The late, great double-talking comic Al Kelly used to impersonate a Hollywood producer being interviewed by a worshipful reporter.
“Mr. Kelly,” the reporter would ask, “what one thing will bring more people into the theaters?”
“Free passes,” Kelly would reply.
It’s a funny line because it’s so obvious, right? Yet last week, more than 2,400 people (not necessarily music zealots, as I will argue) paid as much as $300 a ticket to hear the pianist Yuja Wang— classical music’s current equivalent of Taylor Swift— perform a solo program of relatively little-known works by Messiaen, Scriabin, and Debussy, plus four somewhat better-known Chopin ballades, plus three encores, at Verizon Hall in Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center.
By my eyeball estimate, half the seats that night fell in the $300 category. If we figure the remaining seats conservatively at $100, the total take for the evening exceeded $400,000 and may have reached half a million to hear an artist who surely deserves her status as the queen of classical piano. Yuja Wang’s fee for that evening’s work, based on the best estimates I’ve heard, probably ranged between $50,000 and $75,000. A profitable night for all involved, at first glance. Except…
Ideally, a piano soloist is better suited to a more intimate venue like the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater, which seats only 627. But if Yuja Wang can sell four times as many tickets at premium prices, can you blame her presenters for showcasing her in an orchestral hall like Verizon?
(A similar phenomenon, albeit at a lower scale, is likely to occur this month when Evgeny Kissin, who was the reigning piano phenomenon before Yuja Wang came along, performs a solo recital at Verizon Hall. Tickets for that concert are priced from a low of $51 to a high of $136.)
What’s going on here? Is Philadelphia blessed with thousands of classical music lovers for whom money is no object?
I paid $300 because….
Funny you should ask. Whenever I attend a concert, play, or dance program, I like to stroll the lobby at intermission in search of familiar faces. In any city, there’s a community of music lovers who connect with each other at these events throughout the season, just as there’s a community of pop fans and sports fans. That sense of community is just as important to me as the performance itself. Otherwise, why not stay home and watch a video?
Yet at Yuja Wang’s recital last week, I recognized exactly one familiar face in the crowd (aside from the ushers): the Philadelphia environmental lawyer Joseph Manko. So where did all these other strangers come from? I can’t help surmising that most of them were neither music aficionados nor multimillionaires, but ordinary folks willing to splurge once or twice a year on a special event.
Take a peek, for example, inside my own brain as a Yuja Wang ticket-buyer last week. My wife, Barbara, is a piano teacher who has followed and admired Yuja Wang since Wang arrived in Philadelphia from China as a Curtis Institute student more than 20 years ago. (One of the fringe benefits of life in Center City is the opportunity to hear tomorrow’s great musicians at free student recitals three evenings a week.) Barbara celebrated her birthday last month, and I had neglected to buy her a gift. She was eager to hear Yuja play, and I was equally eager to get off the hook, gift-wise. We live just three blocks from the Kimmel, so transportation wasn’t an issue. Thus, the day before Yuja’s concert, when I checked the Kimmel website and found that the only decent available seats would cost me $300 each, I shrugged and said what the hell.
Opera’s high-wire act
These musings were provoked by “Who Killed the Pops?”, Philadelphia Magazine’s April post-mortem for the Philly Pops Orchestra, which folded last year despite its loyal audience and its 44-year presence in a city with a large appetite for popular-style orchestral music (i.e., Broadway show tunes, upbeat classical, jazz, rock, etc.). Writer David Murrell suggests that the Pops was doomed by a perfect storm of poor management, the Covid pandemic, a greedy landlord, the failure of its charismatic founding conductor, Peter Nero, to groom a successor, even the Philadelphia Orchestra’s desire to acquire or eliminate a competitor. (Murrell overlooks one other factor: the embezzlement of $280,000 by the Pops’ financial director.)
My own take about success in any form of entertainment— Al Kelly and Yuja Wang notwithstanding— is simpler, to wit: (a) There’s no single formula for success in music or theater, and (b) no human institution lasts forever. Also, the most creative arts impresarios are often the worst business managers, and vice versa.
Some of my most sublime operagoing memories occurred during the 1980s, when Margaret Anne Everitt ran the Opera Company of Philadelphia. In any given month, I might encounter the bass James Morris playing the devil in three different operas based on the Faust story; the mezzo-soprano Victoria Vergara in a Carmen updated into the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s; legendary soloists like Jessye Norman, Justino Diaz, Regine Crespin, and Sherill Milnes; and of course the world’s then-greatest tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, singing regularly with the young winners of his International Voice Competition, which he and Everitt organized in 1982. Back then, the Opera Company hosted nationwide TV audiences for seven different productions, one of which (La Bohème, with Pavarotti in 1982) won an Emmy and reached the largest American TV opera audience up to that time.
But Everitt’s regime was itself a high-wire act without a safety net, where the drama often spilled over from the stage into the audience and the boardroom. In the company’s perpetually strapped financial condition, ticket holders could never be certain that a performance would offer more than minimal sets, or that the musicians would show up (they once waited until 15 minutes before curtain time to settle their contract). For much of Everitt’s regime, tickets were available only at the box office, and only for cash or check— no credit cards. Board members could never be certain when Everitt would exhort them (as she did during at least one board meeting) to “take out your checkbooks right now!”
By contrast, the consummate theatrical promoter Bernard Havard has never won an Emmy and has rarely won critical praise during his 41 years at the helm of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theater. But he did build the world’s largest subscriber base (50,000) by packaging consistently professional performances of familiar Broadway hits at way below Broadway prices.
What price Biss and Uchida?
So, yes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Less than a month before Yuja Wang captivated that adoring crowd at Verizon Hall, two other great pianists— Jonathan Biss and Mitsuko Uchida— teamed up to travel the East Coast performing a challenging program of four-hand Schubert duets. The Inquirer’s Peter Dobrin called it “the classical season’s hottest ticket.” And what, you ask, was the price of this hot ticket? Well, at Carnegie Hall in New York City, it cost $175. In Princeton, N.J., and upstate New York, you could attend the exact same program for $50. And at the Perelman Theater in Philadelphia, where all 627 seats were sold out since last June, with a waiting list of a hundred, the price of a ticket was…. would you believe $30?
How’s that possible? When I caught up last week with the program’s Philadelphia presenter, Miles Cohen of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, he provided a ready explanation: Unlike most major music organizations, the Chamber Music Society deliberately draws 70% of its support from donors and foundations and only 30% from ticket sales.
“We want to build a community of chamber music fans who will come to our concerts all year, not just once to hear Yuja Wang,” he told me. “Price should never be a barrier for such fans.” Instead of jacking up its ticket price for big-name attractions, PCMS charges pretty much the same $30 ticket price for all its programs. Some of these performers command higher fees than others. But PCMS tries to make up the difference by cultivating what Cohen calls “a philanthropic audience”— that is, loyal concertgoers who are also willing to become donors.
“We’re at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to ticket price,” Cohen cheerfully concedes. It’s not a formula that works for all music groups, obviously. But it appears to have worked very well for PCMS since its founding in 1986 with a stated mission to “engage our community in a life more beautiful through the shared experience of chamber music.”
Princeton’s audience vs. Philly’s
That mission statement sounds very similar to the mantra of the iconic Japanese music teacher Shinichi Suzuki: “Teaching music is not my main purpose. I want to make good citizens. If children hear fine music from the day of their birth and learn to play it, they develop sensitivity, discipline, and endurance. They get a beautiful heart.”
In the 38 years since its founding, the Chamber Music Society has presented more than 1,700 concerts (50 every season!), commissioned 60 new works, and presented 100 world premieres. This strategy works largely because, I would argue, its leaders know their purpose and their audience, and they understand that building a community matters more long-term scoring a big blockbuster program now and then.
For last month’s Biss-Uchida program, the Chamber Music Society probably could have charged two or three times its normal ticket price and sold two or three times as many tickets by moving the program to Verizon Hall. It did neither. Its top priority was sustaining its community in an appropriately intimate venue.
A music teacher friend of ours, formerly of Philadelphia, attended last month’s Biss-Uchida concert in Princeton and remarked afterward that the audience didn’t seem as “appreciative” as the audience in Philadelphia. Why am I not surprised? And why was I not surprised when, at the Biss-Uchida program at the Perelman, I recognized many more familiar faces in the audience than I did at Yuja Wang’s concert at Verizon?
Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com
From reader Robert Zaller:
he best musical deal I ever had was writing reviews for that quirkily excellent pub, the Broad Street Review (it was excellent; I was the quirky one). Not only did I get to air my personal prejudices in public but to be paid and comped for them. Your $300 Yuja Wang ticket thumped me, but I did manage to hear Simon Rattle do the Mahler Sixth for a $25 rush ticket last week—a center orchestra seat too. One pianist for 300 bucks and a hundred superb musicians for a twelfth the price? Well, I did hear Vladimir Horowitz perform for $8 once, but that was a while ago. Also, it was good to hear a visiting orchestra here after a couple of silent decades. And the Bavarians were as good as the Philadelphians, with the added attraction of a maestro who doesn’t make a spectacle of himself.
From reader Concha Alborg:
Uchida's concert at the Perelman was indeed wonderful and, as you wrote, such a bargain. But I noticed that almost the entire audience was made of people our age. Cultural organizations need to attract younger generations, especially to classical performances. The Orchestra is trying new formats, but the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society needs to get on board as well.