May Auld Antagonism Be Forgot...

There was an interesting concert review in the New York Times over the weekend, interesting partly because you don't often see newly formed new music ensembles that play in Greenwich Village clubs getting full-length reviews in the Gray Lady, and partly because of the direction critic Anthony Tommasini chose to meander in the later paragraphs. Early on, Tommasini notes that, "Though the performances were brilliant, it was the irreverent mixing of works that excited me,"and he goes on to detail a widely varied program ranging from thorny Modernism to pop-influenced music by ultra-trendy 20-somethings.

The lesson we're meant to draw is one I've written about before, that the new generation of young performers and composers "could not care less about the stubborn ideology that divided the camps long ago." This is hardly a new notion, of course. Many of us in the music world have been writing about this long-overdue evolution for years, and ArtsJournal even hosts a music blog whose tagline declares, "No Genre Is The New Genre." But Tommasini notes an exception to the new egalitarian rule:

"Still, the program was not all embracing. The works played here were either by complex modernists (Stockhausen, Babbitt, Berio), or younger freewheeling composers of a post-modernist bent, what the critic Greg Sandow calls the “alternative classical” music of today. Missing from the roster was anything by composers of, for want of a better word, the middle ground, what John Harbison has wryly referred to as “us notes-and-rhythms composers,” meaning those who more or less write pieces for conventional instruments, largely eschewing electronics, composers more concerned with thematic development than with instrumental atmospherics and sound collages."

Now, that's a very interesting observation to me, because, for those of us who play in symphony orchestras for a living, those "notes-and-rhythms" composers are almost all the new music we see! Orchestras, which by definition have to draw huge audiences to survive, rarely program the kind of aggressively modernist works that sent audiences scurrying for the exits in the 1960s and '70s, but we also rarely play works by those hip young experimenters so beloved in the New York club scene. (This isn't because we don't like them, by the way - it's because most of them aren't writing music for orchestras yet. Stress on yet - those who like to see every new musical trend as yet another sign that orchestras are dying love to claim that every new generation of composers has abandoned the large-scale orchestra, when the reality is always that there's simply no point writing an orchestral piece until you know there's an orchestra waiting to play it.)

What we do play is music by those more "mainstream" composers that Tommasini worries about - John Harbison, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Corigliano. (Does Kalevi Aho fit in that group? Not sure...) And while I think the Times is right to point out that there's still a wide gulf between the music that is held in high esteem in academic circles and that which large swaths of the public are likely to embrace, it's not something I think of as a serious problem. Academia is always operating on a different (and less market-driven) plane from the rest of society - it's why academics prefer to stay in the academy, while the rest of us couldn't wait to escape it.

As Tommasini says in his final paragraph, "The important news is that the end of dogma is indisputable. Empowered American musicians and composers from the new generation have it in them to foster pluralism and save classical music from itself." To which I can only add: ...and it's about [redacted by request] time.

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.

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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...

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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...

Back At The Beginning Again

People who attend our Inside the Classics concerts often ask Sarah and me how long we spend preparing each show. We never know quite how to answer: on the one hand, we generally have only a single 2-1/2 hour rehearsal with the orchestra for each show, so in that sense, the whole production has to come together awfully quickly, no matter how complicated we've made the thing, logistically speaking. (This is usually accomplished by giving the orchestra only a bare minimum of information about what we're planning - just the facts and cues that they absolutely have to know. It's more efficient from a rehearsal perspective, and has the added benefit that the musicians are as surprised by the audience at some of the shenanigans we pull on stage.)

But of course, we start working on our ItC season quite a while before the orchestra shows up for that one rehearsal. The repertoire that we'll be covering over the course of a season, for instance, has to be finalized almost a year in advance, to give our marketing team enough lead time to plan strategy, design brochures and other ad campaigns, and solicit subscribers. After we finish that task, Sarah and I are generally immersed for the next several months in writing, tweaking, and executing the current season's concerts, after which we give ourselves several weeks to decompress. (Decompress being, of course, a relative term, since I spend those weeks continuing to play in the orchestra, and Sarah spends them jetting off to all manner of conducting engagements.)

Eventually, we reach a point in early summer when we schedule a big meeting to start planning the next year's shows in earnest. Basically, this involves each of us doing some preliminary research on the pieces and composers we've chosen to highlight, and then getting together to bounce ideas off of each other. Most of what we come up with at this meeting won't wind up in the actual concerts you see at Orchestra Hall, but some of our best bits have come from these early get-togethers. We also try to identify as many potential stumbling blocks as we can, and plot strategy for avoiding them. Lastly, we divvy up a few tasks that have to be accomplished before we can begin scriptwriting in earnest.

Today was that day. Today, as it happened, was also the day that we had a larger meeting with members of our upper management and artistic staff to discuss wider plans for the series, and try to determine which of the pie-in-the-sky ideas we all have for the future are workable, and which are probably best left in the pipe dream stage. And all of this is happening none too soon, because tomorrow just happens to be the day when Sarah and I will sit down in front of a camera and record the set of video clips that get scattered around our web site each season wherein we try desperately to explain just what we're planning for the year and why you should care enough to come to the concerts.

Looking at my notes for those video sessions, I see that I have several paragraphs of thoughts ready to go for one of our '09-'10 shows, and a few bullet points for another. For the third show, my note pad says, and I quote: ".......uhhhhhh." So, that'll obviously need to be fleshed out a bit before the camera rolls.

In any case, we're now officially off and running on a process that won't hit its first major deadline until nearly Halloween. I keep thinking that maybe one of these years, we'll learn how to bang these shows out in a week or two, but I'm not holding my breath. Besides, everybody needs a good summer project, right?

Ask An Expert: The Bottom Line

To pick up where we left off on Wednesday, Mike had asked a series of excellent questions about the various roles that money plays in the orchestra business. We answered two of them to do with musician pay in that post, and now we turn to the thornier issue of how dollars in and dollars out affects programming decisions. Here were Mike's questions:

Q: How do financial matters impact the particulars of performances at Orchestra Hall? Do performances change based on attendance, interest, funding? Do finances have a role in deciding what/how performances are given?

For the answers, I'll turn things over to Kari Marshall, the artistic administrator for the Minnesota Orchestra. Kari is involved in nearly all of our programming decisions, and she is also the staffer who Sarah and I work most closely with in developing our Inside the Classics concerts. (She also once won the orchestra's wildly popular NCAA March Madness pool despite not caring one bit about basketball, which was awesome if not terribly relevant to this blog.) Here's Kari's response:

Mike’s question about financial matters is one of those that all arts organizations, no matter their size, grapple with regularly. How does one balance fiscal responsibility with artistic mission? I remember many a late-night conversation about this very topic with my classmates in graduate school!

My role at the Minnesota Orchestra involves working with the Classical subscription series as well as Inside the Classics, so my answer refers to those areas of the Orchestra. In general, we do our best to make sure we are responsible with the finances while also providing a worthwhile and artistically satisfying experience for everyone in the concert hall. If you follow the blog regularly, you may recall that Bob Neu, our vice-president and general manager, contributed to an Ask An Expert inquiry just over a year ago. In that answer, Bob explained the process of planning a Minnesota Orchestra season.

Another stage of the planning cycle involves coordinating the entire season’s schedule with our marketing department. The classical subscription season, for instance, is a complicated puzzle of two, three or four concerts per week. The process of putting that puzzle together includes discussions about how each week may impact the organization’s financial situation. At the same time, we strive to offer a balanced variety within the program choices we offer.

Once a season is set, we do not change the Inside the Classics or Classical concerts based on attendance, interest or funding. The financial implications have more of an impact on future planning than the week-to-week programs that occur in a season. For instance, if a performance sells really well and the audience raves about their experience, we want to analyze why in order to make informed decisions. If a performance does not do well, we look for an explanation. (Was it the time of year? The weather? The repertoire? Or something else?) Hopefully this knowledge helps us provide the best experience for players, funders, and most importantly audience members.

"Museum and laboratory"

The New York Philharmonic has announced its 2009-10 season, incoming music director Alan Gilbert's inaugural season, at a press conference that is available in its entirety (94 minutes!) via this webcast. There's much of interest: Magnus Lindberg as newly-minted composer-in-residence; artist-in-residence Thomas Hampson; a new music ensemble; the New York premier of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre; a three-week mini-festival of Stravinsky curated and conducted by Valery Gergiev; Alec Baldwin as "announcer-in-residence". Great stuff, all.

Two bits I liked, one line from Gilbert and one from Lindberg - Gilbert puts forth the idea of an orchestra as both museum and laboratory - curating the great art of the past while supporting the curious chemistry that creates great art of the present. And to tie in to that, Lindberg talks about the necessity for a "dialogue between our time and the past". It reminds me of a discussion about programming during a League of American Orchestras workshop I attended years ago about how pieces in a concert program should be in an "active dialogue". I like the sense of the importance of connection and interdependence.

It reminded me of the questions I received after the numerous presentations I've been doing this week as part of a music director search week here in Reno - inevitably, after I discuss my interest in contemporary American composers, an audience member will raise a hand to ask, fearfully, if that means that I want to play "all avant garde music all the time". First of all, I try to explain, American concert music tends to be much more musically conservative than what's coming out of Europe, but second of all, my interest (as with most who like the "new stuff") is in presenting contemporary works with established masterpieces so that the new and the old can shed light on each other, to be presented "in dialogue". That's one of the more enjoyable parts of programming, and a direction to look for as the New York Phil and Gilbert begin their relationship.

Big week, Part I

As Sam noted in his recent post, I've been a little preoccupied this week with my subscription debut with the Orchestra.

In many ways, it's a big deal; it's my debut on a series that's considered both "front-ranking" and the most artistically significant. And, of course, Minnesota is a major American orchestra, so these concerts carry a weight, in terms of my career, far beyond Minneapolis; other orchestras and presenters watch with interest when a staff conductor takes on a major program.

In many other ways, this week has been just business as usual; first of all, because I've certainly conducted subscription concerts with many other orchestras (albeit smaller organizations), and second, because this is my home orchestra, everything has been a well-known quantity (there's certainly a huge benefit to knowing an ensemble well).

Since this week's program has been in my book for about 10 months, I've had ample time to wrap my head around the program - which is a challenging one, both for myself and the Orchestra! Two pieces were "given" to me - the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Winds and Copland's "Quiet City", pieces meant to showcase members of the Orchestra as soloists. I ran with the whole idea of showcasing our musicians, which is where the idea of Concerti for Orchestra (Shchedrin and Lustoslawski).

I've been asked why I chose the Lutoslawski as my main work rather than, say, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, which is certainly a better-known piece and a staple of the repertoire. My choice of Lutoslawski comes from two strongly held convictions; one, that part of my job as a musician is to champion lesser-known but artistically worthy pieces that can help broaden the standard repertoire (in particular, if I have a powerful connection to those pieces), and two, that as a young conductor, my artistic growth is enhanced by working on repertoire that is not already ingrained in an ensemble.

Osmo and I agree on that second point (we chatted about it sometime last season). An orchestra of Minnesota's standing has played the standard repertoire countless (countless!) times - just thinking about the collective experience with, say, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, is staggering. Which means that the Orchestra has deeply etched ideas of how that piece should go, how the work "feels" when played by this particular ensemble, and which idiomatic or traditional "extras" (not indicated in the score, perhaps, but part of an accepted performance practice) that they'll execute without even thinking about it. All of which, while easy on an ensemble, is hard on a conductor, particularly if you have a differing view of the work. The challenge in this lies in getting an ensemble to see your perspective and to adopt that view over the rehearsal period.

Rehearsing a piece that hasn't been played in 15 years (1993 was the last time the Lutoslawski was performed here) presents very different challenges, mostly because there is little collective perspective of the piece. Ask the Minnesota Orchestra to play, say, any Brahms Symphony, and they'll happily fall into a groove - everyone knows how they fit in with everyone else, everyone knows what to listen for, everyone knows where the challenging passages are, everyone knows the variations of tempi. Given a less familiar work, there is a shallower collective understanding to fall back on, making an orchestra more reliant on the conductor, which presents me with more work to maintain ensemble.

But the benefits far outweigh this challenge, because a less familiar piece allows me to work with a much cleaner state. Without strong predispositions toward a piece, it is much easier to mold the musical architecture from my own perspective of the work. And this musical molding, of giving a piece a viewpoint that is both true to the intent of the composer and unique in its perspective, is the most fascinating work that I can do as a conductor. And working those details and making artistic discoveries is heightened when working on less familiar repertoire.

It's been an enormously rewarding week from a personal viewpoint so far; over the weekend, my second post on the topic will delve into the rehearsal process and the concerts themselves.

Fix This Concert

Composer Nico Muhly has been playing a fun and snarky game with violist Nadia Sirota (an old friend of mine, for the record) over at his blog. He calls the game "Fix This Concert," and it was inspired by the New York Philharmonic's season opening program, which Muhly and others have complained was far too unimaginative and lacking any intellectually challenging music. (Orchestras are accused of having no stomach for complex music almost as often as we're accused of assaulting audiences with complex music.)

In Muhly's game, you try to improve the existing program by substituting one or two works for the ones currently on the program, but do so without completely changing the nature of the evening. In other words, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure that Tchaikovsky's overplayed, overwrought 4th symphony wouldn't be Muhly's first choice as a concert anchor, he leaves it where it is on the Phil's opening night program, because he understands the orchestra's need for a warhorse to sell tickets to those who are just looking to hear a big, bombastic piece they don't have to work to understand. But he replaces a similarly overplayed Berlioz overture with a short piece by Jacob Druckman, who is a brilliant composer not enough people know about, and then changes a somewhat treacly Ibert flute concerto to a more forward-thinking concerto by Christopher Rouse. And presto, you've got a better program, at least according to Muhly (and me,) without changing your soloist or your anchor piece.

Now, I'll be the first to defend an orchestra's right to program whatever we think will sell the most tickets (most of the time, anyway.) But I think Muhly makes an excellent point with his game: there's no reason that we can't spruce up our programming without seeming to thumb our nose at more conservative audience members. Half the reason that many in our audience think that they won't like new music is because we're relatively careless in choosing what composers we feature, and under what circumstances. Programmed smartly, a new work frequently garners the most enthusiastic reaction from our crowds, and has the added benefit of making our ticketbuyers more comfortable with the idea of mixing Beethoven with, say, Harbison.

So let's play Fix This Concert, shall we? Below, I'm listing a concert program the Minnesota Orchestra will be presenting this November. It's not a bad program by any stretch (unless you're fundamentally opposed to viola solos,) but it does seem to be a bit "safe." Can you make it better, without completely gutting it? Fire away in the comments, and I'll update this post with my own "fix" in a few days...

The Program:
MOZART Overture to Abduction from the Seraglio
BERLIOZ Harold in Italy
DELIUS "The Walk to the Paradise Garden" from A Village Romeo & Juliet
ELGAR Enigma Variations

Update, 10/11/08: Y'all can feel free to keep chiming in with your own fixes in the comments, but having had a couple of days to think about it, here's my take. Although Harold in Italy is the biggest, longest piece on the program, Enigma is pretty clearly the anchor piece, so it stays. On the viola front, I'm substituting Sofia Gubaidulina's riveting and virtuosic viola concerto for the Berlioz - although a very different kind of piece, I think it pairs well with Elgar's emotional character. The Delius I'm dropping altogether. And as much as I love the Mozart, I'm not sure it fits the character of this program all that well, so I'm substituting Holst's underperformed Brook Green Suite, giving our concert distinctly English bookends, with a challenging but soulful interior work. I'd buy a ticket to that...

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.