Cleveland Orchestra tries out $10 tickets
NewsWe hear that the Cleveland Orchestra is trying out cut-price ticketing.
The TCO Members Club is a subscription program that charges $35 per month and offers $10 tickets to almost all concerts.
Some restrictions apply: you are limited to seats in the orchestra and balcony and they assign the seat.
Our informant says: ‘It’s a great deal, and it gets better the more tickets you buy. It’s just been announced, and my friends and I have been buying tickets all day, and planning carpools. It brings the cost of seeing a great orchestra down to European affordability levels.’
Are certain things in life that should not be discounted?
If you condition young people from the beginning that a symphony concert is not worth more than $10, do you really think when he reaches middle age, he is going to value your concerts more?
“glass is half empty” kind of argument. As long as people still understand, that value and price are two different things, I see no problem at all with offering discounted tickets for the young, to the contrary.
My cardiologist told me he got the Cleveland Symphony’s $10 student rush tickets when he was in medical school. He still attends, though it’s the Cincinnati Symphony that’s closest now.
$10 / 100 live musicians = $0.10 per musician for 2 hours of work = $0.05 per hour.
I bet the gal who paid $10 for that concert paid $5 that morning for her daily Starbucks coffee and $10 including tip for a glass of wine during intermission.
Both the barista and the bar person got a bigger tip than what she paid each musician per hour.
No worries. The old guy sitting in box no. 1 with the music stand in his lap and his nose in a score more than made up for it. The rest of us are waiting for Most to leave before renewing our subscriptions.
Five more years at least..
This “gal” doesn’t go for a daily Starbucks or for wine during intermission. Some of us save up to attend concerts. Your assumptions are ridiculous.
No worries – I’m sure their rich endowment more than makes up for this…..
Why on earth would anyone tip someone at Starbucks for pouring a coffee? Or the wine pourer, for that matter? A lot of nonsense.
Uh, the Members Club has been going on for years – at least two years before the COVID shutdown. And I’ve been able to select the exact seats I wanted both through the website and by calling the box office.
Members Club also includes a subscription to the Adella app.
What’s that comment, we play for 10, Szell gets the credit.
From CvD: “We play a good concert, George Szell gets a great review.”
In part because CvD was an antidote to the previous 10 years of LM and because as good as they were with CvD it was never as good as under Szell. Case in point when they recorded the Schubert 9th for Telarc the reviews were of the nature that TCO once again sounds like a top tier orchestra but the inevitable comparison with the Columbia late 1950s recording with Szell pointed out that it didn’t reach that level of playing and interpretation. In part that’s why CvD was considered an excellent Music Director whereas Szell was always referred to by Robert Conrad and others as the Musical Director.
Remember that subscribers also pay $35 a month. So one concert a month costs $45 ($35 + $10) and two $55, or $27.50 each.
The best for the least. I’ll be looking for discount flights to Cleveland this year.
Understandable how folks here would get confused with a headline like that. But in truth, when you factor in the $35 monthly sub, buying single tix to two concerts a month for one year works out to roughly $27.50 a ticket, I believe. I’d call that a win-win for the orchestra and patrons, considering the randomly assigned balcony seating.
From so many of the balcony seats at Severance Hall the orchestra sounds muffled. You do get the great panoramic view of the stage, but the sound is beyond disappointing.
For my money, at Severance it’s orchestra-level seats, every time.
It will be interesting to see how much this boosts attendance, and increases the diversity of the audience.
Anyway I hope that Cleveland will make soon a European tour like Philadelphia in September.
The NY Phil should take note and from a much more refined ensemble no less……
Sixty years ago, while a student in Pittsburgh, I had a discount student subscription to the Pittsburgh Symphony for $12. For 20 concerts!
At that time they were playing in the Syria Mosque, a 3750-seat performance space owned by the Shriners. Our seats were so far to the side, that only a portion of the stage was visible. But the hall was so big, it was never full except for when Arthur Rubenstein played, so we could easily move to the center.
Since then I have become a lifelong attendee, subscriber, and donor to various symphony, chamber music, and opera organizations.
Don’t be so snobbish and exclusive. One step to building an audience is to get people into the concert hall.
Well said! With an orchestra I managed, I offered a 50% discount for brand new subscribers. I sent a letter to my current subscribers explaining what I was doing and basically asking for their blessings. I didn’t want a full-price subscriber feeling bad that the guy next to him was paying half as much for the same seat. To make a long story short, we literally doubled the number of subscribers in one year and 40% of the “newbies” renewed the following year at the full price.
The Dallas Symphony used to have a better deal, I think it was called “Impromptu”
You paid a $100 fee up front at the start of the season, then “if” there were unsold tickets on the afternoon of a concert you could get one free. There wasn’t even a “handling charge” for it.
No age limit.
I went to every classical program twice for about three years on that deal.
I regret that they discontinued it when they shrank their season several years ago.
The first step to getting young people hooked on symphonic music is to get their asses into the chairs!! This program does exactly that. Bravo!!
Great idea. The idea that classical music is only for the elderly elite has prevailed for too long. This should encourage new infusion of young concertgoers to enjoy what they couldn’t afford to before.
Why are people here complaining about affordable tickets? Don’t you want more people to be able to attend? Or do you want to gatekeep this kind of music to your rich selves? So selfish