Orchestra's opening night

In many respects, the much-anticipated opening night of Yannick Nézet-Séguin's inaugural season as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra justified its advance hype (which included a "Welcome Yannick" banner hanging overhead).

Under Yannick's baton, the Orchestra produced the sort of "sound all around" that Philadelphians were led to expect when Verizon Hall opened in 2001. The program provided an engaging combination of the reliably familiar and the less familiar. Yannick's lush readings of the Brahms Fourth Symphony appropriately evoked memories of the "Philadelphia sound" promoted until 1980 by Eugene Ormandy. The magnificent soprano Renee Fleming opened and closed the concert with exuberant and supremely confident renditions of, respectively, Ravel's Shéhérazade and "Mein Elemer!" from Richard Strauss's Arabella.

Empty seats

In short, the concert amply demonstrated the Orchestra's ability to deliver memorable moments for its audience. But then, that was never the Orchestra's problem during its recent financial troubles and bankruptcy. The problem concerned the sharp decline in the Orchestra's audience over the past decade— a problem that seems to have persisted.

"Look at this house!" Allison Vulgamore, the Orchestra's president, exulted from the stage in pre-concert remarks that were presumably prepared before she actually looked at the house. "It's a night to celebrate!"

I had already looked at the house and was dismayed to see that perhaps 20% of the seats were empty. I couldn't help wondering whether something better was happening elsewhere in town.

The late nightclub impresario Billy Rose once observed that the excitement generated by an event is inversely proportional to the number of empty seats. "Put people in a small room, squeeze them together at tiny tables, and they'll think they're having a great time," was how he put it. Yet no one in the Orchestra's management seems to have had the presence of mind to paper the house with comp tickets to music students from Curtis, Penn, Temple, the Academy of Vocal Arts— wherever.

Bobby Thomson's shot

So instead of reveling in the rich musical banquet set before me on this momentous night in the Orchestra's history, I found myself reflecting on how these riches will appeal to the rising generation of concertgoers whose appreciation of beauty must compete with their addiction to glancing at (and replying to) their iPhones every five minutes.

Granted, we tend to forget that one of the greatest moments in all of sports history— Bobby Thomson's "shot heard 'round the world" in the ninth inning of the final game of the Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Giants playoff in 1951— took place before 20,000 empty seats. It seems incredible that only 35,000 spectators showed up that day at the Polo Grounds, which seated 55,000. So perhaps it's premature to panic over 500 empty seats on opening night at the Kimmel.

On the other hand, six years after that unforgettable baseball moment, the Dodgers and Giants both left New York for the West Coast and the Polo Grounds was torn down. It takes more than great performances to sustain an institution.