Orchestra's "Discovery' concert

Found: That elusive young Orchestra audience

TOM PURDOM

Back in Eugene Ormandy’s heyday, my wife and I used to joke about his practice of scheduling new music on programs that included guaranteed crowd-pleasers. Sara once took in a Friday afternoon Philadelphia Orchestra concert in order to hear her fellow Texan, Van Cliburn, play the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, and she was amused at the unhappy stirring in the audience when the program opened with a premiere by an undead composer. As everyone surely knows, the Friday audiences in those days consisted largely of elderly ladies of conservative tastes. And they all knew exactly what Ormandy was up to.

“He always does this when he’s got somebody everyone wants to hear,” one of Sara’s seatmates hissed.

As a marketing technique for new music, Ormandy’s tactic had its virtues. The sounds reached all the ears the Academy of Music could hold. The number of hearts and minds it reached is, of course, more problematic.

The Orchestra is currently trying a new approach: a policy that puts unfamiliar music in front of people who actually want to give it a try. In the latest issue of Philadelphia Music Makers, the Orchestra’s new president, James Undercofler, mentioned a survey indicating that about half the Orchestra audience are satisfied with the programming, 30% “didn’t like so much new music,” and 10% want more new music. Other studies have discovered that people come to the Orchestra for many different reasons, from simple relaxation to “immersion in the complexity of the music.”

The Orchestra is responding by edging away from programming that blends the repertoire into an undifferentiated mishmash spread through the season. Instead, it’s aiming different concerts at different audiences. The best example is the new Thursday night “Discovery” series, which programs new and unfamiliar music for the benefit of the 10% who voted for more novelty. Each concert is followed, in addition, by a free postlude recital presented in collaboration with the Network for New Music.

Stravinsky: still youthful

The latest Discovery program, on September 27, featured the first Philadelphia performance of Transformations 2 by a living German composer, Wolfgang Rihm; the first Philadelphia performance of all three movements of Carl Reinecke’s D Major Flute Concerto, composed in 1908; and one old standby, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

The Rite of Spring is more suitable than it may seem, since it provoked laughter and rioting at its premiere nearly a century ago. It’s also noisy and driving, which probably adds to its attractions for the youthful audience that attended this particular concert.

And youthful is the word. The age of the audience was especially obvious when a couple hundred listeners— perhaps more— gathered downstairs for the postlude. Critics have bemoaned the graying classical music audiences for at least three decades. This crowd was definitely coffeehouse age.

An Orchestra first, if you’re under age 94

Transformations 2 reminded me of the John Adams masterpiece Harmonliehe, which the Orchestra performed last April. Like that piece, it’s a series of episodes that follow one another in a progression dictated by the composer’s sense of fitness, rather than architectural musical logic. As the title implies, Transformations 2 is constantly transforming itself, with changes in orchestration, pace and musical content. It can be enjoyed by an audience that has never heard of most of the things older audiences have been trained to listen for.

This performance of the Reinecke flute concerto was billed as the first Philadelphia Orchestra performance of the complete work, because the Orchestra has only played the slow movement by itself. It did that just once, however, and in 1913 at that. So perhaps this should have been billed as the first Orchestra performance any Philadelphian under the age of 94 could possibly have heard.

A fresh boost for post-Mozart flute repertoire

As I noted when Orchestra 2001 played a newly “discovered” Tchaikovsky flute concerto (click here), there don’t seem to be many flute concertos written for the big post-classical orchestra. For all practical purposes, the flute concerto repertoire ends with Mozart. The only post-Mozart concerto I can remember hearing was composed by Khachaturian, and that didn’t help the repertoire much. Reinecke’s contribution seems to be the only contender, and Jeffrey Khaner gave it the same classy treatment he gave the Orchestra 2001 program.

Unfortunately, the concerto’s slow movement is in a class by itself. Leopold Stokowski made the right decision back in the 1920s when he let the second movement stand alone. That movement should be played a bit more often than once a century.

The bird-catcher, as seen by the birds

The postlude extended the concert by twenty more minutes merely by giving the stage to pianist Charles Abramovic and a leading Philadelphia composer, Jan Krzywicki.

Krzywicki’s Vogelfanger is a short, light piece built around a serious joke. As the composer pointed out, the bird catcher in The Magic Flute, Papageno, is usually considered a humorous figure. But how does he look to the birds? In Vogelfanger, the bird catcher enters a dark and increasingly ominous forest— a forest that can become angry.

Krzywicki described the second piece as a fable, written for a cousin who was graduating. To me, it sounded more like an epic, with a jaunty, bumptious hero advancing through adversity. The important thing is that the two pieces offered the audience a good-natured, high-quality sample of contemporary composition, with modern devices like plucked and hand-damped piano strings used to good effect. Krzywicki’s audience applauded with genuine enthusiasm— the same enthusiasm I heard in the applause for the Orchestra’s efforts.

There is an audience out there. It can be reached, and without rock stars. You just need to apply some intelligence in marketing your customary wares.



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