Movie scores, a new work that melds hip-hop with orchestral sounds, and a tribute show to Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon highlight the Philadelphia Orchestra’s upcoming season at the Mann Center.including three with repertoire from Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn.
The Mann once hosted up to 18 Philadelphia Orchestra concerts each summer, but that was decades ago, and in recent years it has had difficulty drawing sizable crowds for core classical repertoire. The outdoor center is huge — about 14,000 seats, or more than five times the size of Verizon Hall. Leaders don’t expect to fill it to capacity for many classical events , but they do need to draw enough of an audience to create a sense of occasion.
“The size of the house dictates a lot of what we do, because you don’t want to have an empty house for this great orchestra. And we’ve got a big city,” said Mann Center president and CEO Catherine M. Cahill.The city, she points out, has diverse interests, so the programming that fits under the “classical” banner continues to stretch into varied genres.
To that end, the Mann this summer has brought in West Philadelphia hip-hop artist Chill Moody as its first-ever community artist-in-residence, an expansion of the role held in previous seasons by composer and music producer