With cheap seats, conversations with high-profile composers and programming that includes a CSI-style forensics exploration of Beethoven next season, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will challenge two of the most common complaints about classical music - that it's too expensive and too old-fashioned.
As part of a strategy unveiled yesterday to bolster attendance, the BSO will reduce the average subscription cost to classical and pops programs by 40 percent.
New and current subscribers to the BSO's 2007-2008 season, the inaugural season of music director Marin Alsop, will pay only $25 per concert for seats anywhere in Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, including the usually pricey box seats.
The new pricing is made possible by a $1 million grant from the PNC Foundation, the charitable arm of Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Services Group. (Shareholders of the Baltimore-based Mercantile Bankshares voted yesterday to approve its sale to PNC.)
"The staff came up with a really radical approach to pricing to encourage more people [to come] into the hall," BSO President and CEO Paul Meecham said yesterday.
BSO officials sought funding for the initiative last month.
Meecham said it was "the perfect storm - Marin Alsop's first season, the 25th anniversary of Meyerhoff Hall and PNC's entry into the market. PNC's underwriting effectively allows us to risk doing this."
Henry Fogel, president and CEO of the American Symphony Orchestra League in New York, said yesterday that "a number of orchestras, small and large, have begun to take seriously the whole issue of pricing.
"But I'm not aware of anything like" the BSO's $25 ticketing policy, Fogel said.
Steven Mackey, whose work Time Relief for marimba and orchestra the BSO will perform locally and at Carnegie Hall next season, called the ticket price change "a big deal."
"Now a regular old working-class stiff can take his wife to a symphony concert," he said. "And by the end of the year, that person will be transformed. It will be amazing."
Last fall, the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts sponsored a two-month, citywide campaign of free arts programming. Bill Gilmore, director of the office, said that the BSO's move "mirrors much of what we tried to do with Free Fall Baltimore, to make the arts more accessible and to build audiences. We know that ticket prices are a barrier for a lot of people."
