Symphony attendance, Music Hall and the Banks
How great it was to see nearly 400 kids for "College Nite" at the symphony Friday night. Clearly, the Cincinnati Symphony has struggled this season to fill the 3,400-seat Music Hall, week after week, night after night.
In particular, symphony attendance the past few weeks has looked especially dismal. The orchestra is considering, in fact, "downsizing" Music Hall to be smaller for symphony concerts, by closing off parts of the hall or pushing the stage out to the center of the hall – a "thrust" stage.
Sometime this season, the orchestra will likely hire theater and/or acoustical consultants to come up with a plan.
Music director Paavo Jarvi is concerned because of the perception that tickets are always available.
"There is no demand," he says.
Meanwhile, a few blocks away, another theater where the orchestra played in the '30s, which has exceptional acoustics and is a mid-sized hall, is crumbling in disrepair. That, of course, is the Emery. It's a jewel of a theater, with so much potential, yet support of its renovation has waxed and waned over the past two decades.
Jarvi is afraid that if the orchestra were to leave Music Hall even for a few concerts somewhere else, the Grande Dame of Elm Street would fall into a decline.
Then there's the Banks. In today’s A&E section, our arts staff proposed ways to make the Banks an arts destination – including a mid-sized theater that could present movies, or even chamber music or choirs, says Margaret McGurk. I would add to that, a theater suitable for an alternative symphony series or a permanent home for the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra.
What do YOU think?
Should Music Hall be redesigned to accommodate fewer seats for symphony concerts?
Should the Emery be revived? And if the orchestra played there -- even for a few concerts -- would that jeopardize Music Hall?
Should a new theater suitable for symphonic music be built as part of the Banks?
OR: Should Music Hall be left alone, and the symphony make more effort to beef up its attendance? Already, the board is considering things like mounting video screens on either side of the stage, or even mounting screens OUTSIDE of Music Hall – or on Fountain Square.
What about crime in the neighborhood? Should it be a priority of the new mayor and City Council to make the area around Music Hall safer?
Let me know your ideas!
posted by Janelle Gelfand at 7:59 PM
1 Comments:
at 11/17/2005 10:41:00 PM 
Anonymous said...
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Post a Comment*janelle,
it is now 4 days since you posted this piece on your blog and i seem to be the first person to reply. doesn't anybody care? (danny brown, where are you?)
personally, i think it is one more nail in the coffin of downtown cincinnati if the banks project succeeds in taking away our already successful cultural organizations from their well-established neighborhoods.
think of mt. adams with no playhouse -- how would that affect the already
existing restaurants and bars there? certainly not in a *positive* way!
i love the idea of the emery *finally* being restored. i remember attending performances of the children's theater there as a very young student in the cincinnati public schools. now, as it is, the middle tier classical/popular acts end up in oxford at miami u. instead of here. *why* oh why must we always forsake our cultural treasures and build new ones for the sake of novelty instead of revering what we already have as an important part of our history, the way european countries do?
and let us not forget how many (duh--like ALL) of the queen city's
irreplaceable downtown movie palaces were destroyed in the name of urban
renewal in the 70s. the RKO keith, RKO grand, RKO albee, among others, all also home to vaudeville theatrical shows AND stages -- truly grand places to experience viewing a movie, replete with balcony seating and oh-so-elegant restrooms. the august old shubert theater at 7th & walnut, where a CVS drugstore now stands (and turns dark at 7pm); a sad and sorry statement of where downtown has gone.
out of all the theaters in the "new" aronoff center, the only one i adore is the jarson-kaplan, the best place in town to see contemporary dance (except from the first 3 rows!). the P&G theater feels like you're in some kind of po-mo color time warp and the way the seats are almost, by design, "locked off" to disallow the rabble from possibly moving down to empty seats with the swells is especially offensive. the black box theater is a joke, especially considering that the aronoff is a union house and the budgets of
our small arts organizations are least able to pay for such extras, even given the subsidy rental program's bit of help. the weston gallery is a grand success due to the intelligent and engaging programming of director dennis harrington, a veteran of the old CAC and toni birckhead's gallery with lots of heart and commitment perhaps partially inspired by the now
defunct C.A.G.E. (cincinnati artists' group effort). despite the building's heavy architectural pedigree (Cesar Pelli), its footprint lacks the majesty of, say, the kentucky center of the arts in lexington, sitting, as it is, right on the street with no real space around it for viewing.
the comment by one of your colleagues last sunday about the Blue Wisp being an ideal business to relocate to the banks was hilarious. unfortunately, new and popular destinations are also the ones with the biggest overhead and the long-enduring wisp, sadly, while purveying outstanding jazz in the
tri-state for over 25 years, could *never* afford to pay such outrageous sums. (even a few years ago when circumstances forced marjean to seek a new home for the club, Newport on the Levee's price was unrealistically high.) jazzers are a hearty, but not particularly well-paid, breed, unless, that is, they also have a lucrative teaching gig on the side.
the fact that urban planning seems to be so intent on segregating certain kinds of businesses to make various types of so-called "districts" is a big part of what has killed downtown, in my humble opinion. when carl solway, toni
birckhead, sarah squeri, walt burton, michael lowe, and C.A.G.E. all, at various times located their galleries on west 4th street in the late 70s-early 80s, *that* area was designated as the "arts district" in the city's Year 2000 Plan. unfortunately, there was essentially no RETAIL involvement (aside from brown's novelty!) in the same area to attract shoppers. this is exactly the same thing that has happened since then to all of downtown.
"let's make an entertainment district along walnut between 6th and 7th." oh, sure. let's. but, uh, what's going to be there in the daytime when the shows aren't happening? the rents are too expensive for the little boutiques and non-profit galleries envisioned to surround the aronoff back
then by DCI. besides, nobody in their right mind wants to go shopping before they go to the theater and, hopefully, have dinner beforehand. and the restaurants which were lured into the "Backstage District" are not exactly booming on nights when the aronoff is dark--which is an awful lot. and now there's no Maisonette either.
there has been a lot of talk about how the skywalk system contributed to the death of downtown. well, pardon me, but i found it wonderful to be able to havea climate-controlled environment in which i could walk from shillito's
to fountain square, avoiding walk-wait lights and uncleared snow and ice on street level sidewalks in winter. the skywalks didn't prevent me from patronizing street level businesses. of course there were a LOT more of them then! what killed the little businesses was terrible city planning and failed projects which had already forced the little guys out of business.
what downtown needs is for the city to concentrate more on helping small
independent businesses establish themselves there. these are the unique places which give a city its personality. and also, with all of these people who are presumably going to inhabit all of these new apartments and condos, how about something like a Target or Ikea where they can actually find home-oriented goods within
walking distance? unfortunately Kroger seems to have no one left with the institutional memory of what i like to think of as the prototype for the first Kroger superstore, located across from the old shillito building, on race street between 6th and 7th. just look for the turquoise, white, and
gold mosaic facade--that's where it was. in the late 60s, that was a
two-floor Kroger supermarket, complete with escalator, bakery department and live lobsters!
and, most important--DO NOT SEGREGATE the businesses into these ridiculous districts. part of what made downtown successful was that you had to walk by places you might not be familiar with to get to your destination. the movie houses were clustered around what is now the new version of fountain square. but *they* were there before the then-new square was re-designed.
as for music hall and the symphony, both subjects close to my heart, i am afraid that a big part of the problem with attendance stems from the fact that art and music education are among the first things cut from public schools' budgets. if children are not exposed to classical music at a young age when they are most receptive to hearing it, they may never have a real chance to begin to appreciate it. i hate that the arts are also seemingly segregated into the school for creative and performing arts. what does that say to students in the other schools? are they unworthy of having culture introduced into their young lives? as for music hall, it *is* huge when it comes to contemporary venues for symphonic orchestras. but it is an
important part of our history and our culture and should be cherished. if the CSO, as music hall's most important and highly esteemed tenant, feels that improvements can be made, i know that they will do so with the utmost sensitivity. i just wish that more residents of OTR who may have never had the opportunity to experience music hall and the CSO had the chance to do so so that they might feel a sense of their own "investment" in preserving a
very special part of cincinnati history.
now--aren't you just a little bit sorry you asked? ;-))
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