Philharmonic Should Put Audience First

There were some disturbing opinions expressed and some bad advice given in Mark Swed’s June 25 commentary, “A Testing Moment for the Philharmonic,” that need to be addressed and refuted.

Swed admits he knows as little as everybody else concerning the dismissal of the Philharmonic’s managing director, Willem Wijnbergen; but then he conjectures that there may have been a power struggle between Wijnbergen and artistic director Esa-Pekka Salonen. Swed’s suggestion to the Philharmonic’s board of directors is that “Salonen’s interest and needs should be the Philharmonic’s priority.” As an audience member and subscriber, I feel that the audience’s interests and needs should be the Philharmonic’s priority, which is something that has been missing since Salonen took over the artistic director post.

I have been attending Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts for the last 10 years. When I began subscribing five years ago, I felt I was probably one of the youngest subscribers, and today, at age 38, I still seem to be one of the younger subscribers.

In the time since Salonen became artistic director, the Philharmonic has done little to try to appeal to people like myself who have no music education and have only recently become familiar with the classical repertory. Salonen specializes in the obscure, atonal and dissonant music that appeals to music educators, their students and music critics like Swed. This group of people is not representative of the majority of the concert-going public in Los Angeles and, consequently, many longtime subscribers and supporters of the orchestra are becoming dissatisfied. Attendance has been dropping at an alarming rate. This is the result of what Swed refers to as “the spectacular progress the orchestra has made under Salonen.” If the orchestra makes any more “progress,” there won’t be an audience left.

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What Swed and Salonen seem to be forgetting is that the audience is paying for their tickets. When I pay $55, I expect to hear high-quality music, not some atonal “experiment.” Salonen’s pet projects such as “The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian” have been complete disasters from the viewpoint of audience support and have been building resentment with subscribers, while single-ticket buyers don’t show up.

It should be remembered that classical music fans in Los Angeles have been shown to have rather conservative tastes. Several years ago, classical radio station KUSC-FM tried to program more “adventurous” music alongside standard classical fare and the result was that 30% of its subscribers failed to renew and the general manager wound up resigning.

Meanwhile, last week The Times reported record-breaking attendance figures for the Los Angeles Opera, which shares the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with the Philharmonic. They did not accomplish this by programming a bunch of obscure, dissonant operas. They did it by programming the most beloved operas in the repertory--

“Carmen,” “Madama Butterfly” and “La Traviata,” among others. If the management of the Philharmonic were smart, it would try to emulate the success of L.A. Opera. Unlike the Philharmonic, L.A. Opera has attracted a younger audience and an audience without a music education background. And it did this despite the fact it charges about double what the Philharmonic charges for tickets!

Swed states that Salonen “doesn’t need us as much as we need him,” but in truth the Philharmonic needs its audience more than it needs a music director. And while Salonen is a charismatic figure on the podium, and a first-rate interpreter of Stravinsky, Sibelius, Debussy, Mahler’s Third and Fourth symphonies and numerous obscure, atonal and dissonant works, he is a lousy conductor of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky. My advice to the Philharmonic board of directors is to put aside the selfish “interests and needs” of its music director and concentrate its efforts on meeting the interests and needs of its longtime subscribers and introducing a new generation of people to the joy of classical music.