Amos Lee and Morgan State University Choir are among the guests who will perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Fairmount Park.

by Peter Dobrin | The Philadelphia Inquirer

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.

The orchestra will perform eight concerts at its Fairmount Park summer home, 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 (a Harry Potter concert in 2016 was a high point with more than 10,000 listeners), 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. Cahill points out that the orchestra’s downtown subscription season is also increasingly pushing the boundaries, with more movie scores and crossover acts like Pink Martini.

“We all recognize we’ve got to find new audiences and that Philadelphia is a very diverse city. And we need to find ways to continue to engage diverse audiences if we want to be reflective of the community in which we live,” she said.

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 Nolan Williams Jr.

Chill Moody has been working with composer Darin Atwater on Black Metropolis: Improvisations on Paint Factory, which builds on Atwater’s 2007 Paint Factory and receives its world premiere in a free concert at the Mann on July 19. The rapper will perform in the work, which draws on classical, hip-hop, spoken word, and visual art. Lina González-Granados conducts.

The orchestra season opens May 18 with the Morgan State University Choir, which features spirituals on the first half of the program and in the second half is joined by the orchestra and vocal soloists led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. On May 19, the ensemble and Nézet-Séguin host violinist María Dueñas for the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in a program that opens with Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations and closes with the second suite from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé.

Paolo Bortolameolli leads the orchestra in its annual Tchaikovsky Spectacular on June 20, with fireworks.

Movie music figures heavily into the summer schedule, with the orchestra performing the John Williams scores to Star Wars: The Force Awakens (June 24) with conductor Anthony Parnther and Jurassic Park (July 22) led by Constantine Kitsopoulos.

Hometown hero Rocky gets a workout (Sept. 14) — not with the hometown ensemble, but with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra playing live-to-screen.

Singer-songwriters are backed by the orchestra in two concerts. The Joni Mitchell-Carole King-Carly Simon tribute (June 22) features conductor Ted Sperling with vocalists Andréa Burns, Aisha de Haas, and Morgan James. And the orchestra is joined by guitarist-vocalist Amos Lee and conductor Steven Reineke (July 20) in a program of folk, rock, and soul.

Cahill says she sees the current programming mix at the Mann as an entry point for new orchestra listeners.

“We are another way to attract that audience, for this orchestra to get the acknowledgement and attention it deserves.”

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