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  Audience members seated in a grand orchestra hall. There are a few
  empty seats in the foreground.
  A crowd at Severance Hall in Cleveland during the Cleveland Orchestra’s
  inaugural humanities festival, part of an effort to broaden
  audiences.Credit...Dustin Franz for The New York Times

Audiences Are Coming Back to Orchestras After ‘Scary’ Sales Last Fall

  “It seemed like a switch flipped right before Thanksgiving,” the leader
  of the Chicago Symphony said.

  A crowd at Severance Hall in Cleveland during the Cleveland Orchestra’s
  inaugural humanities festival, part of an effort to broaden
  audiences.Credit...Dustin Franz for The New York Times

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  [14]Zachary Woolfe

  By [15]Zachary Woolfe

  Reporting from Cleveland
    * May 23, 2023Updated 3:37 p.m. ET

  Puccini’s opera “La Fanciulla del West” ends with heartbreaking
  wistfulness, as a crowd of Gold Rush miners bids a sad farewell to the
  life they’ve known.

  But for the superb Cleveland Orchestra, which recently finished a short
  run of concert performances of the piece, the 2022-23 season is ending
  happily, with little nostalgia for how things were going just a few
  months ago.

  At the first performance, a Sunday matinee, “Fanciulla” was
  enthusiastically received by an audience that the orchestra said was at
  about 70 percent capacity.

  That’s hardly a phenomenal number. But for Cleveland, it was more than
  satisfying after a grim fall for attendance. In interviews, orchestra
  leaders around the country echoed that sentiment, saying that things
  had been deeply disappointing early on this season for them, too — and
  that their panic had calmed amid winter and spring sales that were, if
  not boffo, at least not devastating.

  “You feel it’s really moving up,” André Gremillet, Cleveland’s chief
  executive, said of recent attendance at Severance Hall, the orchestra’s
  home.

  The size of audiences at concerts here and in many other cities was
  “miserable” in early fall, said Simon Woods, the leader of the League
  of American Orchestras, a trade group. “To be honest, people were quite
  dejected.”

  Image Two singers, a man and woman, are on a raised platform. The
  woman’s arms are out, the man is looking at her. Below them we see
  orchestra players and the conductor, in the foreground, with arms up.
  In the background is the grand Severance Hall.
  Franz Welser-Möst conducting the orchestra in Puccini’s “La Fanciulla
  del West,” starring (on platform) Emily Magee and Limmie
  Pulliam.Credit...Roger Mastroianni/The Cleveland Orchestra

  Sellouts weren’t everyday occurrences at major orchestras even before
  the pandemic, and subscription rates were dipping. But, as with so much
  else, Covid accelerated existing trends. For many ensembles, the
  2021-22 season had been a tentative step forward after a pandemic
  pause, and the assumption was that 2022-23 would return to something
  approaching the old days.

  Instead, September brought a rude surprise.

  Even for orchestras of Cleveland’s eminence and civic stature, people
  simply weren’t showing up. At the silvery 2,000-seat Severance,
  Gremillet said, “we’d have perhaps 1,100 or 1,200. For us, that’s not
  very good.”

  It wasn’t just in Cleveland. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra hovered
  around half full, on average; the Philadelphia Orchestra, too.

  Before the pandemic, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra had been
  averaging houses just over 70 percent. But in fall, said Melia
  Tourangeau, its chief executive, “we were happy, we were jumping up and
  down, if we got above 1,000” — about 37 percent of the 2,700-seat Heinz
  Hall. “It was very visible, and very scary.”

  In Dallas, said Kim Notelmy, that ensemble’s leader: “We remained
  hopeful because we felt people were interested. But we weren’t seeing
  it translate into ticket sales.”

  But then a turnaround appeared most everywhere, which many leaders
  ascribed to an easing of lingering health concerns around the pandemic,
  particularly among older segments of the audience.

  “It seemed like a switch flipped right before Thanksgiving,” said Jeff
  Alexander, of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

  Dallas and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra reported that noticeable
  improvement began a bit earlier, around mid-October. By the end of
  fall, Philadelphia was in the 70 or 75 percent range, where it has
  stayed.

  Woods, of the League of American Orchestras, said: “Holiday sales were
  very strong, some stronger than in 2019. And that, I think,
  turbocharged audiences.” Erik Rönmark, the head of the Detroit Symphony
  Orchestra, said, “Our holiday concerts were the best-sold ones we’ve
  ever had.”

  Image
  André Gremillet, left, the Cleveland Orchestra’s chief executive, and
  Richard K. Smucker, the orchestra’s board chair, in front of Severance
  Hall during the festival.Credit...Dustin Franz for The New York Times

  In Pittsburgh, Tourangeau said, “during the holidays, we got this huge
  push.” There have been a handful of sold-out performances at Heinz Hall
  in the new year, she added, both for pops programming and for core
  classical pieces like Mozart’s Requiem and Holst’s “The Planets.”

  “It’s below prepandemic,” she said, “but we’re within 3 percent of
  where we were.”

  For orchestras beyond the largest and most famous, Woods said, the
  story was much the same: A brutal beginning to the season, followed by
  a heartening uptick later in fall that accelerated through the
  holidays. (The New York Philharmonic, which opened its renovated David
  Geffen Hall to much publicity in October, was a lucky exception,
  selling well all year.)

  Cleveland’s rebound took longer to start than some other major
  institutions’; until March or so, Gremillet said, audiences were still
  significantly down. But the trajectory has been positive: The orchestra
  said its concerts sold an average of 67 percent for January to May, up
  from 54 percent from September to December.

  Almost every orchestra remains below where it was a few years ago.
  Matías Tarnopolsky of the Philadelphia Orchestra said, “We’re still,
  depending on where you measure, 10 to 15 percent behind where we were
  in 2019 — sometimes 20 percent.”

  In St. Louis, Marie-Hélène Bernard, the orchestra’s chief executive,
  said, “We’re hovering 25 to 28 percent behind where we were.” The San
  Francisco Symphony was 68 percent sold this season through mid-May,
  compared to 82 percent at the same point in its final prepandemic
  season.

  “It’s still not back fully, and it’s more unpredictable,” Gremillet, of
  Cleveland, said. “We sold out all three concerts in April for the
  Wynton Marsalis trumpet concerto, with Dvorak’s ‘New World’ on the
  second half. But the week before was Bernard Labadie conducting an
  all-Mozart program, and it didn’t do great. In the prepandemic world,
  an all-Mozart program would do fine.”

  Image
  The writer Isabel Wilkerson gave the keynote speech at the new
  humanities festival, organized around the theme of the American dream
  that’s firmly present in the 19th-century California of “La Fanciulla
  del West.”Credit...Dustin Franz for The New York Times

  The increasing separation between programs that do well and those that
  don’t was noted in many interviews. “It either sells out immediately or
  it doesn’t sell at all,” Tourangeau said. “It’s feast or famine.”

  Subscriptions are still generally lagging, even as they tick up from
  pandemic lows. Orchestras are reaching more — and younger — buyers than
  before, though those newcomers tend to buy fewer tickets per season.
  Audience members also now tend to wait longer to purchase, making
  budgeting and marketing strategies less predictable. This is all
  requiring expensive adjustments internally.

  Programmers are watching the numbers carefully. “We changed the plans
  next season to make sure there are more of the major masterworks,”
  Tarnopolsky, of Philadelphia, said. “Maybe those anchor pieces
  that people look for weren’t present enough, so we’re making sure that
  they are — alongside our commitment to the contemporary and diverse.”

  For some orchestras, this period of uncertainty has provided an
  opportunity to experiment. Cleveland, which has in the past accompanied
  its annual opera performances with other concerts, expanded that effort
  this year into a humanities festival, which came together in a little
  over a year — a flash in the glacially moving world of classical music.

  An attempt to draw audiences interested in things besides Puccini, and
  to amplify the orchestra’s presence in its city, the festival was
  organized around the theme of the American dream that’s firmly present
  in the 19th-century California of “Fanciulla.”

  There were film screenings, theater productions, panels, readings, an
  art tour — many of the offerings collaborations with other Cleveland
  institutions. Over 24 hours, it was possible to pair a “Fanciulla”
  matinee — the playing sumptuous yet lucid under the orchestra’s music
  director, Franz Welser-Möst — with a rousing performance by local
  choruses and a keynote speech from the writer Isabel Wilkerson (“The
  Warmth of Other Suns,” “Caste”).

  These events weren’t full, but the audiences responded warmly —
  standing and dancing at their seats for the charming choruses — and the
  festival was a compelling proof of concept, an ambitious achievement to
  put an exclamation point on a roller-coaster season.

  “We are feeling better this year than we were this time last year,”
  Gremillet said. “Which leads me to think that what we’ve been seeing
  these past few months is continuing.”

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