Only Discord Is Outside the Hall

It was protest as carefully measured as a Mahler adagio or a waltz by Strauss--no big banners flying, no shouting, no fist-pumping activists stopping traffic.

But for the more than 80 demonstrators, mostly women, who gathered outside the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Tuesday night while the Vienna Philharmonic took the stage inside, the protest was about principles as pure as any note that the renowned, historically all-male orchestra has ever played.

“Discrimination, plain and simple, that’s why we’re here,” said JoAnn Shelkey Perlman of the South Orange County chapter of the National Organization for Women, who handed out pamphlets to concert-goers. “It’s extremely painful that they are so revered and so behind the times. They haven’t joined the 20th century.”

The protest took place despite a vote last week by members of the orchestra to admit women for the first time in its 155-year history.

It proceeded even though the first woman granted membership--a harpist who has played with the orchestra for 26 years but has never been named a full member or appeared in concert programs--did not play in Tuesday’s performance, which did not call for a harpist.

And the protest, organized by the South Orange County NOW chapter and the International Alliance for Women in Music, went forward despite being ignored by most of the people who had paid top dollar months ago for concert tickets.

As the protesters milled around near the concert hall, concert-goers avoided them by entering from an adjoining parking garage. Those who did walk to the hall hurried inside.

“If they want to have an orchestra and not have women, it’s live and let live, you know what I’m saying? It’s like a boys club,” said Judith Wilson of Costa Mesa. “Why don’t these people just stop all this nonsense and relax and enjoy the music?”

Views like that did not sit well with the protesters. “Not even,” Suzanne Gillon of Lakewood said indignantly. “Not even if it were free.”

The demonstration was distinctly genteel, though, featuring a flutist and violinist who played duets as protesters shivered in the evening chill. Organizers said “please” and “thank you” to the police in riot gear who had lined up to keep them off the concert hall grounds.

Many of the protesters, dressed in evening gowns and handsome suits, began the evening with dinner at an upscale Italian restaurant.

“I’ve not participated in a protest before,” said Jim Davis, a retired Internal Revenue Service analyst from Laguna Hills. “This is, well, it’s maybe not your customary protest. It’s just a mature group who are willing to recognize what should be.”

The subjects of the protest responded with equal maturity. Within 15 minutes of the demonstrators’ arrival at the concert hall, Dean Corey, executive director of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, strode out to meet with them.

Corey, whose group is spending about $300,000 to sponsor the orchestra’s concerts in Costa Mesa, defended that decision.

“The thing that people don’t understand a lot is that Brahms and Mahler, when they wrote that glorious music, they had the sound of this orchestra in mind,” Corey said.

“You want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to have the job [with the orchestra]. At the same time you don’t want to lose that sound, and it doesn’t have to do with gender, it has to do with tradition.”

Nora Graham of Hollywood Hills, an organizer of the protest, wasn’t buying that explanation.

“All right, all right, they do what they want at home,” she told Corey. “But when they pack up their little circus, their little show, and they bring it to my country, that’s when I really can’t take it.”