WARNING: This post contains spoilers.<\/p>\n
POSSIBLE SELLING POINT: This post contains spoilers.
<\/b><\/p>\n
I’m going to embarrass my sister now. There was one year she desperately wanted to know what her “big Christmas” present was. She knew our parents were hiding (” “) it in our dad’s workshop (not to be confused with Santa’s Workshop, but, as it turns out, the same thing) in the basement, so she ran downstairs one day and looked. She saw it–I think “it” was a new bike?–came upstairs, and immediately burst into tears. Now she knew what her gift was, and Christmas wasn’t going to be fun anymore. <\/p>\n
I’m going to embarrass myself now. I’ve spent a considerable portion of the past month trying to get myself a ticket to one of the Sondheim birthday evenings<\/a> at the New York Philharmonic. I finally found one in my price range: a “cheap” $75 ticket posted on Craigslist by someone who, as it turns out, works at the Metropolitan Opera. Small town U.S.A.. <\/p>\n I picked the ticket up from my Craigslist Hero at the Lincoln Center Plaza earlier today, and learned that he had seen the show last night. The same thing happened the last time I bought a ticket off Craigslist: I procured a My Bloody Valentine ticket at a Right Aid rendezvous, and the scruffy seller lad had seen the show the night before. In both cases, I was extremely curious to know what had been performed, but didn’t want to know everything. I kept saying, “So did they play X? Wait wait – don’t tell me.” Today, my curiosity got the better of me, slightly, and I found out that Chip Zien and Joanna Gleason sing “It Takes Two,” that the audience laughs because the song starts with “You’ve changed….”, that the finale is fantastic, and that Elaine Stritch does not, in fact, sing “Ladies Who Lunch.” Knowing that last bit is probably for the best, since when my friend Mark and I went to see the Broadway revival of Company<\/i>, we drank way too many vodka stingers beforehand as a gesture of Joanne solidarity. And in retrospect, all I really needed the My Bloody Valentine guy to tell me was to bring earplugs, which he decidedly did not. <\/p>\n This makes me to wonder: is a concert where potential audiences don’t know the set-list\/program easier to market? I personally knew the set-list for my client Gabriel Kahane’s American Songbook<\/a> show a couple weeks ago, and I was kind of sad that I did. It would have been more fun to guess what was coming next, rather than scroll through the program I had in my head. Lincoln Center prints the set-lists from their Songbook shows and hands them out at the end of the concerts, so they make a conscious decision not to use the program as a hook, even though they know it in advance. Can you imagine if say, the set-list for the upcoming Spoon concert at Radio City was advertised on Radio City’s website? You *hope* that they’re going to play 1020AM<\/i>, but you don’t *really* want to know. There’s an intake of breath and an excited murmur every time a violinist plays Air on the G String<\/i> as an encore; would audiences be as excited if they knew it was coming? <\/p>\n This all begs the question, do we see classical music concerts for the performers or orchestra themselves, or do we see them for the repertoire? Would you go to a solo piano recital if you didn’t know what the artist was going to perform? Is the artist, the venue, and the type of music enough? Presenters are funny about this: they often book soloists without The Vienna Philharmonic comes to New York once a year, not unlike Christmas. Maybe I don’t want to know what their program is in advance; I’m going to see them anyway, so it doesn’t matter, and maybe I want to be surprised. On the other hand, I could see the New York Philharmonic any time, so in that case the program and the soloist(s) are the most important things. You want to be surprised by your Christmas gifts; you don’t want to get home from the grocery store and be surprised by your groceries for the week. (“What? Brooooccoli? Come on.<\/i>“) I think presenters and orchestras can play with this idea, though. If they have soloist who they know will sell tickets on his or her own, maybe they don’t announce the program. If they have an intriguing program (the Berg concerto<\/a> I’m going to see on Thursday, for example), maybe they don’t announce the soloist. The problem, here, is that it’s hard to identify the one thing everyone cares about, but I do think the element of surprise is something to consider. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WARNING: This post contains spoilers. POSSIBLE SELLING POINT: This post contains spoilers. I’m going to embarrass my sister now. There was one year she desperately wanted to know what her “big Christmas” present was. 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\nasking what the program is going to be, and then when they receive the
\nprogram from management at a later date, they complain that the program isn’t good for their
\naudiences. So were you booking this date for the artist or for the
\nprogram? I have a friend who will go see basically anything at Rockwood, a tiny club on the Lower East Side. Sometimes he doesn’t even remember what he’s seen there the night before; he just likes being at Rockwood. <\/p>\n