Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Thursday, March 09, 2017

Leveraging music for cultural and economic development: part one, opera

The Elbphilharmonie building was designed to look like the prow of a ship, in honor of its location on the city's waterfront.  Photo: Marcelo Hernandez / Hamburg Abendblatt.

 1.  Hamburg.  After many many years of construction and setbacks--partly because the opera building was constructed on top of an existing historic building, the new Elbphilharmonie, finally opened in January, after having first been promised for 2009.  The cost ended up as much as ten times the initial estimate, and was paid in its entirety by the local government.

Besides primary and secondary halls and related facilities, the building, located in the redeveloping waterfront district of HafenCity, includes a hotel, luxury condominiums, restaurants, and a viewing terrace overlooking the waterfront.

Photo: Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times.

Hamburg is already a major destination for the presentation of  musicals ("'Tarzan' and 'Lion King' Make Hamburg a Theater City," New York Times), and the Elbphilharmonie further broadens the appeal of the city as a destination for the performing arts ("In Hamburg, a New Musical Landmark for a City With Plans, NYT).

According to Mark Swed's review ("What does this critic hear at the new Elbphilharmonie concert hall? The sound of the future") in the Los Angeles Times, the building is a big attraction already, and presents concerts daily, all of which have sold out:
More than a million visitors have already taken the 2½-minute ride on a curved escalator through the “launching pad” (a tube) that leads to the main public area, a plaza with a terrace where you can walk the perimeter outdoors with stunning views of the harbor and the city, have a bite to eat and hit the ample souvenir shop. ...

There are concerts most days, all sold out through August, including a large summer festival. People are preparing to pounce the moment seats for the second season go on sale, and it doesn’t seem to matter what is being performed, be it a symphony, a string quartet, new music, early music, world music, pop or anything in between.

The vast majority of the music is classical, which has excited Hamburg’s classical community no end.
The Philharmonie de Paris is accessed via an imposing staircase. Photograph: CHARLES PLATIAU/REUTERS

2.  Paris.  As part of the trend of the construction of new modern concert halls in European cities such as Helsinki and Hamburg, a new concert hall opened in 2015 ("Philharmonie de Paris: Jean Nouvel's €390m spaceship crash-lands in France," Guardian).

As interestingly, a new concert complex is about to open in the Paris suburbs.  Called La Seine Musicale, it's built on an island on a site that had been an automobile manufacturing plant.

What La Seine Musicale will look like on completion (Baudin Chateauneuf/Shiger Ban Architect).

There will be a large auditorium (6,000 seats) and a smaller concert hall (1.150 seats), along with recording studios, a public garden, and retail and restaurants.

The music program won't be limited to classical music--Bob Dylan will open the auditorium with an inaugural concert on April 22nd.

In the US, suburban music halls have had some difficulties maintaining interest, in part reflecting perhaps less interest in high culture, although many universities maintain active performing arts programs,  Still, the opening of high quality concert facilities in suburbs in part is an indicator of the maturation of suburban communities as "complete places."

3.  Chicago. Since the Great Recession, a number of opera companies shut down (San Diego, New York City, etc.), and audiences have been declining. Unlike in Europe, there appears to be less demand in the US for classical music-related programming.

And local opera companies face competition from the digital broadcasts of the New York City-based Metropolitan Opera, shown in a network of theaters across the country. Likely this cuts into the local audience for live performances, since they can see very high quality productions on the screen for less than the cost of a ticket to a local production.

Crain's Chicago Business writes about the Lyric Opera ("Can Lyric Opera survive the 21st century?," on the challenges faced by the opera company. From the article:
It's showering subscribers, who long ago stopped packing the house season after season, with thank-you notes, more efficient valet parking and other perks. Operagoers will now find a sushi kiosk in the lobby on some nights and also reusable lidded beverage cups, the better to enjoy one's cocktail during a performance of "Carmen."

Lyric's product, grand opera, employs singing, acting, visual arts and sometimes dancing to tell stories in a powerful way. It is also old-fashioned and costly.

To keep operations sustainable through the 21st century, Lyric has to court new subscribers and ticket buyers in a changing arts world that values casualness and flexibility.​

That's why Lyric's to-do list is almost as long as "Tristan und Isolde": Court single-ticket buyers, hang on to subscribers, cut costs, update the stage and systems, and modernize marketing.

It's doing all that in "a business environment that is less predictable and more volatile than any of us can ever remember," says Anthony Freud, Lyric's general director and CEO.
The article mentions how the Company hasn't had a sold out season since 2001-2, and discusses the various initiatives Lyric Opera is taking to maintain interest, increase ticket sales, and generate other sources of income.

Berlin's Pierre Boulez Hall is a new auditorium for chamber music designed by Frank Gehry. Glass acoustical "sails" attached to the underside of the balcony are just barely visible here. (Volker Kreidler)

4.  Berlin.  The Frank Gehry designed Pierre Boulez Concert Hall opened last Saturday. From the Atavist piece, "Music for the thinking ear":
... Frank Gehry’s oval design, with no stage, merely a center, genuinely seems to open up, in the spirit of Boulez’s long-held desire for a flexible salle modulable, the possibility of the “thinking ear”: to engage, to reflect, to make itself part of the performance. The greatest possible distance between the conductor and the most distant member of the audience (682 seats in total) is just 14 meters. There is intimacy—the intimacy, its initiators hope, of collaborative endeavor.
Also see "Frank Gehry's new jewel-box concert hall in the heart of Berlin," Los Angeles Times. From the article:
The 682-seat hall is tucked into one corner of a four-story building from 1955 that was designed by architect Richard Paulick to store sets for the Berlin State Opera, where Barenboim is music director. The building, which sits rather anonymously on a corner in the Mitte district, in the heart of Berlin, backing up to an important civic plaza called Bebelplatz, is now the headquarters for the Barenboim-Said Academy, a conservatory that includes young Israeli and Arab musicians.
Conclusion. An email comment I received on this article originally made the point that the average US city is fine with funding facilities for professional sports, less so for the arts.

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8 Comments:

At 12:37 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

there is a higher regard for the function of the fine arts in society in places like Germany where they are willing to spend big Euros on what is seen here as " superfluous" or marginal activity. Yet we in DC have what I have seen documented as a billion dollar economy in the arts and related fields of employment- and our local governments fail to recognize this- and still push " box seats" for sports venues over the fine arts. If anything they need to be doing both and not favoring one over the other. In Germany sports are definitely NOT given the short shrift.

 
At 3:25 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

Interesting article about Opera Philadelphia, and how after doing extensive market research, they found that there are distinctly different market segments for traditional opera and new opera. But committed to diversifying their audience and support, they have committed to both.

https://www.sfcv.org/article/opera-philadelphia-the-hbo-of-the-opera-world

9/7/2018

 
At 7:59 AM, Blogger RED ARROW said...

Speaking of music, I've just discovered that you can download any existing music piece from torrent websites and that's great. But I am always afraid of getting a virus when I download stuff online so I just checked out Bitdefender mac review and I think that it may solve my problem.

 
At 2:28 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

Collaboration between Austin Symphony Orchestra and a local DJ

https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2020-03-06/austin-symphony-orchestra-heads-bach-to-the-clubs

The program was initiated in 2018 as a new way of getting ASO out of the concert hall and connected to the contemporary music community in a way it hadn't been before. The plan was to match four DJs with four classical pieces (yes, program namesake Bach was represented) and have them create mixes inspired by the older music, then stick it in a club where the audience would get to hear four ASO musicians play each classical work live before each DJ launched into their thumping creation. What happened the first time ASO tested that concept on the street – on Dirty Sixth of all streets – the result was a packed Parish and a crowd that was equally jazzed about the Bach and the beats. With the experiment such a success, ASO said, "Let's do it again."

 
At 5:23 AM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

As opera companies struggle to survive, a sustained note of alarm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2024/02/10/opera-companies-crisis-struggling-closing/

One of the things about institutions is that we tend to treat them as such — stable essential structures that feel like part of the natural landscape, large enough that they attain a kind of invisibility, a permanence fueled by assumption and faith.

The first cracks started forming in November 2022 across the pond, when Arts Council England (ACE) announced cuts that would leave the London-based English National Opera (ENO) short $14 million from the suspension of an annual grant — i.e. a third of the company’s budget — unless the company relocated to Manchester.

January 2023 saw a slight turn of fortunes for ENO, as the council granted the company an extra year in London supported by a little more than $14 million in holdover funding.

“The ENO and our audiences remain in the dark as to why ACE decided to remove our status as a National Portfolio Organisation, despite us meeting or exceeding all the criteria they set,” ENO said last year in a January statement. “One in seven of our audience are under 35, one in five of our principal performers are ethnically diverse and over 50% of our audience are brand new to opera.”

A subsequent subsidy of $30 million and an extension on the relocation timeline to 2029 have allowed the company to limp toward its Mancunian hometown but have thrown its identity into chaos. Proposed cuts of 19 orchestral players and transference of all musicians to part-time contracts enraged members of the opera community and rattled music director Martyn Brabbins into an October resignation, writing that “the proposed changes would drive a coach and horses through the artistic integrity” of the company.

“This is a plan of managed decline,” he said, “rather than an attempt to rebuild the company and maintain the world-class artistic output, for which ENO is rightly famed.”

Rumblings of trouble stateside grew in June, when Tulsa Opera announced the cancellation of two of its forthcoming productions, reporting a 39 percent drop in revenue in 2022 and projecting a 44 percent drop in 2023.

Then in July, the renowned Chautauqua Institution and its Chautauqua Opera Company and Conservatory announced sweeping operational changes to survive its own financial crisis, slating no new productions for its Norton Hall home.

In August, the head of Opera Philadelphia said he would step down at the end of the 2023-2024 season as the company, facing $2 million in budget cuts and a 16 percent reduction in staff, announced the postponement of Joseph Bologne’s “The Anonymous Lover” to the 2024-2025 season.

 
At 5:24 AM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

Really good point that slightly fewer productions increases attendance at the remaining shows.

August also brought news that the Metropolitan Opera Guild would scale back operations — the nonprofit has acted as an assisting organization to the Met since 1935, when its contributions helped the company survive the Great Depression — and with it the publication of the 87-year-old Opera News. (Its final issue was printed in November, and the publication has since been incorporated into the British magazine Opera.)

Met general manager Peter Gelb told the AP the loss was “the result of several years of declining economic fortunes.”

In October, Maryland Lyric Opera called it quits with little explanation in a farewell note posted by founder and artistic director Brad Clark. In November, Syracuse Opera canceled the rest of its season and furloughed its staff of one full-time and four part-time employees.

A big one came in December 2022, when the Metropolitan Opera announced it would tap its $306 million endowment for a projected $30 million to make up for revenue shortfalls. Though few opera houses operate at the scale and expense of the Met, the company is still seen as an indicator of vital signs for the industry. The withdrawal was accompanied by a reduction in total performances, a commitment to better-selling contemporary works in forthcoming seasons and a widespread sinking feeling across the opera world.

But the ongoing crisis in opera parallels a current “free fall” (as Post critic Peter Marks put it) in American theater — with low ticket sales, slumping philanthropy and rising costs putting experimental platforms and long-standing institutions alike on indefinite hiatus or permanent leave.

O’Leary pointed to compounding failures of dated systems, such as subscription models for ticket sales — which, in striking contrast to the subscription services most popular with consumers, require firm and early commitments with little flexibility, i.e. you pay for given seats on certain dates for select performances. “Some of these structures are endemic to the art form,” he says, “and we can innovate around them.”

O’Leary has managed to grow the WNO’s endowment from $8.4 million in 2018 to nearly $15 million. As a matter of policy, every bequest and gift goes straight to the endowment, and the company’s unique relationship with the Kennedy Center — which relieves its cash flow worries — allows the funds to sit and grow.

More important (no less than “the key to the future” to O’Leary) is changing the cost structures of opera — itself something of an old technology — and making some light tweaks to supply and demand.

A slight reduction of total performances — from nine productions and 48 performances in the 2019-2020 season to seven productions and 33 performances this season — created effectively higher demand. Ticket sales for every performance since January 2023 have been in the range of 95 percent to fully sold-out. (That’s up from an average of 62 percent in the fall of 2022.) The trim has also encouraged early demand, leading to a trend-bucking 12 percent boost in subscribership.

 
At 5:27 AM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/01/washington-opera-new-audience/

Cultivating an audience for opera

And what it takes includes patient cultivation of new audiences, beginning with the young, over an extended period of years. Mr. O’Leary did this in St. Louis, and he’s the perfect fit for Washington. Ms. Zambello made me a “believer” when she showed that this area will even eat up a brand-new “Ring Cycle.”

===
Washington National Opera also does a series at the Washington Nationals baseball stadium

https://operawire.com/washington-national-opera-to-present-opera-in-the-outfield

 
At 6:53 AM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

'Gateway drug:' A Pittsburgh music organization's annual Bach program is bringing in new listeners

https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/music/2024/03/13/chatham-baroque-joy-of-bach-tickets-classical-music-growth-subscription-pittsbur/stories/202403110079

In contrast to news of dropping subscriptions and canceled concerts around the country, Chatham Baroque, a plucky early music group that both performs concerts and presents other early music specialists in concert, has seen its ticket sales grow beyond pre-pandemic levels. Its subscriptions have more than doubled this season. It’s budget has grown to about $600,000.

Their secret? Play Bach.

This is part of a pattern in the arts these days: Familiar names are helping bring attendees back to concert halls. At the opera, “Barber of Seville” drew big crowds in the fall; at the ballet, “The Nutcracker” shattered records and at the symphony, Beethoven and John Williams have brought in big numbers as well. (Just a reminder, ticket sales generally account for only about a quarter of these nonprofits budgets, with philanthropy making up most of the rest.) Familiarity sells, and in some cases, sells well.

Chatham Baroque performs an annual “Joy of Bach” program to celebrate the composer’s birthday in March. The organization and its guests all perform on period instruments to replicate how the music would have sounded when it was written.

“Last year this was our biggest concert, in terms of sales,” said Andrew Fouts, Chatham’s violinist and artistic director.

The committee is intended to increase transparency throughout the repairs process by giving Pittsburgh taxpayers and Mount Washington business owners a place to direct their input and ask their questions. The more perspectives PRT can gather on the issue, the better, Ms. Kelleman said.

 

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