It was not the first thing you noticed Friday evening at Powell Symphony Hall, but you had to notice it: There were a lot of butts in the seats.
Powell is a big room (capacity: 2,689), and though the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra well deserves its international reputation, it’s not often the orchestra fills the hall or even comes close.
On Friday night, they packed the house for a lighter night of George Gershwin, guest-conducted by Scott Parkman with Stewart Goodyear (an African American) on piano.
But that wasn’t the first thing you noticed. Before the packed hall, you noticed that food vendors were grilling brats in the lobby and selling them with bags of potato chips.
You noticed casually dressed white men, with an executive look and bearing, sitting on the plush steps leading up to the next level, eating summer festival food off of plastic plates.
The sitting on the steps and eating brats off plastic plates: This was unusual for the symphony hall.
You saw a sharp-looking black teen stepping past the Casual Friday executive type, holding a paper cup of lemonade – another summer festival sight that warmed up the elegant Powell lobby.
And before you got inside the door to notice any of these wonderful things, you would have noticed the cheap seats for the new Casual Classics summer series at Powell, which the Gershwin program kicked off. Early birds got in for as low as $20, and even a walk-in box office sale Friday night went as low as $25.
Also, you may well have noticed the word Casual in the name of the new series. As a matter of fact, Powell Hall is always a come-as-you-are venue, but most of us can be forgiven if we approach the place with the feeling we should be in formal wear. The symphony has a long way to go toward shaking off that elitist vibe.
Or anyway, that’s what I would have thought. But Friday night, that elitist vibe was shrugged off a like a tight-fitting formal jacket. It was an open-necked, open-souled night. It was all good.
It was also a night of music – Rhapsody in Blue, selections from Porgy and Bess – familiar to all symphony-goers and a good many of the rest of us. This was not a program that stumped anybody or left anyone knuckling their noggin. It was the orchestral equivalent of cool, refreshing lemonade.
I had dinner before the show with Fred Bronstein, the new executive director of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. He moved to St. Louis just two months ago from Dallas, where he had run the business side of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. His leaving the Dallas symphony was front-page news in the Dallas daily paper and its business journal (expressing disbelief that he chose to leave Dallas for St. Louis), which goes to show this guy makes an impact.
After talking to him for an hour over dinner at Reggie’s Backstage, I had the strong sense that he will have an impact in St. Louis. He spoke with passion about wanting the symphony to have more of a presence in St. Louis, to dabble more in populist music, and for the symphony hall to become a much more familiar and welcoming destination than it has been up until now.
Indeed, if our evening had been dramatized, it would have looked contrived and unbelievable. Bronstein described, pretty much, what we saw with our own eyes immediately afterwards. He wants a full house of all different sorts of people, comfortable inside the confines of Powell and liking what they are hearing. That’s what happened on Friday, as if by magic.
Actually, magic had little to do with it. It was more about marketing, accessible music and cheap seats. Effective marketing appropriate to St. Louis, which tends to be a bit casual, and cheaper ticket prices, when almost everybody is broke, are good things.
As for the more accessible programming, it moves the symphony closer toward perennial favorites in St. Louis, which (notoriously) likes what it already knows. It also could possibly move the symphony away from one of its current strengths: adventurous programming by musical director David Robertson that (in many cases) you can’t get anywhere else.
There is no Fred/David dichotomy of populism vs. pure art being presented here. Bronstein is a musician himself with graduate degrees in music and the piano gig in a touring chamber ensemble, Aequalis. And Robertson is a populist who heaps scorn upon any form of snobbery.
But Robertson’s ears and innovation often take him and the orchestra out of the comfort zone of many audiences. Bronstein points to declining attendance and a structural annual deficit in the millions as evidence that the symphony needs to make some changes. He made changes in Dallas similar to what he envisions for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra that drove up attendance, revenues and fundraising, and brought down costs.
However, Bronstein was emphatic, over dinner, that the symphony can stretch toward more familiar compositions and more crossover programming (next season includes The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings) without losing its edge.
I have seen a packed Powell Hall, with people drinking lemonade and eating brats in the lobby and loving to be there. It remains to be seen whether we can have more of that without losing what David Robertson has brought us to expect in a symphony’s repertoire.
Next up in the Casual Classics series:
? 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 30: The Four Seasons of Vivaldi and Astor Piazzolla, with David Halen as director and soloist.
? 3 p.m. Sunday, June 22: An Afternoon in Vienna with waltzes and polkas by Johann Strauss and Franz Lehár
? 3 p.m. Sunday, June 29: An American Celebration with Sousa marches, and popular favorites from Leroy Anderson, Aaron Copland and Duke Ellington.
All concerts will be held in Powell Symphony Hall, in its new summer festival mode. Tickets are $25-$40 at www.slso.org, the SLSO Box Office or 314-534-1700.