Protest Seeks to Settle Score With All-Male Vienna Philharmonic

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

But to the 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 gathering was about principles as pure as any note the renowned, historically all-male orchestra has ever played.

“Discrimination, plain and simple, that’s why we’re here,” said JoAnn Shelkey Perlman, a social worker from Laguna Beach who handed out pamphlets to concert-goers. “It’s extremely painful that they are so revered and so behind the times.”

The protest took place despite a vote last week by the orchestra’s members to admit women for the first time in the group’s 155-year history, and despite the fact that 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--was not playing in Tuesday’s performance, which did not call for a harpist.

The demonstration, organized by the south Orange County chapter of the National Organization for Women and the International Alliance for Women in Music, was ignored by most of the people who had bought tickets for the concert months ago.

As the protesters milled 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?”

The protest was distinctly genteel, featuring a flutist and violinist who played duets as demonstrators shivered in the evening chill. And 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 more than $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.”