BSO Focuses on Bernstein

Conductor Marin Alsop to Spotlight Her Teacher and Mentor

Leonard Bernstein would have been 90 this summer, and he is being celebrated around the country. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is on the bandwagon.

The orchestra first announced in December that Marin Alsop would lead it in "Mass," the 1971 work by her teacher and mentor (the words attached to Bernstein's name like a trademark) at this fall's Bernstein festival presented by the New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall. Yesterday, at the announcement of the BSO's own 2008-09 season, the "teacher and mentor" emerged as a leitmotif, including both Bernstein's First Symphony, "Jeremiah," and "Mass," the latter not only at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore and in New York, but also returning to the Kennedy Center, on Oct. 26, for the first time since its premiere.

The BSO had a hard act to follow after last year's sweeping changes, when it rolled out Alsop's inaugural season and cut its subscription ticket prices to $25. This year, it has the somewhat less glamorous task of returning to business as usual.

One idea was subtly to morph Alsop -- known in BSO materials as the "maestra" -- from innovator into Bernstein-like icon. Following in her teacher and mentor's footsteps, she will conduct Mahler, whose First and Sixth symphonies will be programmed together with Bernstein works.

Conventional wisdom increasingly has it that conductors need to talk to their audiences, and Alsop, like Bernstein, is good at it. There is, therefore, considerable emphasis on this aspect of her work in 2008-09, including a new series called "Off the Cuff," four concerts that each involve a discussion of a single work, with excerpts, followed by a complete performance, in an intermissionless hour-plus format. The question with such ventures is whether people who are unfamiliar with orchestral music are really eager to be educated about it, or whether it is more likely to attract music lovers looking to deepen their experience.

Also like Bernstein, Alsop is a champion of living composers. This season's contemporary offerings, most of which will be performed at Strathmore, include works by Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, Michael Daugherty and Jennifer Higdon, whose violin concerto, co-commissioned by the BSO, will be performed by Hilary Hahn. Another living composer best known in the area in another guise is Leonard Slatkin, who will conduct the orchestra for the first time since 1993 in a program that includes "The Raven," his own setting of the Edgar Allan Poe poem.

Wednesday's news conference also saw the release of the orchestra's second recording since Alsop took the baton, Dvorak's Ninth Symphony and Symphonic Variations, the first in a projected three-CD Dvorak set. It will be available on the orchestra's Web site and through its shops for several months before it is made widely commercially available.

The orchestra plans to continue its cut-rate subscription ticket prices, though this season it is contingent on raising money to match a $250,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation challenge grant, and the ticket price for one-quarter of the tickets will be raised to $50. The point of lowering subscription-ticket prices rather than single-ticket ones is to "reward commitment," said Paul Meecham, the orchestra's director, who said subscriptions had grown by 14 percent during the last season.

Cheap tickets are one way to attract audiences, but a major secret to getting people into the hall is getting them to realize that the orchestra is there. So in a nice community gesture, the orchestra's gala opening on Sept. 13 will feature not only the ubiquitous Yo-Yo Ma, but a range of local groups as well.

And "Mass" should certainly attract notice. Its New York outreach performance is supposedly going to involve 1,000 schoolchildren. At the end of yesterday's news conference, a questioner on the Internet -- the conference was streamed live online -- asked how all of the performing forces -- the choirs, the rock band, the orchestra, the soloists -- were going to fit on the stage of the Meyerhoff. "I don't know how that's going to work," Alsop said, noting that Bernstein was interested in challenging the limits of a conventional concert experience and turning it on its head. It is nice to hear the same thing as a stated goal of a mainstream orchestra.