Santa Cruz Symphony launches new season feeling the momentum of last season’s successes

To shamelessly generalize, symphony audiences might be older and thus a bit more cautious about gathering in large groups, indoors, in the wake of a global pandemic than, say, dance club audiences. So, it would make sense that symphonies and similar performance organizations would need more time to bounce back from such a calamitous interruption.

Indeed, locally, internal surveys were telling the Santa Cruz Symphony that, yes, its audience still had some residual reticence about going to in-person concerts.

Then, came the final two concerts of the 2023-24 season. At the drop of a baton, suddenly the symphony’s audiences were back, in a big way.

In May, the symphony, in collaboration with the Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus, staged a performance of J.S. Bach’s sweeping and powerful “B Minor Mass.” That was followed a month later by a concert of the most famous works of composer John “Star Wars” Williams. Both concerts were enormous hits, with audiences up by half from the year before. The latter show, in fact, sold out, the first time that’s happened since the pre-pandemic era.

“We were blown away,” said the symphony’s executive director, Gary Reece. “I was getting calls, ‘Oh, I forgot to get my tickets. What can you do for me?’ Usually, I can. But this time, I had to say, ‘Sorry, I can’t do a thing for you. We are sold out. I don’t have a single extra seat. I’ve given every producer-hold seat away. We are jammed.’”

It’s tempting to credit the programming for the big shows last spring — Cheryl Anderson’s Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus is always popular, and John Williams is a colossus in the symphonic world. But the symphony had presented both before, and didn’t get this kind of response. Reece gives the credit instead to (a) the symphony’s traditional older audiences finally putting pandemic caution behind them, and (b) a new aggressive strategy to promote the symphony through social media, which was bringing in younger, newer audiences. 

Whatever accounts for the magic fairy dust of bigger audiences, the symphony is hoping that momentum carries over to its new season. The 2024-25 Santa Cruz Symphony season kicks off Saturday, Sept. 21, at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, followed, in a custom going back decades, by a repeat matinee performance at the Mello Center in Watsonville on Sunday, Sept. 22. The show is called “Philharmonia Fantastique,” and it pairs a high-profile piece from the classical canon, Brahms’s “Symphony No. 1,” with two smaller pieces from contemporary composers. Those living composers are Gen X DJ-turned-opera-composer Mason Bates and UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist (yep, astrophysicist) Martin Gaskell, who teaches a class at the university called “The Psychophysics of Music.”

This classical/contemporary intermingling is a hallmark of the symphony’s music director, Daniel Stewart. “I think every single concert,” said Stewart, “should, in some way, describe a little bit of all that we have to offer in terms of a good geographical, stylistic and historical diversity. So, we have music covering the span of many hundreds of years and styles and sensibilities.”

The new season will feature four main concerts in the symphony’s “Classical Series,” plus a family concert (Tchaikovsky’s “Peter and the Wolf”) and two pops concerts, including the return of the John Williams repertoire next June.

The big news is that, for the first time, the symphony will be hosting a holiday pops concert in December, featuring holiday-themed music from Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and others. The holiday show will coincidentally fill the void left by the annual performance at the Civic of “The Nutcracker” after Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre closed its doors permanently earlier this year. 

The spring of 2025 will also feature two big events for the symphony. In March, the Symphony combines forces with Santa Cruz Shakespeare in a concert called “Symphonic Shakespeare,” which will include SCS artistic director and actor Charles Pasternak performing Shakespearean soliloquies before a concert of Shakespeare-adjacent music from Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn and accomplished British composer Anna Clyne, whose “Sound and Fury” is inspired by “Macbeth.”

“This is an idea that I actually mentioned during my interview [for the job of the symphony’s music director] 10 years ago,” said Stewart. The symphony had featured local Shakespearean actors Paul Whitworth and Mike Ryan in past performances of “Peter and the Wolf.” “But this,” Stewart said, “is really the arrival of something that, for years, I’ve been wanting to do, preceding each of these Shakespearean pieces with actual chapters and dialogue and scenes from those plays.”

A few weeks later, on May 3 and 4, the symphony presents one of the most celebrated masterpieces in Western art, Mozart’s “Requiem in D Minor.” The Mozart alone is likely to be a big crowd-pleaser, but it also marks the swan song of Cheryl Anderson as the director of the Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus. “We’re going to honor her in a big way,” said Stewart. 

Also this year, the symphony received the single largest donation in its history, a $1 million bequest by stalwart supporters Mark and Roy Chamber-Bray, in memory of Roy, who died in May. Roy’s husband, Mark, continues to serve on the board of the symphony. The symphony also lost one of its foundational supporters with the death of Rowland Rebele last November. Gary Reece said that Rebele’s family has agreed to continue their support at the same level.

“The financial support will be there,” he said. “But the moral support and his always keeping up the morale of the symphony, him being at every concert with his boisterous ‘Bravo!’, that won’t be there anymore. That’s gone, and we’re really going to miss it.”

Even in the wake of the big concerts and the even bigger donation, the Santa Cruz Symphony must face, as all symphony orchestras must, an ongoing decline in its audience generally. Such organizations working to interest younger generations in what they are doing is not a new or recent story. It’s been going on for decades. But the level of technological competition for the attention of that younger generation is unprecedented. 

“Our story is pretty much the story of most of the symphonies in California and the nation,” said Reece. “Most of them are still struggling with trying to bring audiences back from pre-pandemic levels. Audiences were even starting to decline before the pandemic. The pandemic just really accelerated the decline. And now we’re just trying to build back up and maybe we’ve been more successful than others. But for the most part, we’re definitely not an outlier.”

The Santa Cruz Symphony’s 2024-25 season begins with “Philharmonia Fantasique” on Saturday, Sept. 21, at 7:30  p.m. at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, and Sunday, Sept. 22, at 2 p.m. at the Mello Center in Watsonville.

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