I read this entry from David Stabler’s blog with interest. It cites comments by OPB radio host (of the program Beats and Pieces) Steven Cantor about the new season of the Baltimore Symphony in their first year with new music director Marin Alsop. Presumably, Cantor (and by extension, Stabler?) is excited the huge amounts of both new music and composer-conductors conducting their own works and music of their contemporaries. He is also amazed by the all seats for $25 and wonders how they’ve made that possible.
The $25 seats are made possible by a $1 million subsidy – they’d lose their collective shirts otherwise.
As for all the new music – I may have misread all of Stabler’s articles and reviews in the past, but it seemed to me that he wasn’t very excited by the significant amounts of new music (or even 20th century music) programmed by Carlos Kalmar and was making an effort to lobby the decision-makers of the orchestra to go in a different direction. He gave anecdotal evidence that concert-goers were unhappy about the programming and wanted something more traditional. I also remember him denouncing the conservative repertoire choices in the last years of James DePreist’s tenure as well.
Well, which is it? Should we play less or more new music at the Oregon Symphony? Baltimore has had a long history of new music promotion under the direction of David Zinman, and after the ultra-conservative Yuri Temirkanov, a return to more adventurous programming might be desirable with the new tenure of Alsop.
And why would light classics be a bad idea? I think there’s support for it both from within the orchestra and from audiences. People loved the Sunday matinees with Norman Leyden, which directly copied the format of concerts of the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler. They featured lighter classics along with more heavy warhorses as well as soloists drawn from the orchestra. There’s a lot of great lighter repertoire that would be fun for the orchestra to play (and much of it is very demanding, despite the light “feel”, believe me!) and for audiences to listen to and enjoy.