I think it’s a genius idea, particularly in light of the success of the Met simulcasts. And the LA Phil, their popular and charismatic Music Director Gustavo Dudamel (hey, he has a hotdog named after him!) and the magnificent Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall have the gloss of Hollywood-style glitz and glamour that’s multi-media friendly.

The LA Phil has clearly hung its hat on Dudamel’s star power (he’s featured in the widely broadcast “visit California” commercial), and it’s certainly not unusual for an orchestra to focus its PR push on the most visible member of the organization, which is usually its conductor. What I wonder, however, particularly in these challenging times when orchestras are scrambling for visibility and branding, is what the ramifications are of identifying an orchestra solely through the luster of its music director.

More to the point, if the LA Phil is Gustavo Dudamel, what is the LA Phil without Gustavo Dudamel (because, as with all MD’s he’s not going to be there forever)?

Again, it’s not as if this kind of thing hasn’t been around forever (Leonard Bernstein and New York). But times are different now; we are bombarded more by media images, from print to TV to online, than ever before. Organizations are more acutely aware of their own branding and the maintenance of their public image. As any successful corporation could tell you, image is everything.

So, if the image of an orchestra is inextricably linked to its conductor, what happens to that image (and therefore that orchestra) when the conductor leaves the orchestra?

And to bring it back to the simulcast, the companion question: would people attend LA Phil Live without Gustavo Dudamel?

Lest you think I’m making up this particular conductor’s brilliance, by the way, here’s video evidence of same. (Embedding is disabled, for some reason, so you’ll have to click through to see it.) His name is Gilbert Varga, the orchestra in the clip is the Gürzenich Orchester of Cologne, Germany, and the piece is Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta (which, apropos of nothing, we’ll be playing a chunk of in our Thanksgiving weekend preview concert for this year’s ItC season.)

Now, I know you guys are all Osmo-crazy, and I get that, I do, but seriously, there are other awesome conductors in the world, and you should hear what we can do with them. So here’s what I’m proposing: I will reserve one free ticket to either of this week’s concerts to anyone who requests one in the comments (up to, let’s say, 20 people, because I think that’s the max number of freebies a rank-and-filer like me will be able to swing,) IF AND ONLY IF you promise to buy at least one ticket the next time Varga (or any other awesome guest conductor you happen to love) is in town. This is obviously going to have to be on the honor system, so I’m counting on you to live up to your obligation if you take advantage.

If you’d rather not give your real name in your comment (I’ll be leaving the tix at Will Call, so I do need to know who you are,) just drop me an e-mail with the relevant info. (Also, please tell me whether you want the Thursday matinee or Friday evening.) And should we reach max capacity on this offer, I’ll post an update to this entry letting you know who’s in and who’s out.

UPDATE, 10/12: We’ve officially reached the max number of tickets I can offer, so I’m closing off the comments now. Everyone who left a comment (plus the one e-mailer who wished to remain anonymous) will have either one or two tickets waiting in his/her name at the box office. Just to avoid confusion over numbers, here’s the list of winners with an indication of how many tickets you’re getting. The tickets are all for Friday night’s concert, unless I’ve specified Thursday. Oh, and with one exception (sorry, Beng! nothing personal,) you Friday nighters are all sitting together, so say hi to each other!

Beng Chang (1)
Mark Hatlestad (2)
Tiffany & Chris Brand (2)
Luciano Patino (1)
Linda Grothe (1)
Kris (last name withheld – 2)
Ryan Moltz (1)
Sarah Greene (1 – Thursday)
Shelagh McLeod (2)
Will Richardson (1)
Jeanne Bostrom (2)
Roberta Parker (1 – Thursday)
Anonymous E-mailer (2)

President Obama: classical music lover (and Maria Callas fan), according to his recent Rolling Stone interview (see the second paragraph).

Anyway. I was running a little ahead of schedule, and as I neared Nicollet Mall, I happened to notice that Haskell’s was having some sort of wine sale. I like wine, and since I’d been out of town for most of the last few weeks, I didn’t have any at home, and I figured, why not kill some time buying a couple of reasonably priced bottles? I’d still have plenty of time to bike the two blocks to Orchestra Hall and stash them in my locker before the game.

I wound up with a nice pinot noir and a passable chardonnay, each under ten bucks, loaded them into my side-slung pannier, and jumped back on the bike. A minute later, I was on the plaza in front of Orchestra Hall, headed for the stage door. I swerved to avoid some pedestrians, and wound up involuntarily on the narrow step just out front of the hall, where we keep giant posters advertising upcoming concerts. Just to my left, six inches down, was the front drop-off driveway, where I wanted to be. In front of me, about 50 feet away, was a herd of oncoming Twins fans on their way to the game.

Now, I’m no menace on my bicycle. I observe all traffic rules (really!), signal my turns, and generally behave as if everyone else has a higher priority than me on road and sidewalk. But I also knew that, about halfway between me and the oncoming foot traffic was a little ramp that would take me down into the driveway and out of their way. So I hit the pedals and tried to make eye contact with someone at the front of the pack to somehow signal that I would be getting out of their way and did not intend to plow into them.

It was roughly one second before I made my turn onto the little ramp that I happened to catch sight of the new Inside the Classics poster our marketing staff had mounted just at that location. It has a brief description of all four of our programs for the upcoming season, and the usual obligatory shot of Sarah looking gorgeous and me looking as marginally presentable as I’m capable of. “Oh!”, I thought, “that’s a nice one,” and at that exact moment, the moment that I began my turn onto the ramp, the thought about the poster pushed another (far more important) thought straight out of my mind. The thought that my bike currently had an overstuffed pannier attached to its left rear.

The pannier caught the edge of a concrete barrier the moment I hit the ramp, and there was an awful moment as it wrenched violently sideways, nearly ripped clean away from my rack, and then decided to capsize the bike instead. I swung the front end around and jumped off as the bike lurched to a sudden awkward halt, two feet to the right of the now-passing pedestrian horde. As the bike stopped, the pannier gave up the ghost and released all its contents violently onto the concrete, with the bottle of chardonnay leading the way. As it shattered, the entire group of passers-by turned simultaneously to watch me flailing like an idiot in an attempt to avoid being soaked in wine.

Humiliating yourself in public is always a lovely experience, and we’ve all been there, so most of the Twins fans stifled their laughter and looked away. But of course, I’d just shattered a bottle of wine on my employer’s property, so I wasn’t about to leave the detritus there for someone else to pick up tomorrow. So I started gathering up the pieces and trying to work out whether there was any way to salvage even the slightest bit of dignity out of this situation. Meanwhile, one of the fans walking by grabbed up the largest piece – the whole bottom half of the bottle, still full of grape juice, and started to hand it back to me, joking about how it would have fewer calories now.

And then he saw it. The poster, still right in front of us. And then he looked back at me. And at the poster. And at me.

“That’s you, isn’t it? On the sign?” he demanded, clearly perplexed by the idea that someone important enough to be on a professionally designed poster in front of a big concert hall would also be dumb and uncoordinated enough to crash a bicycle full of wine in front of a parade of onlookers.

I sighed, fighting the strong urge to just run away. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.”

He snorted, and finished handing me the busted bottle. “Hope you’re better at whatever that sign’s for than you are at riding a bike!”

Touché, sir. I hope so, too.

I also, and here’s the shameful part, am totally addicted to the Food Network. I can’t really figure out why, since I’m all about learning and perfecting new ways of making food, and the Food Network as it exists in 2010 is primarily about watching minor celebrities eat food that someone else has prepared, usually either on closed sets that you’re not invited to, or in restaurants hundreds or thousands of miles away from where you live. Sure, there’s still a smattering of shows where knowledgeable people actually show you how to cook things, but they’re few and far between. Strangely, this does not seem to have dampened my interest in the channel even a little bit. I really have no excuse for this – it is what it is.

The other night, I was writing a blog post while watching an episode of one of the most polarizing shows on the Food Network. It’s called Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives, and it’s hosted by a frost-tipped hipper-than-thou California freakshow named Guy Fieri. (For some reason, he pronounces his last name “Fietti.” I’m assuming this is an attempt to sound Italian. It doesn’t.) There are foodies out there who despise Guy Fieri. They hate his laugh, they hate his catch phrases, they hate his hair, and they particularly hate that his show celebrates big fatty slabs of American-style comfort food – heavy on the meat and dairy, please – at a time when most of the foodie culture is centered around rediscovering healthful eating and worshiping Michael Pollan as a minor god.

Figure 1: Why Foodies Hate Guy Fieri

I am not one of these people, partly because I just don’t get that worked up about other people’s eating habits, but mostly because I don’t see any reason that Guy Fieri and Michael Pollan can’t coexist. Pollan is all about balanced diets, sustainable agriculture, local and seasonal eating, and weaning America off our factory-farmed, high fructose corn syrup-soaked, genetically modified supply chain. Fieri is all about guilty pleasures, sustainable agriculture, local and seasonal eating, and weaning us off the endlessly generic and tasteless fast food chains that have replaced mom-and-pop diners across the US. (No, really, he is. Go read this if you don’t believe me.) That’s a lot of common ground, and let’s face it, Michael Pollan probably enjoys a tasty burger on occasion, too, so…

Yeah, I know. Music blog. Not food blog. Get to the point. Fine. In a minute.

See, there’s pretty obviously a disconnect right now between the hardcore world of seasonal-eating, corn-fed-beef-eschewing foodies who know what kohlrabi is, and the larger American society where most people want to eat healthier and have no interest in destroying the environment just so they can have a cheeseburger, but don’t have the time or inclination to devote huge chunks of their lives to changing everything about their food supply. (There are various class, race, and geographic issues at play here, of course, but in the interest of not boring you to tears, I’m not going to get into them just now.)

I see a very direct parallel between the food disconnect I’ve just described, and the gulf that exists between hardcore classical music lovers who refer to Beethoven String Quartets by their opus numbers and have definite opinions on Karajan vs. Bernstein, and the wider populace that, for the most part, has nothing against classical music, but doesn’t have the time or inclination to obsess over it and consequently feels completely alienated by the clublike atmosphere that pervades its core audience. And while I don’t think there’s a blessed thing wrong with knowing Beethoven’s opus numbers, I worry that the primary exposure most outsiders get to classical music these days is the same kind of exposure they get to the idea of a sustainable food system: that is to say, earnest, overly intellectual pleas and lectures from upper middle class white folks who shop at a coop, adore NPR and Al Gore, and get a CSA box delivered to their house every week.

If I’m right, that’s a shockingly limited demographic of advocates, and, I believe, one which doesn’t begin to represent the broad swath of people who actually come to Minnesota Orchestra concerts every week. And in the same way that I think the local/sustainable food movement will only really gain traction in a global way once it allows a whole lot of non-purists in the door, I think classical music needs a whole lot more advocates whose exhortations sound a lot less like this and a lot more like our friend Emily Liz from a couple of weeks back.

Figure 2: Nobody cares what this guy thinks anymore.

We’re living in the age of Ultimate Word of Mouth, where a lot of the cultural and intellectual discoveries we make come from hearing or reading someone else’s enthusiastic endorsement in some far-flung corner of the internet that we happen to frequent. Restaurants, rock bands, video games, and orchestras sink or swim based on how many well-connected people we can get to talk us up, not just to friends and neighbors, but to the much wider circle of Facebook friends, blog readers, and Twitter followers.

A lot of that sort of thing is beyond our control as performers, of course, except to the extent that we generate interest by visibly and audibly giving our all every time we step onstage. (No small consideration, since far too may orchestra musicians still seem to think looking bored or irritated while performing is okay.) But other industries are way ahead of us in using the good will and enthusiasm of our existing fans to draw in new ones, and like Guy Fieri making a point of visiting a greasy spoon that grinds its own grass-fed beef and tops it with locally made cheese, we could do a lot worse than welcoming in as many non-experts as we can find, and finding out what it takes to connect with them on a deeply personal level.

This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that everyone in the music world but American symphony orchestras has been doing for quite a while now. We should have done it years ago, but the media rules governing our industry are massively complex, nationally negotiated, and quite frankly, about two decades out of date. There are some very good, smart people who have been working to change this, but the process frequently seems to get hung up when other people with very old, dull axes to grind start grinding them against the wheels of progress. If that makes any sense.

But anyway, the good news is that we are, finally, making progress, and these downloads are some of the first evidence of it. Over in St. Paul, the chamber orchestra launched its own music-streaming site this week as well, and really, once you open those floodgates, it’s nearly impossible to close them again, so with any luck, these projects will be the first of a lot of great things to come!

Leave it to The New Yorker’s Alex Ross to buck the trend. His April Fool’s blog post, which took the form of a 2010-11 season announcement for a nonexistent Manhattan-based orchestra, is darkly hilarious, and like all great satire, the more you know about the larger unpleasant truths of the industry it parodies, the funnier it gets…

“While other orchestras retread the tired old classics, we at the [Lower Midtown Orchestra] are elated to announce a raft of world premières. The acclaimed American master John Adams is our Composer-in-Residence; in October he will be on hand to conduct a new large-scale orchestral work with the intriguing title “Sorry Guys, Much Too Busy This Season, Best of Luck .”

And don’t you hate it when conductors insist on trying to do innovative things with your favorite symphonies when you just want the performance to sound like the recording you’ve owned since 1976? Have no fear, Ross has you covered:

“Our Beethoven Cycle will consist of Beethoven’s best-loved piece, the Symphony No. 5, “Duh-duh-duh DUUUHHH,” being played over and over and over and over again. In a series of five concerts, the Fifth will be heard no fewer than twenty times, with no variation whatsoever in the particulars of the interpretation. To ensure a total lack of spontaneity, the podium at ConAgra Jiffy Pop™ [Concert Hall] will be occupied by a TV set playing a video of Lorin Maazel. After each performance, listeners are invited to a panel discussion at McGrimm’s bar, where members of the Orchestra will reflect on the experience while drinking themselves into oblivion.”

Or even better, take a look at each individual portrait that makes up the poster – “128 Soloists”.

But one of my favorite ArtsJournal bloggers, Molly Sheridan, wrote a post earlier this week that went beyond the trashing of a slogan to address the larger issue that some American orchestras still aren’t very good at making the audience feel welcome. That Molly makes the point by relating a personal experience in which she was made to feel welcome makes the post all the more effective:

“I think being open to and engaged in hearing much of the orchestral repertoire in 2010 hinges on fostering that connection between the mass of performers on stage and the audience members out in the dark of the hall. Without it, the most transcendental musical experience has an uphill fight on its hands.”

It really can’t be said much more succinctly than that. Times change, and though the music we’re playing might be timeless (I said might,) the social trappings and crowd etiquette that go along with any public event evolve from generation to generation, and orchestras tend to be horrifically bad at noticing this. My pet theory is that this is because orchestras (especially major ones with venerable histories) prize Tradition so highly, and are therefore slow to accept any change, for fear that even a small adjustment in the proceedings will snowball into a wholesale devaluing of that Tradition.

That’s why I’m not surprised that the orchestra that gave Molly such an unexpectedly pleasant night out was the Baltimore Symphony. The BSO is a major-league band, to be sure, but in the hierarchy of big-time American ensembles, Baltimore, like Minnesota, fits comfortably into what I think of as the “upstart” category.

Upstarts generally perform at a level comparable to more famous orchestras like New York and Philadelphia, but toil in unglamorous mid-sized cities that the New Yorkers who write the rule book of cultural fame tend to overlook. This can be annoying if you’re an upstart band trying to find a permanent place on the mythical list of Great American Orchestras, but it’s never going to change, so it’s best just to accept it.

Besides, the upside to being an upstart is that you’re probably less shackled to the whole Tradition thing than the hidebound ensembles at the top of the meaningless GAO list, so innovation is easier to achieve. And because residents of midsized American cities tend to be less likely than your average jaded New Yorker to interpret friendliness as a sign of weakness or stupidity, you can buy an awful lot of goodwill from the public just by smiling a lot and telling concertgoers how much you appreciate them coming out to the show.

Of course, I rarely experience an orchestra concert as a customer, so my view of things may be somewhat skewed. So I’m throwing this one open to all of you who buy tickets and slog through the winter snows to hear us play: give me your best/worst customer service experiences with an orchestra. Who does the little things right, and what is “right” to you? And most importantly, what’s the one thing an orchestra can do, other than playing great music well, to make you want to come back?

…and then, about midway through the show, there was this, which had everyone in the theater baffled right up to the very end…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1EYBckMRb4]

If there is a better way to market grand opera in 2009, I don’t know what it would be. And if you ask me, this is exactly the kind of thing orchestras need to be doing more of. Opera companies have gotten very good in recent years at reinventing their image, making their performances seem like not-to-be-missed events, and generally making themselves seem like the cool corner of the classical music world. And that, by extension, makes orchestras the decidedly uncool corner. They’re exciting, we’re sleepy, they’re hip and fresh, we’re stuffy and tuxedoed, they’re simulcasting their biggest shows live to your local movie theater, we’re stuck in a mid-20th century universe pretending that the internet doesn’t exist.

You might point out that it’s easier for an opera company to market itself on a visual medium like YouTube than it would be for an orchestra, but I’m not buying it. The stories behind symphonic music, even non-programmatic stuff like a Shostakovich symphony, are easily as riveting as your average opera libretto. It’s just a matter of finding the part of the narrative that’s going to grab people, and then retelling it in a creative way and getting it out there where people can see it. It’s really not rocket science, and orchestras need to get a whole lot better at embracing that sort of idea, even if it means changing some longstanding elements of our business model…