string music, end with a concerto highlighting the violin; the Shosty is not exactly new, but it is a great piece and is certainly more challenging to the typical audience than Mendelssohn or Tchaikovsky. Plus the Shosty maintains and builds upon the tension that started with the Barber and flows on through the Herrmann, and it starts with an extended passage limited to the strings and soloist. That said, if it's too scary, substitute with the Brahms since it is similar in scale/length.


Program 4
Debussy: Preludes for piano (orch: Colin Matthews)
Beethoven: Piano Concerto in D (transcribed from Violin Concerto), Op. 61
(intermission)
Mussorgsky/Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition

Program summary: This is the lone OCIS concert; my take on the theme is to make all the programs transcriptions. The Debussy transcription is new, the concerto is Beethoven with a twist, and the finale is a well-known warhorse.


Program 5
Lutoslawski: Paganini Variations for Piano & Orchestra
Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
(intermission)
Lutoslawski: Symphony No. 4
Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances, Op. 45

Program summary: Probably the most challenging of the five programs, but still reasonable. The Rachmaninoff gives you the big draw, with the Lutoslawski as the foil. I think the music pairs very well. Even though the Lutoslawski isn't melodic in the traditional sense, it has a clear structure so it is fairly easy to follow, with a lot going on throughout and eventually offering up the de riguer big ending.

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

We don't have a runner-up, but did want to give a very big honorable mention to Minnesota violist Jen Strom for her anonymously-submitted "Women On Fire" program. Since Jen plays with the orchestra many, many weeks every year, she wasn't eligible for the prize (and she wouldn't have a lot of use for tickets to concerts she plays in anyway,) but Sarah and I both loved her submission.

Oh, and I almost forgot: Mr. Dexter Haven, sir, if you would be so good as to e-mail me at sbergman@mnorch.org and tell me which prize you prefer, and where it can be sent, I'll get right on that. Congratulations again, and thanks to everyone who entered!

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...

Beyond The Product

Doug McLennan over at ArtsJournal has a blog post up today taking arts organizations to task for not keeping up with other entertainment venues when it comes to customer comfort.

"Despite the fact that the average concert hall was many times more expensive to construct than the new-generation movie complexes, the customer amenities inside the halls constructed over the past 20 years - how can I put this kindly - kind of suck... There's an argument to be made for preserving formal rituals in going out to see a performance. But things change. I like some of the rituals, but I have to admit I often resent the degree to which it is imposed by rigid seats and cramped legroom. And why can't I bring my drink back in to the show?"

This is the kind of issue that those of us who make our living on stage forget to think about most of the time - after all, we don't sit in those cramped seats very often, and to be perfectly frank, if you think the audience spaces are uncomfortable, you should see the backstage areas we work in. (Just for example, if we have more than three soloists on a single concert, we don't have enough dressing rooms for them.) But we should, and this ties into a much larger issue. Doug's been talking a lot on his blog lately about the need for arts groups to realize that we're no longer just competing with other arts groups - we're competing with baseball teams, rock bands, TV programs, and the almighty Internet, and we might want to start acting like we're aware of this.

As it happens, of course, the Minnesota Orchestra recently announced that we're intending to spend $40 million to upgrade Orchestra Hall, and nearly all of that money will be spent on audience spaces like our severely undersized lobby. Now, unfortunately, $40m isn't enough to suddenly transform a 35-year-old concert hall into this, but it's certainly enough to make a tangible difference in the concertgoing experience.

So what are your priorities? What, specifically, do you think we should be spending our renovation budget on? And what popular upgrades do you think would be a huge waste of resources that we shouldn't even think about bothering with?

To see or not to see

A review about the opening concert of the Ravinia Festival caught my eye, primarily because a majority of content was not about the performance itself; critic Lawrence Johnson spends most of the article panning the use of the large video screens showing closeups of the performers.

One of my earliest exposures to symphonic music (besides my audiophile father and the Honolulu Symphony, which is a subject of a future blog post) was PBS's "Great Performances" - I still remember a Brahms Piano Concerto #1 with Ashkenazy/Giulini/LA Phil from the early 80's. What I loved about those programs was the up-close-and-personal sense one gets, thanks to some well-produced camera work; it's great to actually see an instrument during a solo spot, illuminating to see the cues and communication going on onstage and inspiring to see the expressions of conductor and players as they deliver an emotionally and intellectually engaging performance.

Perhaps my predilection for this kind of "produced" concert experience makes me much more sympathetic to the use of video screens in performance. We experimented with this in our final Inside the Classics concert of the season, to mostly rave review; a vast majority of responses from the audience were very favorable, while a minority pronounced the screens distracting (this data via website commentary and written survey results).

I certainly think the more conventional concert experience (of the standard, "unenhanced" variety) has its place. By the same token, I question Johnson's contention that "in its attempt to “open up” the traditional classical event, the video simulcast only serves to cheapen the concert-going experience, making it less appealing and, to be frank, irritating as hell." It may be "less appealing and...irritating" for some, but I would be curious to hear responses from the Ravinia audience; if it's anything like Minnesota audiences, many enjoyed the sense of connection to what's happening onstage. And I wonder, is there a generational disconnect here? Are those of raised on produced televised concerts in tandem with live performance more accustomed and open to different concert experiences? And does any enhancement of a symphonic presentation "cheapen" the experience (and what does that really mean?)?

Finally, Johnson wraps up with this:

Perhaps in time one can learn to tune out the video or drink the Kool-Aid and become accustomed to this MTV-ification of the classical concert experience. But I doubt it. So much contemporary pop calls for music-video flash, quick-edit dancing and assorted stimuli to distract one from the fact that the music isn’t very good. Brahms, Mendelssohn and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra don’t require such pointless “enhancements.”

What I find pointless is taking potshots/hurling veiled insults at other musical genres. This is the kind of holier-than-thou attitude that does nothing to endear those of us in the classical side of the business to...well, a vast majority of the rest of the world (because, really, less than 10% of the adult population of our country attended a classical music performance in 2008 - this according to the NEA). It's tantamount to insulting a majority of the populace for its musical tastes. Do we need to engage in this kind of bridge-burning in an attempt to elevate our preferred music?

Music is a living art; a symphony was never meant to be presented as a museum piece, with a removed reverence utterly disconnected with the era in which it is being performed (not that in which it was created). I'm not advocating for video screens for all concerts of symphonic music; I'm simply interested in keeping what I do and love vibrant and relevant for generations to come. And for that to happen, we cannot rely on business as usual.

Ask A Concertmaster

Our concerts this week are being billed as "A Fleezanis Farewell," not because our esteemed concertmaster is leaving us just yet, but because this will be the last week that she solos with us before her move to Indiana this summer. (Of course, she could well return as a guest soloist in the future, but you know what I mean.) I've been looking forward to this week, not only because our audiences are always big and enthusiastic when Jorja solos, but because conductor Gilbert Varga is one of my all-time favorite batons to work under.

I'm assuming Jorja will be hugely busy this week, but it seemed an opportune time for me to begin thinking about sitting down with her for the exit interview I promised way back when she announced her retirement. My hope is to talk with her sometime in the next week or two, after which I'll have audio as well as written excerpts up on the blog as soon as I can. And I already know a lot of what I want to ask her, but I'm interested to hear what you all want to know about our remarkable leader for the last 20 years. So if you would, please post any questions you'd like me to ask Jorja in the comments, and I'll try to work as many as I can into the conversation...

After Hours: Thursday Edition

I don't know what it is about our Thursday crowds, but you guys always have the most incredible energy! Thanks so much for coming out, and now here's your chance to weigh in. Did you like the video component? Was the balance between interview and our usual format successful on the first half? What did you think of the symphony itself? (Remember, we really do use your feedback to shape future shows.)

Most importantly, we're interested in knowing how you feel about our occasionally programming new music on this series. It's something we'd like to do more of in the future if our audience shows an interest, but we also want to hear if you'd prefer that we just stick to the core orchestral repertoire. Chime in below in the comments, and be as detailed as you'd like...

After Hours: Wednesday Edition

If you were with us at Orchestra Hall tonight for the Jay Greenberg symphony, here's your chance to tell us what you thought of the show. Did you like the video component? Was the balance between interview and our usual format successful on the first half? What did you think of the symphony itself? (Remember, we really do use your feedback to shape future shows.)

Most importantly, we're interested in knowing how you feel about our occasionally programming new music on this series. It's something we'd like to do more of in the future if our audience shows an interest, but we also want to hear if you'd prefer that we just stick to the core orchestral repertoire. Chime in below in the comments, and be as detailed as you'd like...

After Hours: Thursday Edition

Your turn, Thursday crowd. Here's the place to let us know what you liked or disliked about the Mendelssohn concert, and really, about your whole Orchestra Hall experience.

In particular, we're interested in hearing what you thought of the pacing of the first half of the show. We made a conscious decision (based largely on audience feedback from past ItC shows) to jump around more in the first half than we have in the past, spending less time than usual on the featured piece specifically and more time exploring the composer's life and music as a whole, and the way the orchestra approaches the music in rehearsal and performance. So if that worked for you, let us know, and if it didn't, tell us why, as well as any ideas you might have for future concerts.

In any case, thanks for being there - you Thursday people always have fantastic energy, and we're looking forward to seeing you again in March...

After Hours: Wednesday Edition

Well, our first Mendelssohn concert is in the books, and as usual, we're eager to hear what you thought about it! If you were in the house on Wednesday night, chime in down in the comments and tell us what you liked, what you thought needed a different angle, and what you would have liked to hear more or less of.

In particular, we're interested in hearing what you thought of the pacing of the first half of the show. We made a conscious decision (based largely on audience feedback from past ItC shows) to jump around more in the first half than we have in the past, spending less time than usual on the featured piece specifically and more time exploring the composer's life and music as a whole, and the way the orchestra approaches the music in rehearsal and performance. So if that worked for you, let us know, and if it didn't, tell us why, as well as any ideas you might have for future concerts.

As always, thanks so much for taking the time to come out and support live music, and I hope we'll see you all again for our March concerts...