PHILADELPHIA — The timing was uncanny. Just last week the new chairman of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Richard B. Worley, announced that it would have to raise $15 million in emergency funds to head off crippling deficits this season and next. And there the orchestra was on Thursday afternoon, in its former home, the venerable Academy of Music, hymning the praises of philanthropy during an impressive tribute to Leonore Annenberg, one of the most generous benefactors in its history and that of the city, who died in March.
The Philadelphia Orchestra has seen a drop in attendance this year.
It was part of a busy, varied season-opening week for an orchestra challenged in more ways than the financial and intent on proving its relevance not only to monied elites and arts lovers but also to the city as a whole. On Sunday it performed a benefit program at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts here, raising $170,000 for the survivors’ fund of the city’s Fraternal Order of Police. On Wednesday it gave a free preview performance of its opening subscription program in its current home, Verizon Hall in the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, for college students. That program of works by Berlioz and Saint-Saëns, led by the orchestra’s principal conductor, Charles Dutoit, was performed publicly on Thursday evening and Friday afternoon, but the season does not officially begin until Saturday evening, with a gala concert at the Kimmel Center.
Gala or not, the season opens under seemingly darkening clouds. With Mr. Dutoit in his second season of a four-year temporizing term as principal conductor, the orchestra still lacks a music director. Nor is one likely to be named anytime soon, for it also lacks a permanent executive director; Frank Slattery Jr., a Philadelphia businessman with no orchestral background, took over temporarily in January after the premature departure of James Undercofler.
Attendance has been declining, with 80 percent of seats filled last season and subscriptions down 9 percent for this season. Even with a 30 percent staff cut in March and givebacks from the players totaling $4.7 million over the next two years, the orchestra ended its last fiscal year in August with a $3.3 million deficit and projects a $7.5 million loss for the current one.
“When I got here in January, things were in bad shape financially,” Mr. Slattery said in an interview on Thursday. “Very bad. We hit a low point just before the summer, but I have a strong feeling that we have now started up the slope.”
What Mr. Slattery concludes from the declining attendance figures is that “we’re playing too many concerts in Verizon.” Next season he expects to return for a week or two to the Academy of Music, beloved by Philadelphians for its physical beauty, despite a long history of wretched acoustics. (Then again, the acoustics in the eight-year-old Kimmel Center are being given a hard look.) In addition, the orchestra is studying the feasibility of a portable stage to expand its program of community concerts.
But Mr. Slattery is undoubtedly the first to hope he will no longer be on board as caretaker by next season. In fact, there is widespread belief in the classical music field that the hiring of a permanent executive may be imminent. The orchestra here has been in extended discussions with Allison Vulgamore, the president of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Vulgamore announced this week that she would not renew her contract there, and newspapers in Atlanta and Philadelphia have drawn their own conclusions.
“This is just speculation,” Mr. Slattery said, refusing to comment further. “I will discuss only facts that I know are facts.”
What he states categorically as fact is that despite its present travails, “the orchestra is still making great music” under Mr. Dutoit, who has had a long relationship with it. Many critics have agreed, and the two programs on Thursday offered strong support.
Ms. Annenberg traveled widely in the worlds of politics and the arts: she was a chief of protocol in the Reagan administration whose fortune derived from Triangle Communications, a vast enterprise developed by her husband, Walter H. Annenberg. (Mr. Annenberg, an art collector, philanthropist and former ambassador to Britain, died in 2002.) Accordingly, the orchestra shared the stage in the afternoon tribute with speakers including the retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, Mayor Michael A. Nutter of Philadelphia and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York.
“In our city we really did consider her a New Yorker,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “She is still alive in our museums and opera stages.”
Mr. Dutoit led the orchestra in part of the Largo from Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, with an especially sweet English horn solo by Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia; the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with the young Di Wu as an engaging soloist; and vocal music, with the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade sounding fresher, miked, in “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “God Bless America” than in Strauss’s “Morgen.” Still, the spirit of the occasion was everywhere intact, and moving.
The evening program — Berlioz’s huge “Resurrexit” and even more huge Te Deum and Saint-Saëns’s grand “Organ” Symphony — played to Mr. Dutoit’s sweet spot: the point at which his superb handling of French idioms intersects with his fondness for big, rattling pieces. The Saint-Saëns benefited greatly from the magnificent sonority of Verizon Hall’s Dobson pipe organ, as it did in 2006, when the organ was new (in a lesser performance conducted by Christoph Eschenbach). Michael Stairs played it strongly here and in the Te Deum, where the organ also looms large. (The work had its premiere in connection with the dedication of an organ, at the Church of St. Eustache in Paris, though it had been written six years earlier.)
This invigorating evening might have left a visitor in almost as positive a frame of mind as that professed by Mr. Slattery, if only the house had been full. Or even 80 percent full. Or anywhere near. (It was under 50.)
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