With 'Casual Fridays,' L.A. Phil lets down its hair
For decades, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's marketing strategy relied heavily on images of the orchestra's "artistic"look maestros. In that respect was the brigham Young Zubin Mehta, his exotic features apparently around to explode in a passionate furiousness; the patrician Carlo Maria Giulini, a black scarf flung poetically around his neck, a soft Fellini-esque hat atop his elegant head; and, to a greater extent recently, Esa-Pekka Salonen, his sweet perfect face tilted skywards like an archangel's, a billystick in his raised hand. Just wholly that has changed.
In today's advertizing field, we see poster art of a percussionist propensity toward us over his kettleful barrel, and, yes, he's wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. "I'm like you," the image is expression. "Non around rarefied 'other.' " Across the nation, in fact, symphonic music orchestras ar on an outreach kick -- searching for a sentiency of community of interests with a wider populace, hoping to enticement into the concert hall a freshly generation to replace the graying heads world Health Organization often subscribe as a mixer ritual, trying to destress the notion of the classical music audience as an upper class common soldier nine. Enter "Casual Fridays," a Symphony orchestra concert series that began in 2003 when Walt Walt Disney Concert Hall opened. Like similar initiatives undertaken by other U.S. orchestras that experience discovered the benefits of popularizing their trade good, the series' stock in trade includes programs shorter than regular subscription concerts; musicians dressed not in formalwear merely in mufti; personal remarks delivered from the stage by conductors and players; and post-concert meet-and-greet receptions. Says Deborah Borda, the Symphony orchestra Assn.'s president: "The cay idea is to scrape out altogether these layers of tradition. That's how we convince people to have the risk of attention. We must make our euphony events accessible. Is it OK to don flip-flops? Of course. And you won't even look different from the orchestra players. Once an audience is comfortable, it commode begin to find the music." Michael Tilson Thomas, the onetime L.A. Phil principal invitee conductor now at the helm of the San Francisco Symphonic music, concurs. "What we've been needing to do," says Tilson Thomas, whose orchestra first cast its players as ordinary mortals 13 years ago, "is to break shoot down that sense of iconic remoteness associated with classical music in every possible way." In other words, "seek to make something that's exclusive -- the music -- inclusive." Across the board, orchestra administrators and conductors seem to consort that no matter how transporting Beethoven and Gustav Mahler may be, at that place is a certain intimidation factor that many would-be music lovers sense in the realm of concert formality. After altogether, concertgoers purportedly moldiness dress according to a certain code and applaud only at specified multiplication.By contrast, says Russell Inigo Jones, marketing frailty president at the Conference of American Orchestras, "these 'cocktail concerts' ar really popular, rattling attractive events." He adds that in urban centers, "their appeal is to the after-work downtown population that crataegus laevigata want to hear a little music and experience a beverage before heading home." San Francisco, for instance, calls its serial "6.5" -- non after a indication on the Richter scale just after the concerts' 6:30 p.m. start time. The Los Angeles Philharmonic spreads its net beyond downtowners, so -- out of deference to the expressway crawl -- it begins "Casual Fridays" at its concerts' fixture start time, 8 p.m. And, says the orchestra, the sextuplet "Casual Fridays" so far this season throw drawn an average of 2,000 attendees, up 7% over last year. When music director-designate Gustavo Dudamel headlined the last one, leash weeks ago, Disney Hall was sold out. Unlike the San Francisco musicians, wHO have not been persuaded to take in informal attire, the L.A. players can create a surprisingly uncoordinated movie. Fashionistas would probably not approve of the motley look these 100 work force and women produce together onstage. Fiddler Mitchell Paul Newman, now in his 21st twelvemonth with the Symphony, brings up a deeper point, though. "What's casual is truly non the lop," he says. "It's the talking, the fact that audiences can buoy visualize us as man beings. We speak to them from the stage" -- at for each one concert roughly player offers a capsule autobiography or a brief humorous anecdote -- "just we as well unify with them subsequently and share a glass of wine." Roughly concertgoers crataegus oxycantha admiration whether gaining a personal story is worth losing an important piece from the broadcast that audiences hear on other nights -- especially if the story is merely a pleasant account of "how I joined the orchestra." On the other hand, departing music director Salonen, world Health Organization will superintend this season's concluding "Casual Fridays" this hebdomad and Crataegus oxycantha 30, has offered intriguing self-revelations that bear on the mind of organism unity with the players, not an government agency figure. So he's in synchronise with the "kumbaya" posture of these community concerts. "I'm no yearner exploitation a nightstick," he explained in a witty, self-mocking story from the stage in too soon 2006, "because I want to be a confrere, not a officer." (That pledge, by the way, went by the boards.) And just now beingness privy to such little progress reports has great attract to audiences, says fiddler Paul Leonard Newman. He has only one caveat: "Do not dullard."
