When the Music Starts, Who Will Be Left Sitting?

The first notes won’t sound in its new home for another year, but listeners and management at the Los Angeles Philharmonic have already begun an epic game of musical chairs, one that begins amid the 3,086 seats in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and will end across the street on Grand Avenue, amid the 2,265 seats of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

For management, the goal is to use the steel-skinned, wavy-walled venue to woo new subscribers and motivate the old before October, when the orchestra begins its final season in the 38-year-old Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Under this strategy--which has already boosted subscription sales 23% above last year’s figure--the orchestra’s marketers have told subscribers that extra donations will get them better seats and hinted that dawdling could leave them seatless.

“It doesn’t make me too happy, because I’m a good proletarian,” said Natalie Limonick, a longtime subscriber and former USC music professor who teaches voice and piano. Still, Limonick said, “they’re doing what they have to do. Money, money, money rules the world.”

As Limonick and others note, the task of appeasing 27,000 priority-seeking subscription-holders in clout-conscious Los Angeles stands as a challenge in human engineering to rival the mathematics behind architect Frank Gehry’s tilting, soaring wall panels.

The new hall, which carries a projected $274-million price tag, is scheduled to open in fall 2003. “The only way to assure a seat,” the Philharmonic marketing staff wrote subscribers in a recent promotional mailing, is to sign on for season seats in the old hall this year. Furthermore, the Philharmonic’s letter noted, every gift “made by Sept. 1, 2002, counts toward subscriber seating priority.”

Soon after Labor Day, marketing director Joan Cumming said, current subscribers will get mailers with seating maps and ticket prices (they’re expected to rise in most cases) for Disney Hall. They’ll be asked to indicate their first, second and third choice among sections, but they can’t earmark specific seats.

When the responses come back, Cumming said, the Philharmonic will match subscribers with specific seats.

For the box office staffers making those assignments, Philharmonic officials say, the foremost questions will be: How long has this person been a subscriber, and where is the subscriber’s current seat? The second set of questions: If this person is a donor, how far back does the giving go, and how big have the checks been? Third: Does this person have a history of volunteer work for the Philharmonic?

The Philharmonic’s Web site elaborates on this philosophy, but spokeswoman Elizabeth Hinckley declined to disclose details of the process. For instance: Who gets priority between a 15-year subscriber who has donated nothing and a five-year subscriber who has donated $10,000?

“It’s proprietary information,” said Hinckley, adding that the largest donors and longest subscribers are frequently the same people.

Jacquie Blew, a 38-year subscriber, said: “You can buy your way in. Let’s be honest about it. It’s a little bit off-putting.” But Blew, who worked for the Philharmonic for 11 years before taking her current position as box office associate with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, agrees that the Philharmonic’s focus on donations is inevitable, because ticket sales alone seldom cover the costs of classical programming. Figuring out whom to seat where in the new hall, she said, “must be the biggest headache in the world.”

The transition is in many ways an apples-to-oranges affair. The old hall holds 3,086 seats in a traditional four-level concert hall arrangement, and the costliest, most coveted seats are those in the Founders Circle, where an eight-concert subscription in 2002-03 costs $656 per seat.

The new hall’s 2,265 seats are also arranged in four levels, but the hall’s 10 sections circle the orchestra platform, putting some seats behind the musicians but quite close to them. In fact, the farthest seat from the stage is about 120 feet away--much closer than in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

“It’s really hard for someone to think, ‘I’ve been sitting in the loge for 25 years. Where’s the loge?’ There is no loge. It doesn’t translate,” Cumming said.

The reseating game is still in its early stages, but the demand for seats has been growing for more than a year. In 2000-01, the orchestra counted 19,000 subscribers (that is, concertgoers who bought packages in advance for three to eight performances during the season). That figure grew, Cumming said, to about 22,000 for the 2001-02 season. With several weeks of sales left before the Oct. 3 season opening, Cumming said, the 2002-03 subscription figure has reached 27,000.

However, there still seems to be plenty of room. Through the 2001-02 season, Cumming said the Philharmonic’s average attendance “hovered around 1,900 people per concert,” which left about 1,180 empty seats in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and would have left about 360 empty seats in the new hall--room for demand to grow.

And supply is growing as well. The orchestra’s subscription schedule in 2002-03 includes 89 performances (covering 29 programs). With the move into Disney Hall, Cumming said, the performance count will grow to more than 100. The result, Cumming said, is that “there should be plenty of room available” in the new hall.

But subscribers and other music fans nevertheless face daunting variables themselves, from what section to seek in an unknown hall to how much they’re willing to pay.

Ticket prices, now $33 to $82 per performance for subscribers, may fall for some, depending on their section choice, but will rise overall. Cumming said that the new prices were decided after focus-group research in the spring. They will be revealed when subscribers get their mailings in the next few weeks.

Given the Philharmonic’s history with subscribers, those weeks stand to be anxious ones. Twenty years ago, when conductor Carlo Maria Giulini wanted to extend the stage into the audience to improve sound and heighten immediacy, audience members rebelled and management backed down. The orchestra went through a similar experiment and retreat in 1995. Finally, in 1999, the orchestra crafted a stage extension that affected 480 seats and won enough support to survive challenges.

Howard Felsher, a Tarzana resident who has subscribed to the Philharmonic for more than 20 years, has been complaining since 1998 about the “extortionate” way the Philharmonic has invoked Disney Hall to encourage donations. Despite the organization’s public statements that subscriber tenure is its most heavily weighted criterion in seat assignments, Felsher says he doesn’t believe it. If the orchestra would just come out and say that money matters most, he said, “then we would all know where we stand.”

Aiming to calm such anxieties, Philharmonic management plans in September to start calling every subscriber household--an estimated 11,000 of them--to answer questions. During the 2002-03 season, meanwhile, concertgoers will find information tables in the Chandler lobby, Internet prowlers will find increased information on the Philharmonic’s Web site and a subscriber reseating hotline will be established. Subscription renewal packages for 2003-04 will probably be sent out by late November.

By the end of March 2003, Cumming said, seat assignments for returning subscribers in the new hall should be made. In April 2003, first-time subscribers will get their first chance. Single-ticket sales for the 2003-04 season will open in September 2003.

For William Vance Smith Jr., a retired postal worker from Hancock Park who has subscribed on and off for 38 years, the worst anxiety has passed. Several years ago, when he started hearing about the new hall, he said, “I got paranoid. My name is not Chandler.” But since then, Philharmonic representatives have reassured him that his front-row mezzanine subscription seat, along with his donation of $1,500 to Disney Hall in the late 1990s, will guarantee him a satisfactory spot.

In assembling the reseating strategy, the Philharmonic studied orchestras in Chicago, Seattle, Cleveland and Philadelphia, all of which moved into new or drastically renovated venues since 1997. The most recent of those was the Philadelphia Orchestra’s move last December, when it left its longtime home in that city’s Academy of Music and took up residence in Verizon Hall in the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.

There, despite a boost in top prices from $94 to $110 per seat and a dip of available seating from 2,800 to 2,500, total paid attendance for the season rose 7%, filling 99% of the new hall’s seats.

As officials in Los Angeles are doing, the Philadelphia Orchestra promoted the last season in its old venue as a chance to grab prime spots in the new one, and called subscribers to prep them for coming changes.

Orchestra officials also told subscribers, in a delicately worded holiday communique, that not only subscription histories but donations and volunteer time would be considered when seats in the new facility were assigned.

Unlike Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Orchestra started by making a specific seat recommendation to each subscriber--recommendations that 95% of subscribers ultimately accepted, said Judith Kurnick, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s vice president of communications and public affairs. But before those subscribers made peace with their new places, they lighted up the orchestra’s phone lines. Many callers, frequently older subscribers, asked about the height of railings, the number and steepness of steps, the locations of bathrooms and elevators.

“The one thing we would probably do different is put more people on the telephones for the first couple of weeks after tickets were received,” Kurnick said.

In Los Angeles, Philharmonic officials say they’ve already made plans to boost their phone staff and have resolved not to steer subscribers toward specific seats, because the definition of “a good seat” is elastic, depending on the listener.

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Keeping Score: How the performance halls stack up:

*--* Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Walt Disney Concert Hall Seats 3,086 2,265 Layout Four levels/ seven sections Four levels/ 10 sections Ticket prices $33 to $82 NA Subscription 89 more than 100 orchestra performances

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