For Symphony, Day at Ballpark Is a Lot of Work

Most people react to the strains of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” with a genial vision of basking in the bleachers with a beer in one hand and a hot dog in the other.

But to San Diego Symphony’s operations director, Andrew Cady, the song brings to mind the logistical nightmare of setting up the orchestra’s annual stadium concert before a Padres game--without ever setting foot on the playing field.

Whenever the symphony plays outside Symphony Hall, Cady and his crew bear the burden of creating a suitable performing environment for the 81-player orchestra.

“It’s definitely a bigger challenge than setting up a quintet of bluegrass players,” said Cady, who should know, since he spent his first years out of college as a concert promoter.

Even with the county’s usually benign weather, performing outside can provide daunting challenges. Cady recounted a near catastrophe when the orchestra performed last summer in Carlsbad.

“The industrial park is on a windy mesa near the airport, and a sizable Santa Ana wind was blowing the day we were to play. The heat wave was so severe, it fried out our stage crew. Two of our guys literally dropped while setting up for the concert.

“Then, when the setup was accomplished, the wind picked up to 50 to 60 miles an hour, and we had to quickly take down the fiber-glass shell we had put up under the blistering sun because we were afraid it would blow into the audience. In its place, we circled up our vehicles around the setup--fortunately we had a big box van with us--in an effort to create wind protection for the orchestra.”

That concert started 15 minutes late because the crew was still screwing down all the music stands to the plywood stage floor at curtain time. But, Cady noted ironically, a change of wind direction after sunset, which brought in cool ocean air, left symphony players shivering by the concert’s end.

The orchestra has played to audiences as large as 20,000 at a concert before a baseball game at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium--about 10 times the number of listeners at a Symphony Hall full house.

However, setting up at the stadium presents some unique challenges.

“The groundskeeper there will shoot you if you touch the grass,” said James Hoffman, the symphony’s personnel manager and principal percussionist. “We have to put down plywood sheets in front of us, like pontoon boats across a river, in order to get our trucks onto the infield, where we set up. You can’t just drive up and unload your equipment.”

Cady said that because a pregame concert is on an extremely tight schedule, the crew can do the entire setup in 52 minutes and strip it down in 20 minutes.

“Outdoors, the major consideration is acoustics,” Cady said. “The acoustical value of our shell is such that we can reach the first 1,000 people in an outdoor setting without amplification. Beyond that we have to ‘lift’ the music, which is the same situation as our summer site out at Hospitality Point. We close-mike the entire orchestra with some 25 microphones, and run it all back to a sound board.”

Cady said that shielding the players and their instruments from direct exposure to the sun is another problem. Many musicians, he said, especially the string players, have a second instrument for outdoor gigs. No prudent orchestra member would allow his $50,000 cello, for example, to bask in the sun for two hours.

Getting the orchestra’s instruments to an outdoor site is not a major problem, Hoffman said, because only a few of the larger percussion instruments, such as the timpani and tubular chimes, are owned by the symphony.

When the orchestra plays without benefit of a stage, such as at Rancho Bernardo’s Concerts on the Green series, Cady’s crew puts down a temporary wooden floor.

“We do a double skin of plywood over the ground to give a smooth surface, particularly for the bass players and the poor cellists,” he said. A former cellist, Cady easily sympathizes with a cello’s end pin sinking into the damp sod.

For someone thinking about having a symphony instead of a sextet for alfresco serenading, the base price is $17,500.

“This is what we ask for a program that is already rehearsed--for instance a ‘run-out’ of one of our summer pops concerts,” Cady said, adding that a custom-designed program needing rehearsal time would increase the cost significantly.

Most of the San Diego Symphony’s road performances have been within San Diego County, but the group has in the past crossed the border to play at Tijuana Cultural Center. Typical venues are Chula Vista’s Ocean View Park, country clubs in Rancho Bernardo and La Costa.