Last fall, during his consultancy to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma visited the Illinois Youth Center, a correctional institution in Warrenville. He accompanied the female inmates as they rehearsed a musical show based on their life experiences, as part of the C.S.O.’s program to reach communities far from Symphony Center.
In December, the superstar soprano Renée Fleming, in her role as the Lyric Opera’s creative consultant, outlined plans to draw new audiences to the Lyric’s home on Wacker Drive. They include the classic American musical “Show Boat” in the operatic season and concerts by non-opera artists such as Sting.
That sort of thinking should appeal to Anthony Freud, who was named the Lyric’s new general director on April 21. His previous tenure at the Houston Grand Opera included creation of the world’s first mariachi opera, one of several programs establishing him as an envelope-busting innovator in this country and his native Britain.
That these three audience-builders should appear on the Chicago scene within the last 16 months is no accident. Even before the recession, the 21st century posed challenges to classical-music institutions, and Fleming and Ma – the first creative consultants employed by either institution – are leading the response. In addition to influential ideas, they bring a charisma that carries beyond concert halls and into popular culture.
Add the world-renowned Riccardo Muti, who recently took over as the CSO’s music director, and you have the sort of star-power lineup that, say, the Cubs have been seeking for years. Even more than sports teams, classical music needs that kind of celebrity these days.
Not even the venerable giants have been immune: In April, the 111-year-old Philadelphia Orchestra voted to seek bankruptcy protection. The CSO and the Lyric are healthy enough, but they can hardly ignore the warning signs around them.
No niche of the performing arts has felt the sting of the digital revolution more than music. The record industry was decimated by easily copied MP3 files. iPods allow listeners to hear music all day, everywhere: no need to step into a concert hall or arena. As improved technology brings higher-quality downloads and high-definition video streaming, even the most persnickety orchestra and opera fans can find reasons to avoid live events. Why contend with traffic, parking, audience sniffles or a plain old off-night on stage?
A 2008 study by the National Endowment for the Arts surveyed adults attending arts performances at least once in the previous year. Compared with 2002, the classical music audience declined by almost 20 percent, and the opera audience by 30 percent.
Susan Mathieson Mayer, director of communications for the Lyric, blamed cutbacks to public-school arts education for the drop in attendance. “We survey opera subscribers continuously, and almost invariably they had some kind of exposure when they were kids: music lessons, parents taking them to concerts, etc. Times are very different from 20 years ago. We’re dealing with maybe two generations who did not have the same kind of exposure that their parents did.”
Deborah F. Rutter, president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, identified another factor. “The competition for leisure time is so much more challenging than it was 20 to 30 years ago,” she said. In fact, given the lure of computer-driven entertainment, she finds it “fascinating that this passion and excitement still exist for the live concert experience.”
But that passion belongs to an increasingly older segment of the classical music audience. The N.E.A. survey found that in 2008, nearly 40 percent of the symphony audience, and about 35 percent of opera-goers, were older than 55. By comparison, the audience for Latin music, among the most popular idioms surveyed, counts only about 20 percent of their audience in this demographic.
Both Rutter and Mayer say their challenge lies in enticing younger audiences to show up a few times, and then to turn that interest into habit, so that by the time they reach their 30s and 40s and have more disposable income, they might become regular attendees and even subscribers.
Rutter describes the strategy as “Trick them into loving you for the rest of time.” The C.S.O.’s student ticket policy is a case in point. For $10, registered students can reserve a ticket online weeks before a concert; when they show up, they get the best available seats. “They could be in a lower balcony seat that normally runs $120,” Rutter said, noting that last year the program attracted some 14,000 students.
The Lyric’s NEXT program sends an e-blast to college students announcing unsold tickets. “This past year we had probably close to 10,000 college students attending, at a cost of $20 a ticket” for seats that can sell for up to $200, Mayer said.
Some seemingly novel concepts are firmly rooted in centuries of tradition. Fleming hit on the idea of bringing Broadway to the Lyric last summer in Vienna, while visiting an exhibit about Gustav Mahler, the 19th-century composer and opera director. “Mahler was quoted as saying how excited he was to be presenting works by Mozart 100 years after they were written,” she said. “I thought that would be a good place to start in the U.S. too,” with homegrown works from the previous century .
At Houston Grand Opera, Freud left his stamp with “The Refuge,” a 2007 production for which he commissioned a poet and a composer to interview hundreds of non-native Houstonians to learn their “journey stories” – how they ended up in the city – and turn them into a full-fledged production.
“On one level, you can regard opera as a 400-year-old European art form,” he said in Chicago the day after his hiring. “But if you distill opera, it’s simply telling stories through words and music, and that transcends history and ethnicity.”
The Lyric has already dipped a toe in these waters, notably with the 2010-11 season’s finale “Hercules.” The famed director Peter Sellars drew on weeks of workshops with American military veterans to transfer the story from ancient Greece to modern America, and to explore the difficulties that returning soldiers have in leaving the traumas of war on the battlefield.
Do such productions build audience? At a reception following the opera’s dress rehearsal, which was attended by more than 75 of the military veterans who had worked with Sellars, several allowed that this was their first opera experience, and that they didn’t really follow much of the action on stage. While it’s unlikely that many of them will return, the production did attract major media exposure.
Similarly, the inmates from Warrenville probably won’t rush off upon parole to sign up for the new season at the Chicago Symphony. But the idea behind that program, and others in the orchestra’s ambitious Citizen Musician initiative, is to expand the audience indirectly, by building community ties. “By going beyond the seats in Orchestra Hall, they’re doing the right thing,” Ma said.
And such experiences leave their mark on the consulting musicians as well. “What a musician does is collect all these experiences and then report back in sound.” Ma said. “I know after this, the Dvorak Concerto sounds different when I play it. There’s more love there – more humanity.”
Photos by Jose More:
