San Francisco goes mad on seat prices
OrchestrasThe cheapest seats at Davies Hall for Tuesday’s Yo-Yo Ma / Kathryn Stott recital are $499.
Someone’s taken leave of economic reality.
Is this why they can’t afford a music director?
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And yet a quick look shows that it is almost sold out. Much cheaper than Tay Tay
Yes. If seats were left empty that would be reason to complain. When there is a sell-out, as here, the non-profit is justified in maximizing its revenue.
$614 was the price for rear orchestra for this recital by Ma and Stott, who retires this year after 45+ years but is not really an international star.
It’s astonishing that San Franciscans will pay these prices for chamber music.
€25 was the flat price for this morning’s chamber music concert by Berlin Phil players in Baden-Baden, for comparison, and 100+ seats were empty.
Things must not be as bad as reported on the U.S. scene.
Nice program and would surely be memorable in a better venue at affordable prices. One needn’t wonder about the viability of Classical Music when these paradigms are in play. N.L. please give us a post recital debrief.
Absolutely NUTS! I just paid $960 for 18 top-price seats in my 2024-2025 subscription at the fabulous Philharmonie in Paris. That’s $53 each for great orchestras and soloists.
1) “Is this why they can’t afford a music director?”
No, It’s to PAY the music director they can’t afford.
2) On the one hand, the ticket prices are not high for tech bros, on the other hand, tech bros don’t do classical.
3) If your audience is the type that’d still pay $500 to listen to an arrière-garde like Yo Yo Ma, then it’s not an audience that is interested in Salonen’s avant-garde programming.
These are resale tickets the original prices were $209-$459.
No, they’re not “resale.” They’re on the SFS websiite.
I count as a “tech bro” who “does classical” and $499/person for any kind of concert is still outrageous, even for SF prices. (I did enjoy Salonen’s wind quintet however.)
Obviously $499 isn’t for those attend concerts week in week out, not even tech bros who do classical. But for those who go to concerts once or twice a year (usually with a kid learning an instrument), $499 isn’t crazy at all, compared to a Taylor Swift one or privates lessons their kids take
Well the most expensive seats are $599 but it’s nearly sold out!
Do they sell any?
They sell almost — but not quite — 2700 seats. Good enough for you?
As of now there are 12 seats left out of 2,700. It seems they will sell it out.
If they make lots of money on the concert then they can afford a new music director! At least it’s cheaper than Taylor Swift.
There are only a handful of tickets left for the recital, so the prices are astronomically high because someone will pay those amounts. It’s dynamic pricing and it’s helping organizations survive.
Nope. It’s extortion, pure and simple. Classical music for the filthy rich only? Welcome to America!
What a truly dense thing to say, Norman. The reason the prices are high is that they can sell tickets at this fee, just as the major festivals can extract hundreds of Euros, Pounds and Dollars for top artists when seats are in short supply. Don’t worry, they’ll drop the prices for any open seats close to the concert date. Don’t fool yourself. Further, this is California. Groupies are willing to pay big dollars for their favorite artists. And YoYo Ma qualifies.
The 2500-seat hall is nearly sold out – clearly the prices aren’t high enough to discourage attendance.
The question is, who is getting rich on those tickets? Is it a benefit for the homeless? I thought it was Stubb Hub, but I was wrong and they are even higher.
I saw the almost the same concert a few years ago in Florence for 15 euros….
Yes, but you were in Florence, not SF, and it was the “world renowned” FSO playing, not the SFS. So not quite the same thing.
I wager Yo-Yo Ma and his management are the someones whose economic realities are responsible. Sad.
Indeed. Ten years ago he was getting 100K for a single recital, so with inflation, and quite possibly a new fee structure (e.g. a % of the ticket sales), Y2 is getting well paid for being in tune and affable.
It’s a premium booking, in a premium venue, in a premium city. And you’ll see that it is very nearly sold out.
One could EASILY name 20 cellists and 50 pianists today who can match or outplay those listed.
Yo-Yo Ma is great but yes, there are many fine cellists out there. There is not one other who would sell out a hall at these prices or anything close to it. But ultimately it’s the name that people are paying for.
20 cellists and 50 pianists? Go on — we’re waiting for those EASY names.
This will help them to pay for innovative programming that nobody would ever pay such prices for.
April Fools Day? Oh no, that’s Monday, surely this can’t actually be real …
If an orchestra wants to attract young people to experience classical music, and to give them a chance to hear the best of the greats, this is madness. The super rich don’t usually care about the event except to be seen. And they are not sending in the big checks as they used to do. Around my town, they are spending it on Jaguars football game seats in special glassed in boxes to avoid the “great unwashed” instead of the Symphony and museum donations.
Is that from SFSO or a place like ticketmaster that jacks up the prices and charges exorbitant fees
That is the SF Symphony’s own website selling the tickets at this prices. You could easily verify this.
Serious? There’s no Google machine at your house?
https://www.sfsymphony.org/Buy-Tickets/2023-24/YO-YO-MA-KATHRYN-STOTT
Lazy doesn’t look good on you, Omar.
you have to pay me a whole lot to go to SF.
Good to know, but why would we want to do that? San Francisco is full of people who actually want to be there.
I have noticed this trend for at least the last couple of years. I have lived in the SF Bay Area for 50 years and used to attend many SFS or SFS-sponsored events, but their relatively recent “demand-pricing” scheme has completely priced me out of most events. Plus, it was the case, not long ago, that subscribers, as I used to be, could buy last-minute tickets to any event at the original subscriber price, but that ended a couple of years ago. It is a sad state of affairs for a formerly avid concert-goer on a retiree’s budget.
Obscene yes, but it looks like there are about 10 seats remaining in entire hall. Nice work if you can get it.
just awful. how luck were my sis and I to see him at Akron’s EJ Thomas Hall for low double digits. We took my nephew, then about 10 years old and just starting on cello. You can only imagine what that recital meant to him. So, how many kids will be in audience at Davies? feh.
Good for them. Better that money go to the orchestra than to some online scalper.
But the seats are almost sold out, so there’s a high demand. I personally would save the money for a good set of speakers.
The thieves of San Francisco are smart, but not clever enough to get these seats.
Salongagain should break free sooner from this rotting city.
“But crime rates are falling!!” naive commenters will reply.
Correct! Because businesses have closed shop and families have left the Bay Area altogether. Soon there won’t be anyone left to steal and it’ll be Skid Row North.
Why do you continue to write with such negativity and ignorance. Please get a life elsewhere.
Oh my! That ticket price is kinda steep, but don’t forget they still gotta tack on an additional “handling charge” and that all important “convenience fee.” This indeed makes for an expensive night out. I live in San Francisco, but I think that I’ll be giving this program a pass. A brilliantly filmed and performed YouTube concert, in luminous 4k HD video, is becoming more appealing all the time. Well, to each his own.
Yeah, there are no handling charges or convenience fees if you go to the box office.
But sure, sit there on your filthy couch alone in your hovel and watch great music on your big screen. Sounds shrewish, if not enlightening.
The hall is nearly sold out, it appears. How is this a problem? Were the tickets sold too cheaply?
Looking at the website, it appears the show is sold out, or close to it. So apparently that’s what the market will bear.
And while Yo-Yo Ma generally doesn’t work cheap, apparently he can generate the revenue to cover his fee. And hopefully generate a decent profit for the orchestra.
It’s really a totally separate issue from their music director.
They were charging that much for Yo Yo Ma’s concert in Phoenix last month & it was sold out. Maybe it’s the artist, not the venue?
Quite extraordinary. As far as I can see from the website, well over 90% of the seats have been sold, at prices which start at USD 499. It’s a huge hall, so the revenue will be enormous by comparison (say) with a sold-out Wigmore Hall, top price (typically) GBP 50 / USD 63. No indication that this event is a charity fund-raiser either, which could of course have explained such astronomical prices.
Ma and Stott are fine musicians, but no better (imho) than several other similar duos. And I really would prefer to hear chamber music in a chamber, not a vast symphony hall.
It’s called ‘dynamic pricing’ like Disneyland, except SFS is not the happiest orchestra on earth at the moment.
Well I guess the plutocracy deserves their dedicated concerts as well.
Hard to be an enlightened classical artist though AND serve the plutocracy, since it makes for a much better revenue.
Champagne humanists.
Hope Yo-Yo gives a little speech that spits into the faces of the corrupt moneyed elite. But probably not.
As a season ticket holder I can tell you that they let you buy several tickets . People then get a subscription and buy multiple tickets for a concert like this and resell them. I think the symphony should do a better job of limiting how many tickets you can buy. I know this is true because patron services told me when I bought some tickets to a concert where the price was high.
Just think some years ago I heard Yo Yo Ma play the complete Bach Cello Suites at the Proms.
I payed £5 for my standing place in the Arena!!!!
Pop and rock concerts charge even more (and often sound much worse). If people are willing to pay, why not? Kudos to Yo Yo and Kathryn if they can sell out concert halls at those prices, although I do hope they continue to play concerts with more modestly priced tickets. They are both top class artists as individuals and they are also a well established duo who sound great together.
The cheapest tickets — indeed, all tickets — for “Teen Night” four nights later are $20, and that’ll sell out too. (Program includes Ives/Mozart/Glazunov/Jessie Montgomery.) Later in April, there are lots of tickets for Joshua Bell at $125 and for Karina Canellakis conducting Strauss and Ravel with Cédric Tiberghien for $25 and $39. As always, it took almost no time to find this information, which, I assume, doesn’t appear in the original post because it would wreck a cheap narrative.
That’s the market. The optimum price for anything is where supply equals demand. They could probably charge more.
It was also impossible to see Yo-Yo Ma during his last appearance with the NYPhil. It’s a slap in the face to those who support the orchestra by their attendance and support year-in and year-out.
Yes, Mr. Ma has remained a major star attraction (I remember seeing him with the St. Louis Symphony in the early ‘70s…) but it feels slight avaricious for an orchestra to monetize his appearances to this extent and probably prevent their most loyal subscribers from attending… without mortgaging their homes.
I could even understand if this concert was billed as a special fundraiser, but it is not. It’s kind of a f-y to those most loyal to the orchestra.
As noted repeatedly by others, SFS uses dynamic pricing. The seats were a fraction of $599 when first available. Like an airline, if you decide you want to fly a popular route at the last minute, you’re going to pay a premium.
I bought tickets to SFSs recent Sibelius performance. I paid $60 back in January. When I went to the box office to exchange a ticket the day before the concert, the current price was $180. (The box office did the exchange at the original price.)
Wonderful way to show classical music is not just for the rich elite.
It doesn’t have to sell out to make money.
It just has to show a profit when the costs are subtracted from the revenues.
I like high prices. It keeps the peasants and riff raff away.
No one was homeless in Esterhazy.
That’s probably because Esterhazy is not a place.
Classical music has a celebrity culture that attracts the non-aficionado. A concert with Yo-Yo Ma? Buy a ticket and check the box.
Not every San Francisco Symphony concert costs as much as this one. My ticket to the March 3 concert featuring Gerald Finley and Michelle DeYoung in Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle cost $84.50 for a prime seat in the Loge, section H, row B. The concert included Cartier perfume (from the dispenser located next to the seat) as a sensory element in Scriabin’s Prometheus, The Poem of Fire.
What a misleading and illogical post, Norman. You criticize for the orchestra not trying to right itself financial and also made that it charges demand based pricing, and uses an imagine that reads like it is empty, when in fact is basically sold out.
At this rate, they will charging thousands per seat for YunChan.
I attended Yunchan’s 2023 concert in the Hollywood Bowl. Ticket price was $6 so I splurged and spent a grand total of ~$50 to bring some family and friends.
The tickets first went on sale over a year ago. The cheapest seat then, according to my season brochure, was $209. The $499 seats in Premium Second Tier were going for $219 when first offered to renewing subscribers. Still not cheap. Dynamic pricing did the rest.
It’s not really SF that is charging that much … it’s Ma and Stott.
They know they can sell out the hall and want to get as much out of it as they can.
Tickets to see John Williams conducting in Cleveland were going for upwards of $1,000 on the secondary market. The market sets the pricing. It’s basic economics.
It’s called Dynamic pricing….once it starts selling really well, the tickets just go up in price….harsh reality here in the states.
Julie wrote, “It’s called Dynamic pricing….once it starts selling really well, the tickets just go up in price”.
Understood, but does the reverse also happen? My supermarket in the UK evidently has quite a sophisticated algorithm for progressively reducing the price of food as the sell-by date draws near. Sometimes there are three bar-coded labels on top of one another by the time I buy an item. Why can’t arts venues do the same thing?
Ok, there are seat-filling organisations that offer tickets at reduced prices: I sometimes use those but find it frustrating that they rarely if ever allow me to choose where I want to sit.
A friend of mine booked the Wigmore Hall decades ago for a solo recital with a challenging programme. When she saw that the hall was only 20% full, and that the audience was mostly sitting in the front two rows of each of the four price blocks, she just said “why don’t you all come and sit up front?”. So we did.
Of course classical music isn’t elitist and we have to be sure that young people are welcomed. Right . . . . . . .
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