In Tampa, orchestra moves to Mondays
After finding it difficult to secure the desired venue on Friday nights, the Florida Orchestra will now perform on Monday nights in Tampa.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
Published February 17, 2004
TAMPA - A Friday night musical tradition will end as the Florida Orchestra next season will play its masterworks programs in Tampa on Monday nights at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.
The move guarantees that the orchestra will play in the center's Morsani Hall, rather than in the smaller, acoustically inadequate Ferguson Hall. The switch was announced by executive director Leonard Stone in a letter mailed to subscribers this week in advance of Sunday's release of the 2004-05 schedule.
"I think it is very important for us that we be in Morsani," said music director Stefan Sanderling. "The acoustic differences between Ferguson and Morsani are quite enormous. And in Ferguson Hall we have only 900 seats, and we have more subscribers in Tampa than 900. So we had to make this decision and just hope that people follow us."
With big moneymakers like The Lion King and The Phantom of the Opera, the Broadway series has become the priority for Morsani Hall, which seats 2,500. The arts center also is trying to book more profitable pop acts ahead of the orchestra, sometimes unsuccessfully. On several Fridays this season, the orchestra played in Ferguson while Morsani was dark.
Broadway tours don't perform on Mondays, leaving many of those dates in Morsani open for the orchestra. The Monday orchestra performances will start at 7:30 p.m., making it an earlier evening for working people.
Still, there are two Mondays in 2004-05 when the orchestra can't get into the bigger hall, so only 12 of the 14 masterworks programs will be played there. Rather than play in Ferguson, the other two programs will be offered to Tampa subscribers at either Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater or Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg.
The switch to Monday nights comes with risk. When the orchestra does play in Morsani on Friday, it often draws a good crowd, such as last week's turnout of 1,840 for an all-Russian program. But the constant switching from hall to hall was taking a toll in canceled subscriptions and erratic attendance.
"I'm a little bit nervous about it," Sanderling said. "We might lose some people, but maybe we'll gain some people who would never go Friday. It's terra incognita for us. But we didn't have much choice. We have to try."
[Last modified February 17, 2004, 01:05:15]
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