(Cyrus McCrimmon | The Denver Post)

A three-part series

Today: Relevance lost

Next Sunday: A classical comeback?

Dec. 19: A new image
Can classical music be cool?

Part 1


Leonard Bernstein followed along in the 1950s and '60s, bringing the New York Philharmonic into American homes with his televised Young People's Concerts while soprano Maria Callas was a hot topic for gossip magazines. Later, virtuosos like Itzhak Perlman and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg took turns chatting with Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show."





"I've just heard a lot of people around the world who say that a lot of times, classical music is just boring. So, I think that is just a massive problem," said Michael Christie, who directs the Phoenix Symphony and the Colorado Music Festival in Boulder.

&quot;I&#8217;ve just heard a lot of people   who say that a lot of times classical music is just boring,&quot; said conductor Michael Christie.
"I've just heard a lot of people who say that a lot of times classical music is just boring," said conductor Michael Christie. (Denver Post file photo )



In an era of celebrity obsession, the genre has failed to produce one bona fide star since Pavarotti. If one day you're in and the next day you're out, as Heidi Klum says on "Project Runway," then classical music is out.

Put simply, the field is in trouble.

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How bad is it? Even some of the genre's most ardent supporters are questioning the need for all but the country's largest and most influential orchestras.

"What, if anything, justifies the existence of a regional orchestra in the 21st century?" wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Terry Teachout in a June column that caused a stir in the symphonic world. "Many people still believe that an orchestra is a self-evidently essential part of what makes a city civilized. But is it true?"

Invulnerable no longer


The Philadelphia Orchestra saw average turnout fall to 65 percent of capacity last season.
The Philadelphia Orchestra saw average turnout fall to 65 percent of capacity last season. (Jessica Griffin, The Philadelphia Orchestra Association )

"The danger with classical music and opera is to make any kind of assumptions that they are invulnerable, because clearly they are not," said Peter Gelb, general manager of New York's Metropolitan Opera. "And the evidence of that is occurring with great frequency these days as companies go under or teeter at the edge."




Meanwhile, the challenges mount. In research for his upcoming book, "Rebirth: The Future of Classical Music," author Greg Sandow has found a steady increase in the average age of classical audiences going back more than a half century.

In 1955, for example, the Minnesota Orchestra conducted an audience survey that showed that half of its audience was 35 or younger. Compare that with 2008, when the national endowment's attendance survey indicated that 44.7 percent of classical audiences were 45-64 years old.



But it's not all doom and gloom. Orchestras, like other segments of classical music, are plunging ahead.

Miami's New World Symphony is building a $154 million campus. The Los Angeles Philharmonic has generated a buzz with its 29-year-old conducting sensation, Gustavo Dudamel. And more than 2.4 million people worldwide will attend the Metropolitan Opera's live HD movie-theater broadcasts this year.

Competition remains fierce for music directors, with the Chicago Symphony recently managing to land one of the field's biggest catches, Riccardo Muti. And the playing just might be better than ever, with more second-tier ensembles like the Minnesota Orchestra making strong cases to be counted among the nation's, even the world's, best.


"There's just a tremendous amount of pressure for us to find where we are in the entertainment food-chain," said the Colorado Music Festival's Christie. "So, if we're not ready to adapt to that and think about ways to make ourselves higher up in people's priorities, we're looking at phasing ourselves out."





"If you look on our website, there's no real distinction between (pianist) Helène Grimaud playing Bartok and Liszt on a Monday night and a DJ playing dubstep and reggae the night after," music director Ronen Givony said. "It really is the idea: There are two kinds of music: good music and the other kind."



"We'd be kidding ourselves if we said that it didn't have this unfortunate effect of making us all really lazy, making us to the point where if can't be streamed instantly and for free at home, it's very hard to get people to come out," Givony said.

Some costs can't be cut


Many orchestras are negotiating reductions in musician salaries, but they can't cut the size of their ensemble without harming the very essence of the art form. A big Mahler symphony can require 100 musicians — and each has to be paid. Similarly, they are bound to the municipal concert halls in which they perform and long-established union rules.

"For whatever the reasons, we have very little flexibility," Gelb said. "We're dealing with rigidly prescribed art forms with not much chance to maneuver."

At the same time, the recession devastated many arts groups' endowments, compounding issues of dwindling government and philanthropic help.

All these factors have converged as a kind of perfect storm for the Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the country's most respected ensembles. It saw average turnout fall to 65 percent of capacity last season, and as revenue plunged, its leaders were forced to assemble an emergency bridge fund of $15 million to cover projected deficits.




"We sometimes in the arts rarify ourselves too much," said Stephen Seifert, executive director of the University of Denver's Newman Center for the Performing Arts.

"We're partly in show biz. We need to be entertaining. But we also have to demonstrate that we're relevant in multiple ways. Purely aesthetically is one of those ways, but artists are citizens too, and often what they have created has some greater connection to our lives."

As audiences for classical music continue to get older, the form simply has to find ways to connect with 20- and 30-year-olds, who are mostly absent from today's concert halls. But too often, presenters don't know where to begin.

"I think it's very fair to say that there's this monumentally underserved audience, not just in New York but round the world," Givony said.




The new genre benders

Or innovative singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane. Sitting at the piano Elton John-style, he recently performed an amplified, genre-bending concert at Brooklyn's Mata Festival that combined Schumann's "Dichterliebe" with a group of songs he commissioned from 10 up-and-coming composers.

In addition, some of the field's challenges can also offer opportunities. While new technology, for example, might be taking people away from classical music, it can also bring new people to it. That's what happened to Givony, who knew nothing about it five or six years ago.

"The reason I learned about classical music in the first place was because of the Internet," he said. "If you are a legitimately intellectually curious person, you can dive into Dutch Renaissance music or Mozart or Haydn, and you can really teach yourself to an amazing degree."




"That makes me optimistic, seeing how there really is a spontaneous movement for change," Sandow said. "I see so many and very different examples of how to do things in new ways."


"No one says it's easy," he said. "No one says there aren't many nights we thought would do better for us. But in general, I think people can surprise you, and in general the classical world has really underestimated people's ability to encounter this (form)."

Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com

Six key obstacles hobbling the genre

New York critic Greg Sandow has spent years researching his upcoming book, "Rebirth: The Future of Classical Music," and writing an accompanying blog on the same topic. In a recent interview, he noted six key problems holding back the field:







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5. Entrepreneurialism. Rather than waiting for a grant or somebody else to initiate change, artists need to take things into their own hands. "What if the Beatles had said, 'We're going to wait until we get some funding and then we're going to go on the road'? " Givony said. "What if the Sex Pistols had said that? Nothing would have changed in music history."