We finished our second of three subscription concerts tonight – a big program of Dvorak, Rachmaninoff and Strauss. It’s so interesting to me the differences in the personalities of the audiences each night.
Usually Saturday night’s audience (which used to the famous “Tuesday Nighters”) is pretty boisterous and excitable. There are usually quite a few whistles, bravos and various screams perpetrated by this audience. In short: they’re pretty crazy about the symphony and classical music, and they let us know about it.
Sunday night’s audience couldn’t be more different. Sometimes I think that Jesus could come down to earth in physical form, play a major piano concerto, walk on water as an encore, and the Sunday night audience would still only give him one curtain call. It’s not that they don’t appreciate what we do, I’m sure of that, but they are just less demonstrative (and apparently more attuned to the length of the drive home) than the Saturday night crowd.
Finally, there’s the Monday group. They’re supposedly the patrician, old-money crowd, but they run hot and cold – some weeks it feels like we scorch the very air with our wild abandon and people are out there giving the ol’ “golf clap”. Other times we give a lackluster and listless performance, only to get 10 minute standing ovations. Go figure. Maybe it has to do more with the performance of the stock market that day than how we play (ooh! I made $300,000 today, that Beethoven was great!).
Whatever night it is, these first two shows sold quite well. The first night was close to sold out, and tonight looked about 85-90% full. Very respectable. Now we just have to do that for about five more seasons and raise a record amount of money, and we just might make it!