Notes from the Upper Balcony

Last week, while participating in the League of American Orchestras' National Conference in Chicago, I attended a Chicago Symphony Orchestra Dvorak Festival concert with Sir Mark Elder conducting and Alisa Weilerstein as the very able soloist.

My seat was in the Upper Balcony, and I ascended the stairs to the very top of Symphony Hall. It's quite a view from that perch - the rake of the hall takes your breath away until you get used to the steep angle looking down on the stage. The ceiling seems close enough to touch if you could just jump high enough, and the acoustics are surprisingly good.

Perhaps the best part of sitting up there is that those audience members listen to the music with a level of intensity I have rarely experienced. It seemed to me that the folks in the Upper Balcony are there for the music and nothing else - except, perhaps, for the opportunity to share their enthusiasm with others.

I settled in and was immediately captivated. The program began with In Nature's Realm, a rarely heard work that received a marvelous reading under Elder's baton.

Soon Alisa Weilerstein entered the stage and Dvorak's Cello Concerto began. The music was sumptuous one moment and electric the next. The audience sat silently until the final notes of the concerto led to an outburst in the balcony that was deafening. Far off to the right of the section, I heard a male voice bellowing, "That was GREAT! THAT was just GREAT!" I looked over and saw a man in his seventies beaming with happiness.

During intermission, in the balcony's lobby, the man walked near me. "What'd you think?" I asked. "Incredible!" he answered and his face lit up with joy. Curious, I asked him a few questions and found that Bob was a retired schoolteacher. He had been required to take a music appreciation class from Chicago Teachers' College in the early nineteen-sixties, and one of the course requirements was to attend a CSO concert. Bob was hooked. "I kept coming back. I never missed a concert by Solti or Giulini," he said. "I've stayed through Barenboim's time and now I can't wait for Muti to take over. You have no idea how much joy this place has brought into my life...and you know the best thing? I can afford it. So much is beyond my means, but this is something I can do!"

When you start to wonder if we can pull this off - find a business model to ensure that we'll continue to make great music at a level of genuine excellence, develop marketing strategies that will draw in new audiences, cultivate enough donors to sustain ourselves, and weather the financial storm long enough to survive - go sit in the upper balcony. Look around for the Bobs of this world. They aren't rich and they may not pronounce "Muti" correctly, but they love music as much or more than anyone else.

The Bobs count. They're why we're in this field in the first place, and they're why we can't allow ourselves to fail.