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player ready...The streets of Pilsen are 3 miles and a world away from the Symphony Center, the lavishly appointed Michigan Avenue home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its globe-trotting music director, Daniel Barenboim.
So Gloria Torres was surprised recently to look up from the counter of her tiny Pilsen taco shop and see Barenboim on Spanish-language television, inviting residents of the heavily Mexican neighborhood to a CSO performance in their own back yard–and in Spanish, no less.
“It’s wonderful to see them paying some attention to us,” Torres, 51, said in the Spanish of her native Mexico. “Sometimes we feel forgotten.”
With classical music struggling to keep its existing audience–and to diversify that aging, largely white group–the CSO’s Pilsen concert, slated for 6 p.m. Sunday in Harrison Park, marks a historic, expensive gamble to attract a new audience and take its music directly to the people.
The Plazas De Mexico concert is the first free, full-scale outdoor CSO performance aimed at diversifying the orchestra’s audience; and it represents an investment of $200,000, half through a federal National Endowment for the Arts grant.
Barenboim arrived back in Chicago on Wednesday to prepare for a concert Friday night at Ravinia, his first local appearance since creating an international uproar with his surprise decision to play a work by German composer Richard Wagner at an Israeli music festival last month.
In a statement issued Thursday, he said, “I am delighted to bring the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to the Pilsen neighborhood. Being originally from Latin America, I am especially excited about performing in this vibrant Latino community. The music of Latin America has won so many new audiences. I hope people from all around Chicago will come to hear and experience this rich musical tradition.”
Coming just a week after Mexican President Vicente Fox’s visit to Chicago, the concert in Pilsen–with works ranging from Ravel’s “Bolero” to Silvestre Revueltas’ “La Noche de los Mayas”–sends a highly visible signal that the orchestra not only recognizes the city’s changing demographics but is ready to recast its haughty image.
The CSO will play on a stage erected at home plate of a park baseball diamond, just adjacent to the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. Ringed by small homes, three-flats and a corner grocery, it’s a far cry from the usual red-carpet-and-chandelier ambience associated with the symphony.
Immeasurable impact
But don’t expect anyone at the CSO to take the event lightly.
“This event is off the scale in its importance,” said Lee Koonce, the orchestra’s outgoing community relations director and the new executive director of the Sherwood Conservatory. “The message the CSO is sending by going to Pilsen is that Chicago is important to us, Pilsen is important to us and Latinos are important to us.”
“When you think about the world’s best orchestra in Pilsen on a Sunday, would that have happened 10 years ago? Five years ago? No way,” said Carlos Tortolero, executive director of the museum, which is co-sponsoring the concert as well as a daylong series of musical activities at the park beginning at 11 a.m. “It’s acknowledging the increasing numbers in the Mexican community–and acknowledging that they have to increase their numbers. In Mexico, that’s how to do it: have an outdoor concert and make friends with the community.”
Attendance looks good
Theresa Rojas listens to Latin pop music on headphones most afternoons at Harrison Park, Damen Avenue and West 19th Street, where she fast-walks three loops around the fields for exercise.
Face flushed, arms pumping on a recent weekday, the 45-year-old homemaker was part of the usual summer scene there. Old men and women sold crushed ice sweetened with coconut syrup from white wooden carts. Children shouted to each other in a mix of Spanish and English as they raced in and out of the handsome Harrison Park Fieldhouse. A young mother strolled to the corner mercado to buy pork, mango and tortillas for the evening meal.
Rojas, who says she occasionally listens to classical music, is leery of the crowds and heat that concertgoers may face during Sunday’s concert, which will involve blocking off some streets to traffic.
But, she said, “I think I’ll come for a while and check it out.”
She was less sure if her four sons, ages 18 to 27, would be interested.
“They’re more into rap and all that,” she said with a laugh.
The CSO’s move mirrors similar efforts in cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit and Boston, where the Boston Pops and Boston Symphony Orchestra have performed recently in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood, which has a sizable African-American population.
Orchestras that stage such events may not sign up new subscribers, but they reap other benefits–including an inside track on the ever-shrinking pool of grant money, said Mark Volpe, managing director of the Boston Symphony.
“Here, it’s front page news. [It attracts] TV stations and it makes it easier to fund the high-profile stuff, whether it’s getting a corporate sponsor or going to the city. It’s getting your name associated not just with a major event but a broader context,” he said.
The classical music industry in general could use such a boost. Tremors of trouble are rippling throughout the country and across the board, from radio (with longtime stations such as WNIB-FM 97.1 getting sold and reformatted) to records (with an established classical label like RCA downscaling its new releases output to barely a trickle).
Smaller orchestras in cities such as Sacramento and San Diego have disbanded. And as the classical audience grows older, succeeding generations of rich white music buffs–those who would assumedly fill the breach–are turning to formats such as adult rock for their listening and spending pleasure.
For now, the CSO is fiscally sound and might seem safely above such market pressures. But no one at the Symphony Center seems eager to take any chances, or to ignore the fastest-growing local population segment in the 2000 census.
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Latin roots
Barenboim himself has Latin-American roots, having been born in Buenos Aires, in 1942. He lived there until he was 10, when his family moved to Israel.
The concert highlights a seven-year effort by the CSO to partner with local communities through projects from woodwind clinics in Uptown to vocal residencies on the South Shore. In Pilsen, the CSO has two small ensembles that perform works by Latino composers.
Ray Nordstrand, former vice president of WFMT-FM 98.7 and now a marketing consultant to the classical station, believes the crucial question is whether the CSO is in it for the long haul. “Whether it’s just plopping [the music] into a community or whether a great deal more needs to be done to make it more entertaining and rewarding for people, I wonder,” he said.
“I don’t fool myself into thinking that a week after this concert, our subscription offices will be flooded,” said CSO President Henry Fogel. “It is a long-term thing, and occasionally you have to do something dramatic to highlight that relationship. That’s what this is.”
Jesus Rivera, 26, lives just across from Harrison Park and plans to take both of his sons, ages 6 years old and 15 months, to hear the symphony.
Rivera visited Symphony Center–then called Orchestra Hall–on a school field trip years ago, he said, but hasn’t been back.
Nonetheless, Rivera, a car mechanic, listens to classical at home more than usual these days, thanks to the “Baby Genius: Breakfast with Bach” compact disc and the “Mozart and Friends” video he plays for his younger son, Manuel.
“It’s good music when you want to relax,” Rivera said.
He and Manuel’s mother tune to a classical station when they have Manuel in their car. That’s the toddler’s music of choice, at least for now. “If we have rap or something else,” Monique Rivera said, “he says, `No, no, no, no, no.'”
Rivera said he was glad to learn of Sunday’s concert. “It’s a good idea to promote this stuff,” he said. “Maybe they’ll get more listeners.”
As for when the investment in Pilsen might begin to pay off, “It’s impossible to tell whether it will be seven years or 15 or 25 years,” Fogel said. “I think it will definitely be when I am gone from the scene.”