AURORA | Jerry Kern has a funny way of talking about orchestral music. Kern speaks with a no-nonsense candor befitting his former role as a high-profile New York lawyer. That brashness didn’t stop when Kern started as the CEO of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra earlier this year, and it doesn’t go away when he talks about the CSO’s corps of paid classical musicians.
“We have 80 full-time professionals. That’s how you build something,” Kern said. “You don’t build a football team with a quarterback and a couple of linemen and fill in the rest of the team on the weekend.”
Since returning to the CSO with his wife Mary Rossick Kern two years ago, he’s been at the forefront of a push to reinvent a civic orchestra that was in very real danger of failing not so long ago.
So far, the effort has included collaborations with a new crop of local and international pop musicians. It’s meant taking the orchestra out of its home base at the Boettcher Concert Hall at the Denver Performing Arts Complex for shows in Parker and Lone Tree. The orchestra’s also taken gigs at the Jewish Community Center, a few miles west of the Aurora city line. The push has also seen the orchestra tackling different types of music, from movie scores to work by contemporary composers and rock stars.
“It’s very clear that simply getting on a stage and playing old dead white men’s music for older people is not a business model that works anymore,” said Kern, who also co-chairs the CSO’s Board of Trustees. “You’ve got to be flexible enough to play across a wide genre of music.”
It’s a monumental effort, considering the state of the CSO when Kern and his wife returned after a five-year hiatus. In the final months of 2011, the CSO canceled concerts and cut musicians’ salaries in the wake of a shortfall that topped $1 million. Two-thirds of the orchestra’s board of trustees quit, and it looked like the CSO could easily go the way of defunct civic orchestras in New Mexico, Florida and Hawaii.
The Kerns’ came on as co-chairs of the board of trustees, a move followed by the arrival of former Arvada Center chief Gene Sobczak as CEO. Jerry Kern took over as CEO earlier this year, months before the CSO named Andrew Litton as its new music director.
“Things are going remarkably well considering how damaged the organization was when my wife and I got involved two years ago,” Kern said.
So far, the reinvention seems to be paying off — both creatively and financially.
In the past two years, the CSO has collaborated with pop artists like Sarah McLachlan, Guster, DeVotchKa, Amanda Palmer, the Lumineers and Rodrigo y Gabriela. A performance earlier this month with folk singer and guitarist Gregory Alan Isakov at Boettcher was the first sellout performance of the season. A comic book-themed concert earlier this month included music from popular films and TV series.
It’s all part of the push to get beyond the old model of playing Beethoven sonatas for an older audience in a classical music hall.
“When I got here, the orchestra had not played any ticketed concerts at Red Rocks for 20, 25 years,” said Anthony Pierce, the CSO’s vice president of artistic administration. Last summer, the CSO performed for a crowd of about 40,000 during five performances at Red Rocks in Morrison; that’s compared to a total Boettcher audience of about 120,000 for the entire 2012-13 season. “We started to collaborate with artists outside the traditional sphere … We’ve tried to consciously build that reputation.
“We have to be open to all things. A lot of the barriers that orchestras have put up have been shattered,” he added.
Some of those barriers are physical. The CSO is looking to appeal to audiences beyond Denver with upcoming concerts at the Parker Arts Culture and Events Center and the Lone Tree Arts Center. A nascent program titled “Partners In Music” could see the CSO eventually collaborating with smaller, community ensembles like the Aurora Symphony Orchestra.
“Music is music. Great music is great music. We feel that our mission is to expose people to extraordinary music, whether it’s live or broadcast, using broadcast in the broadest terms,” Kern said, pointing to the potential of recording and online concerts. “It’s all about trying to build a new audience.”
That’s not to say the orchestra will veer away from the standards by Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner in their bid to find younger music fans. But the CSO, along with other orchestras around the state and the country, will have to look for new access points to the classics.
“We have a real responsibility to educate in the community,” Pierce said. “We almost have to be a cradle to grave provider of education to ensure that the classical arts remain relevant.”
For more information on upcoming CSO shows, call 303-623-7876 visit coloradosymphony.org. Tickets for CSO Masterworks, Inside the Score and Pops concerts start at $20; $10 student rates and $2 military rates are also available.
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at 720-449-9707 or agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com
No nonsense? ALL-nonsense! Politically correct clichés may get you far in NYC as a lawyer, but saying snarky things about “dead white men” shows Mr Kern thinks the orchestra business is a race to the bottom.