When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit Universities

Why Phila. economic future looks so bright

Richard Florida is director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and founder of the Creative Class Group.

From where I sit, Philadelphia’s future looks very bright. Trust me: I know all about the issues that confront the city. I grew up in New Jersey, went to Rutgers, and spent much of my teens and 20s hanging out in Center City. I’ve seen the dark days and watched the recovery.

You have a new mayor. The core is looking more vibrant than ever. The universities, from Penn to Villanova, Drexel and the University of the Arts, are full of innovation and creativity, pumping out talent and connecting them to the city.

But there’s an even bigger reason to be optimistic.

Greater Philadelphia’s economic future is in large measure being shaped by its role as a key node in the second-largest “mega-region” in the world – a megalopolis that economic geographers in the early 1960s dubbed “Bos-Wash.” Running from Boston through New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore to Washington, Bos-Wash is home to about 54 million people and more than $2 trillion in economic output, making it one of the five largest economies in the world – nations included.

Philadelphia has become a place of choice in this mega-region and in the United States as a whole. After losing population for decades, Philadelphia is projected to grow. It’s a hot place in a hot mega-region.

That’s important because people make three big moves during their lives: when we graduate college, when we have children, and when the children leave home. Forty million Americans move each year, and 15 million of us make a significant move – to another county, another state or another country.

Our moves are crucial to our lives, affecting everything from our job opportunities and career options to our investments, the friends we make, the people we date, the mates we choose, and the way we raise our families. Our choice of place to live is the most important decision we ever make – largely because it influences and shapes all the others.

According to my rankings, Greater Philadelphia does best for young singles, families with children, and retirees, being in the top 30 percent of regions nationwide in all three categories. (One tidbit: Greater Philly is an especially good place for single men. The region has the second-largest plurality of single women to men, more than 56,000 more, behind only Greater New York, but ahead of Greater Washington and Atlanta. Single men actually outnumber single women by large margins in Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix.) The area around Trenton and its South Jersey suburbs is an absolute powerhouse, ranking in the top five for smaller regions for singles, families with children, empty nesters and retirees.

So what do people truly value in their communities? According to the results of a large-scale study of place and happiness I conducted with the Gallup Organization, where you live (along with family and work) is a key leg in the triangle of our happiness. That survey also found that there were five characteristics of a place that matter to happiness.

First, you need to get the basics right: schools, health care, affordable housing, roads and public transportation. Second is physical and economic security: crime and safety, jobs, opportunity, and a healthy economy. Third is leadership: the quality of both the public and private (business and civic) leaders and citizens’ ability to plug into their communities and contribute. But two other factors stand out.

We asked people, “How would you rate your city as a place to live for the following kinds of people: Families with children, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, immigrants, seniors, people living below poverty, young singles, and recent college graduates looking for work?”

And with every amount of tolerance extended to these groups, the overall happiness of the community increased! Not because we value diversity as an abstract value, but because many people are drawn to open communities on the assumption that these are places where they can be themselves.

But guess what group came in at the bottom of the list. Not immigrants or gays. At the bottom, alongside “people living below the poverty line” were “recent college graduates looking for work.” Nearly 45 percent of people surveyed nationwide said their communities were either “bad” or “very bad” places for recent graduates, while just 7.3 percent said they were “very good.”

Philadelphia has a huge asset here: It has great universities and colleges that function as talent magnets. That’s why Campus Philly (http:// www.campusphilly.org), a pioneering effort to attract the region’s 90,000 college students to stay in town after school and connect them to the region, is so important. Young people are much more likely to move after college than at any other point in our lives. To get them to stay after college, the city must stay ahead of the curve in the competition for talent. Once they’re over 30, they tend to settle and have kids, and it’s much easier to keep them after graduation than to try to lure them back once they’re gone.

The quality of place matters a lot more than you might think. People expect their communities to provide basic services and public safety, and most places do. So while very important, they’re not a huge competitive advantage. But we found that the higher people rate the beauty of their community, the higher the level of community satisfaction. Philadelphia’s green spaces, parks and trails, historic buildings, and access to the outdoors are attractive to people of all income groups, races and ethnicities, and education levels.

Philadelphia has a secret weapon. Housing everywhere, from the urban core to its terrific suburbs, remains affordable. The biggest challenge in the leading mega-regions of the world is escalating housing prices. Wharton’s Joseph Gyourko and colleagues dub this the “superstar-city” phenomenon. Prices in other key parts of Bos-Wash (not just Manhattan, but also Boston and Washington) have skyrocketed, and not even the subprime crisis or the current credit crunch has brought them down to earth. At a recent dinner party in Toronto, we were talking about trying to recruit a high-flying professor from a Philadelphia-area university, when a colleague jumped in: “We’ll never get him. He has a mansion outside of Philadelphia for less than what it would take to buy a two-bedroom condo in Toronto.” This housing-cost advantage is a huge edge for Philly’s future.

Philadelphia has plenty of challenges. As in all cities, there’s work to do on crime and urban education. But both city and region are well-positioned for the future.

NORRISTOWN, Pa. – Opponents of a plan to relocate The Barnes Foundation’s multibillion-dollar art collection to downtown Philadelphia on Monday asked the judge who approved the move to allow new hearings on the contentious issue.

The opponents have been trying to persuade Montgomery County Orphans’ Court Judge Stanley Ott, who has jurisdiction over Dr. Albert Barnes’ trust, to reconsider his 2004 decision.

Lawyers representing the county and a citizens group called Friends of the Barnes asked Ott on Monday to allow them to present new arguments for keeping the foundation at its current location in suburban Lower Merion Township. They said the new proposals would provide the Barnes with funding it needs to stay put.

The foundation cited poverty when it asked Ott for permission to leave the suburbs and move closer to Philadelphia’s most popular tourist attractions. Ott’s permission was needed because Barnes’ will had instructed that his paintings “remain in exactly the places they are” after his death.

The Barnes’ collection includes an astounding trove of French impressionist and postimpressionist masterpieces and thousands of other objects. But the foundation says it would go bankrupt if it had to keep its 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 60 Matisses and 44 Picassos in its out-of-the-way home, which was subject to restrictive township rules that limited the number of visitors.

On Monday, opponents of the move told Ott that a new township ordinance would allow more visitors and that a county-backed $50 million purchase-lease back arrangement would give the Barnes a massive infusion of cash. They also said the Barnes building is eligible for National Historic Landmark status, opening up a possible source of federal funding.

“It’s not too late to make a U-turn,” Montgomery County Deputy Solicitor Carolyn Carluccio said.

The county would lose its most significant cultural asset and one of its most significant educational, economic and historical assets if the relocation is allowed, she said.

Longtime township residents who live near the foundation also would suffer irreparable harm by the move, Friends of the Barnes attorney Eric Spade said.

Attorneys for the foundation and the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office, which has jurisdiction over the executors of wills, told Ott the county’s financial proposal is far from guaranteed and the opponents’ ideas are too little, too late.

“They come in here at the 13th hour, asserting pie-in-the-sky schemes … that would not withstand any scrutiny,” said Senior Deputy Attorney General Lawrence Barth. “Enough is enough.”

Ralph Wellington, an attorney for the foundation, said the $50 million arrangement proposes that the Barnes invest the money in high-yield investments and pay back the loan with interest.

“What if the investments were unsuccessful, given the current climate? What charity could responsibly take such a risk?” he asked the judge. “This proposal does nothing other than expose the Barnes Foundation to financial ruin.”

Barnes, a pharmaceutical magnate who died in a 1951 car crash, established the foundation in 1922 to teach populist methods of appreciating and evaluating art.

His collection has been housed since 1925 in a 23-room limestone gallery by renowned French architect Paul Philippe Cret that features a Henri Matisse mural inside and Jacques Lipchitz reliefs on the exterior.

Inside, Barnes placed his paintings close together and grouped them with objects like metal hinges and wrought ironwork as a teaching tool to illustrate common aesthetic themes.

Last June, Montgomery County proposed to buy the Barnes’ land and buildings for $50 million and lease them back to the foundation. They said the money would be raised through the sale of bonds, with no taxpayer involvement, and proceeds from the sale would be used to start an operating endowment to put the Barnes on sound financial footing.

The following month, Lower Merion officials also repealed rules that strictly limited the number of paying customers. The township passed a zoning ordinance that would more than double the number of visitors permitted annually, to 140,000, and replaced a previous rule that allowed the Barnes to be open to the public three days a week and restricted to about 400 visitors daily.

The Barnes has not expanded its hours since the change, however.

Since getting the go-ahead to move, the Barnes has raised $150 million, including a $25 million grant from the state and millions more from three charitable foundations, to build a new home on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and establish an operating endowment.

Construction, however, has yet to begin. The city only four months ago struck a deal to move out of a juvenile jail that sits on the land that the Barnes will use for its new gallery.

It was unclear when Ott would issue a ruling.

Gary Graffman literally grew up at the Curtis Institute of Music, first walking through the doors as a 7-year-old piano protege. He became the school’s director in 1986, but well into his second decade felt that was enough.

As he told the school, “I thought after all this time maybe they wanted a fresh face.”

Now they have it. In 2006, after ensuring that Curtis would remain tuition-free under its new director, Roberto Diaz, the 77-year-old Graffman left for his New York home near Carnegie Hall.

The passing of the baton at the Curtis is part of an unprecedented shift in the Philadelphia region, where the leadership of many of the largest arts and culture groups has changed hands in the last several years.

The departures include Peter B. Lane, who spearheaded the Mann Center’s expansion (and left for the Bethel Woods arts center in New York), and Janice C. Price, the Kimmel Center’s first professional arts-management leader (for an arts festival in Canada).

“It’s something we can anticipate for several more years,” says Laura Otten, director of the Nonprofit Center at La Salle University. “We did a local survey in 2006, and two-thirds of nonprofit leaders said they would be leaving their jobs by 2010. It’s not unique to arts and culture.”

Among the major organizations with new presidents, chief executive officers, or artistic chiefs:

The Barnes, the Fleisher Art Memorial, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Philadelphia Zoo. The Independence Seaport Museum, the University of the Arts, and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

“It’s big turnover time,” says Peggy Amsterdam, president of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, who sees the movement as mostly generational. “It’s not just here. It’s a national trend. Those of us who came up in the early 1970s got into this business when it was really new, when funding was becoming more and more available through the [National Endowment for the Arts] and other sources, and there was a lot more emphasis being put on being a well-run organization.”

Robert Capanna, for 26 years the executive director of the Settlement Music School, plans to step down next year. The Free Library of Philadelphia, which has an interim president, expects to have a new leader in place by July 1. And Nancy Kolb, president of the Please Touch Museum, aims to hang up her hat a year or so after the children’s museum moves in the fall to a mammoth new home in Fairmount Park.

“Nationally, it’s a huge crisis, because the group that I represent, people between 55 and 70, have been the leaders for the past 30 years,” Kolb says. “Some of these individuals aren’t thinking about transition, and that’s irresponsible.”

Each group has its own reason for new leadership. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts sought two new heads after its director left to run the Barnes.

The main task for the Seaport Museum’s new director is to rebuild an organization and community trust after the previous president was sentenced to 15 years in prison for defrauding the Penn’s Landing museum out of more than $1 million.

Although it’s impossible to predict whether so much change at one time will be beneficial, arts veterans say the new talent, in general, is impressive.

“The turnover that has occurred has brought in such a wide range of visionary and capable leaders, it is all to the good,” says Olive Mosier, director of arts and culture at the William Penn Foundation. “It shows that there is a wonderful pool of talent out there.”

“In the Fleisher’s case, they found a great, young, energetic, smart and very enthusiastic new person” in Matthew Braun, says Nancy Burd, president of the Burd Group, a nonprofit consulting firm. “But we see many organizations that go through leader after leader because they didn’t get the right person or the board didn’t know what they wanted.”

This wave of change is hitting now because a lot of current leaders entered the job market 30 or 40 years ago as arts groups were coming of age, adding programs and staff. Those leaders are retiring, or looking at a second act for their careers.

Amsterdam says she got her first arts administration job – running the Fairfax County Arts Council – under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act during the Carter administration.

“I was 24 years old running the arts council in the wealthiest county in Virginia. I was making it up,” she says.

What’s different about the new breed of arts leaders, she says, is that they have training and degrees in arts administration and “are much more schooled and well-versed in what it takes to run a theater company or museum.”

They also might expect higher salaries. Some groups have been run by founders who kept their wages low because it was one line-item they could control, or who even volunteered. Hiring a replacement at market value can strike an organization with sticker shock.

Nonprofit salaries at major groups are highly competitive, especially when a leader comes from a similar job in another job market. At the upper end of the scale, Price, the Kimmel’s former CEO and a career performing-arts executive, earned $418,000 in the year that ended June 2006, according to tax forms.

Seth Rozin, producing artistic director at the InterAct Theatre Company – with a budget a fraction of the Kimmel’s – received base compensation of $41,958 in the year ended June 2007.

Unlike board leaders, whose terms are often limited by an organization’s bylaws, paid executives can stay for decades, feeding the misconception that they and the organization are one.

General wisdom says art museums whose directors have stayed too long, or chamber groups whose founders linger for decades, can suffer from stagnation.

Getting a “productive conversation” going about career transitions is the aim of the Legacy Project, a program of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, which gathered 21 of the area’s arts leaders for the first time in 2005.

“It grew out of the fact that the baby-boom generation has been in these in roles for a very long time,” says Martin D. Cohen, director of the initiative. “There’s been a lot of research in the nonprofit field that began to say, ‘We know that this transition is coming,’ and ‘What are we doing to prepare for it?’ “

Some groups are preparing for change earlier so a new leader can be put in place before the old one leaves. That process took a year at the Kimmel Center when Price left.

At Please Touch, where Kolb’s departure is more than a year away, work has begun on finding the new CEO within the staff. What’s worrisome, Kolb says, is that while there’s “enormous talent out there, very few of them want to be CEOs” of cultural groups.

“It’s a horrible job,” she says. “We want somebody to come into these organizations and be everything. They’ve got to manage a board, manage the staff, know the field, be good at fund-raising and marketing, and have no life. Who would want to do that?”

Capanna, 55, who joined Settlement with a background as a composer, says the job has never been easy.

“The school could benefit from a fresh perspective, and so could I,” he says. “I have been planning for [this year's] centennial and related activities for a very long time. Seeing them come to fruition is very gratifying, but I am not sure that I have the appetite for the next big thing, whatever it may be.”

The next thing for him is consulting, and keeping his hand in a school project to provide software to other community music schools.

“And definitely spending more time writing music, and probably more time playing tournament poker,” he says, adding: “The one thing I do not want is to run another large organization.”

Contact culture writer Peter Dobrin at 215-854-5611 or pdobrin@phillynews.com. Read his blog at http://go.philly.com/artswatch.

Please Touch prepares for its big move
By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Classical Music Critic

If a cultural organization’s every act of ambition is to some degree a leap of faith, the Please Touch Museum is inching up to the greatest yawning gulf in its history. In October, the 32-year-old children’s museum will leave its squat, plain-Jane Center City brick home near the Franklin Institute for the grand marbled volumes of a renovated Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park.

Its annual budget will go from $4 million to $9 million, its exhibition space more than tripling to 38,000 square feet.

Reluctantly, the museum is making this transition after taking a hard look at its fund-raising drive and cutting plans for a $5 million reserve fund.

All this, while pinning its hopes on nearly tripling attendance – to an average of 476,000 from 180,000 visitors per year.

In some ways, the museum already has taken its big leap: It’s well into spending its $44 million construction budget and already is putting the finishing touches on the renovation of Memorial Hall. Last week, in the enormous Beaux Arts souvenir from the 1876 Centennial Exposition, glaziers were putting in new Palladian windows. Roofers were working atop the octagonal carousel house, an entirely new structure that will house the restored Woodside Park Dentzel Carousel from 1924. Exhibits fabricated off-site will begin moving in this month.

Fund-raising for the museum’s $88 million capital campaign still has a long way to go. With opening day a little more than six months away, the museum is $25.5 million shy of its finishing line.

Can it bridge the gap?

“I think we’ll make goal, but not by opening day,” says president and chief executive officer Nancy Kolb. “We’ve gotten money from people who didn’t know our name five years ago, so it’s a cultivation thing.”

Whether it makes goal or not, Please Touch has taken out $60 million in debt to help cover the project’s costs. Even if the full $88 million is raised, Please Touch does not plan to immediately pay down that debt, which is in the form of 30-year tax-exempt bonds.

The bonds carry an (average) fixed 4.93 percent interest rate, said Concetta Bencivenga, vice president of finance, while the museum anticipates a 5 percent to 6 percent return on investments made with a pool of money raised for the project’s general support, which it calls the Museum Fund.

“The investment portfolio can grow and we can make sure those moneys are used to hold harmless the museum’s general operating budget,” said Bencivenga.

As for an actual endowment, Kolb says that line item had to be cut from the budget. “The reality is this project has taken 10 years, and that was the only flexibility we had,” she said. “So any surpluses in operating in the first couple of years will go into a board-directed endowment.”

Please Touch spent $10 million developing proposals and plans for a site on Penn’s Landing, a project that never materialized.

Before its anticipated 480,000 visitors march through the front door, Kolb is giving regular tours to potential donors. What they’re seeing is nothing less than an architectural rescue. Memorial Hall, from 1876, suffered decades of water damage, ham-fisted retrofittings (it recently housed both a pool and a single prison cell), and neglect.

Some of the spaces are getting mere stabilization and a new coat of paint. Each area of the museum will have its own child’s-room-bright paint color to help visitors navigate the experience.

But other areas, such as the central entrance hall, have received painstaking repair of elaborate plaster work, ornamented columns, and niches for statues. The marbled floor has been restored. Plaster details, not too long ago disintegrating beyond recognition, are now sharply detailed, highlighted in a very grown-up color scheme of gold and brick-red.

The central hall will, however, contain one very child-like flourish: a replica of the torch from the Statue of Liberty rendered in a colorful palette of discarded toys, game boards, street signs, and other flotsam and jetsam collected by Philadelphia artist Leo Sewell.

Some of the new spaces will retain the intimacy of the Please Touch’s current space, whose smallness and manageability are qualities that parents like.

But some of the vast new spaces, three stories high, will clearly not be like that, and the entire museum experience will change from something akin to gourmet boutique to superstore food warehouse.

So much bigger will the new Please Touch be that the current 90-minute stay is expected to grow to four hours or more. “I don’t think you’ll be able to do this experience well in one day,” says Kolb. “You’ll want to come back again another day.”

The age range of the target audience also will expand. For preschoolers, there will be the supermarket and water games. Other children, to age 12 or older, can learn about the Centennial Exhibition via a 20-by-30-foot model of the Exhibition grounds.

For much older visitors, the museum is playing the nostalgia card (as it has in its current space), offering visitation with Captain Noah’s TV set and the Wanamaker Rocket Express monorail from the store’s old toy department. It hopes to lure carousel buffs with its newly restored 1924 specimen, which is on an 80-year loan from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

Many of the old, beloved aspects of the Please Touch will be a part of the new experience – the popular SEPTA bus, for instance – in brighter and enlarged forms.

The Alice in Wonderland experience will travel to Fairmount Park, but the new exhibit will have a circular sliding board.

“This time,” says Kolb, “you’re going to be able to fall down the rabbit hole.”

Funding Sources

The following grants and donations are in addition to the anticipated net proceeds of more than $5.5 million from the sale of the organization’s current buildings.

Government funds

Commonwealth $18,960,000

Federal 6,859,723

Local 5,500,000

Major donations

$2.8 million

William Penn Foundation

$2 million

Hamilton Family Foundation

Pew Charitable Trusts

$1.5 million

Wachovia Bank

Annenberg Foundation

Delaware River Port

Authority

$1.1 million

Toyota

$1 million

Bill and Susan Shea

anonymous donor

$850,000

John S. and James L.

Knight Foundation

$845,000

Philadelphia Foundation

$750,000

Arcadia Foundation

$730,000

McDonald’s Corporation

$525,000

Independence Foundation

$500,000

Connelly Foundation

Albert M. Greenfield

Foundation

Phoebe W. Haas Charitable Trust A (as recommended

by Carole Haas Gravagno)

Hess Foundation

Independence Blue Cross

The Tut show at the Franklin is tops in world

By Stephan Salisbury, Inquirer Culture Writer

Tut is tops. And not just any Tut, but the Franklin Institute’s blockbuster 2007 show of boy-king antiquities.

According to figures published in the March issue of the Art Newspaper for shows that concluded in 2007, “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” which spent February through September at the Franklin, had the highest total attendance of any temporary exhibition of art or antiquities in the world.

About 1.29 million visitors attended the traveling show during its Philadelphia sojourn. Tut’s stop at the Field Museum in Chicago from May 2006 to January 2007 drew 1.04 million, making it No. 3 worldwide, according to the newspaper. No. 2 was “Manet to Picasso,” which drew 1.11 million to London’s National Gallery from September 2006 to May 2007.

The next-largest U.S. exhibit was the Museum of Modern Art’s “Richard Serra Sculpture: 40 Years,” which drew 737,074 between June and September.

The show with the largest average daily attendance – by far – was “The Mind of Leonardo” at the Tokyo National Museum from March to June. An average 10,071 visited the exhibit each day – all to see a single painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation (1472-75), on loan from the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. The Art Newspaper said the Leonardo daily figure represented a record for the decade or so during which the newspaper has parsed such numbers.

By the measure of daily average attendance, the Franklin’s “Tut” still did well, drawing 5,375 visitors per day, ninth on the list.

Helen Stoilas, editorial manager for the Art Newspaper in New York City, said the Tokyo National Museum seems to do well every year.

“Tokyo in general seems to get enormous attendance figures,” she said. “We think it is groups, school groups. They seem to pull in a lot of them.”

One other Philadelphia exhibition did well by the international measure: the exhibition of Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from January to March of last year. Some 42,913 visited the painting after the Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts jointly acquired it, the climax of a highly public purchasing effort.

The Art Newspaper said an average of 846 visited the Eakins exhibit daily, placing it eighth worldwide in average daily attendance at exhibits of 19th-century work.

Tut at the Franklin Institute was the number-one show of antiquities worldwide.

“We’re very happy,” said Lynda Bramble, an institute spokeswoman.

Dutoit: The leader, in fact

By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic

Titles are nice, but in the murky study of orchestra alchemy, music director is as music director does. Charles Dutoit is only the Philadelphia Orchestra’s chief conductor and artistic adviser – and not even that until September. Yet already he is a fully present force, leading concerts – and, apparently, rehearsals – with the kind of authority only the titular head of an ensemble can exercise. Maybe we should just call him boss and leave it at that.

Dutoit is a reenergized sight on the podium, making moves Thursday night I could not recall from my nearly two decades of watching him. His new juice no doubt stems from an alleviation of the rheumatoid arthritis that plagued him several years ago, and also perhaps a response to what he’s getting in return from the orchestra. In Strauss’ An Alpine Symphony he at one point stepped back farther and farther on the podium as the music grew, as if the perch were no longer big enough to contain both him and his expansive gestures.

But in ways that portend a partnership of great achievement, what Dutoit was able to do with Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”) was more impressive. The orchestra doesn’t do a lot of Mozart, but it does perform this symphony from time to time, and it looms large in the training of most players. Dutoit made it his own. The first movement presented an interesting paradox that even some musicians doubt can exist: The tempo was on the slower side, but the music was packed with crisp energy. It all comes from the details.

I wasn’t privy to rehearsals, but the score was so meticulously worked out that Dutoit’s preparation became absolutely legible. Lengths of notes, finely scaled dynamics, shared phrasing between sections, instrumental balances – all were wonderfully etched into an interpretation that had to startle anyone who thought Dutoit was simply a sensual French specialist (if last week’s Janácek Sinfonietta hadn’t already provided a surfeit of lovely evidence).

The spiritual second movement made me think you can keep your period-instrument techniques – legato lines wrapped in an extremely refined sound is an idealization that’s hard to top. As usual, fewer players on stage in Verizon Hall rewarded the acoustic. The piece calls for only five woodwinds, and each projected polish and complexity of sound.

It’s important in this season of big pieces (as the orchestra’s marketing materials have categorized them) to factor in the impact inherent in any large work. With a huge ensemble that includes organ, wind machine, cowbells, off-stage brass and a suspended piece of metal that might fall under the jurisdiction of the Sheet Metal Workers Union, An Alpine Symphony is out to impress the audience. And it did. And it should have. I’m not particularly in love with the piece, but there’s no doubting the ensemble and solo skills it took to put together Strauss’ nature picture so convincingly.

But with half as many players on stage, it was the Mozart that conveyed the stronger sense of poetry – not to mention, in its own quieter way, sheer impact.

By Stephan Salisbury, Inquirer Culture Writer

Lori Dillard Rech, who practically grew up on the water and just about has gills, is not one to flee a sinking ship. But she’s not interested in going down with one either. So maybe it’s not surprising that Rech leapt at the chance to take the helm of the beleaguered Independence Seaport Museum, an institution run aground on Penn’s Landing and battered by the misdeeds of its former president, John S. Carter.

Rech, 42, a self-described “Navy brat,” took over in September, two months before Carter was sentenced to 15 years in prison for defrauding the museum of more than $1 million.

In her first months on the job, she has carefully moved to bolster staff confidence and establish ties with other institutions and groups in the city and on the New Jersey side of the water. Carter had let associations and morale fall by the wayside, Rech said.

This was particularly unfortunate, she added, because she believes strongly that the future of the museum lies in its ability to tell the stories of Philadelphia as a working port and the Delaware River as a working waterway.

Rech wants to tie the museum directly to the water by, among other things, more closely linking it to its two major historic vessels – the Spanish-American War cruiser Olympia, and the World War II submarine Becuna. Both are docked at the Penn’s Landing basin right outside the museum and are open for touring. Still, their relationship to the building just feet away is unclear.

The museum may have attracted 80,000 visitors last year, but that figure includes 20,000 schoolchildren, as well as visitors to the Olympia and Becuna who did not venture into the building. New signage will begin to address that problem.

“We’re also going to use the basin, which is the body of water right here,” Rech said. “We have that finger pier that extends out, and we’re going to actually put some of our small-craft collection on the water this spring. They’re rotating right now through the [museum's] workshop. So all the folks in the workshop are restoring these small crafts that have been sitting in our warehouse for years.

“We’re going to be putting about five boats that tell the story of the Delaware – a little shad-fishing boat, for instance, and some other boats that are Delaware Valley regional boats. They’re going to be floating in the water.

“We’re going to run a summer program this year that will include not only a boat-building project but also an on-the-water experience. So we know that we need to extend our programming out.”

Rech has the full backing of the museum’s trustees – the Board of Port Wardens, as they are called – who selected her unanimously from among 122 applicants.

Previously, she spent five years as president of the Betsy Ross House, where she sorted out myriad management and program problems. Before that, she served as director of education and public programs at the National Museum of American Jewish History, education director at Fort Mifflin on the Delaware, and education coordinator at Brandywine Battlefield.

Rech has been a vice commodore of the Liberty Sailing Club and owns a 1959 Chris Craft Silver Arrow, restored by her father. She lives in Queen Village with her husband, an old salt himself.

Theodore T. Newbold, a museum president in the 1980s who returned as interim chief when Carter was fired in 2006, expressed confidence in Rech.

“I’m very positive about her,” he said. “If anybody can really get that place moving in the right direction, she can.”

Board chair Peter McCausland concurs: “She has tremendous talent and energy. I’m looking forward to Lori pulling it all together.”

McCausland, who became chairman two years ago, is expanding and replenishing the board. Nine new members have been added, for a total of 23. (Vincent J. Fumo, the Democratic state senator who faces a separate set of legal problems, stepped down more than a year ago.)

The board is “organized around strong committees,” McCausland said, with each museum department tied to a committee. “The board will bring all plans together,” he said, “and move the museum forward.”

McCausland has worked to replenish finances, as well, museum officials said. The endowment has grown from $7 million to $14 million in two years. And the museum ended its most recent fiscal year with a small operating surplus. The annual budget is $4 million, officials said.

New financial and administrative controls are now in place, which McCausland believes will go a long way toward preventing the kind of misappropriation of funds that Carter engaged in.

To rethink the museum’s identity, Rech is seeking ties with organizations on both sides of the river and within the city’s cultural community.

“There are lots and lots of, for instance, maritime organizations – the stevedores, the longshoremen, the pilots association, the maritime exchange folks – lots of organizations along the river that we need to be partners with because that’s the story we need to tell: the working river,” she said.

“I go out and meet with these folks. I attend their dinners. I’m talking with them. I want them to come into the institution and become involved and start telling their stories so that becomes our new mission – that we’re telling the story of these folks on the banks of the Delaware every single day. . . .

“And another thing I’ve been trying to do is create stronger partnerships with veterans groups. These are also the groups that are going to end up supporting us in so many ways, not only financially but also in terms of artifacts and stories.”

Cara Schneider, an official with the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp., said the museum is in “a good position to strengthen partnerships” with other organizations, adding, “Sooner or later people will catch on.”

“I love the water,” Rech said. “. . . My father has restored six antique boats. I have one of them. I go to boat shows. I sail every week. On weekends I’m sailing in regattas.

“I’ve climbed around naval vessels all my life, my dad being in the Navy. There’s something about it that’s just in me. This is really my life.”

Walking through Center City on a warm, rainy morning this week, I have Schumann on the iPod – the Overture to Manfred. It’s obvious to me and no one else what makes Schumann so great. Not just that wrenching chord progression that keeps coming back like some awful, implacable guilt. Schumann has this way of maintaining that everything in the world is safe, there to support you, now and always. You can hear nature in all of his music, pushing itself into the score like a reminder of man’s idyllic origins. And then he takes it all back. The real truth about life, Schumann argues, is that your reality, everything you think is true, is a mirage.

Sounds trite or maybe overheated in a sophomoric way when you write it, which is what makes committing language to music as tough as it is. But the bigger point is this: Classical music is so large, so deep, so personal that we lack a common language to communicate what’s great about it. Maybe the first paragraph of this piece meant something to you; maybe I lost hundreds of others after they saw the name Schumann.

And that, in a nutshell, is classical music’s dueling asset and liability.

What does all this have to do with last week’s announcement of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 2008-09 season? Think back more than a dozen years.

When it comes to cultural epochs, the thin end of the wedge is often hard to detect. It is pretty obvious, though, that the moment that classical music started to lose its hegemony was 1996, when recording companies began walking away from U.S. orchestras.

Around the same time, subscriptions to live concerts began to plunge, corporate underwriting fell, and incredulous orchestras had to explain to people what was so great about classical music. Explain? Justify? It seemed like a form of humiliation.

Though shaken, the Philadelphia Orchestra hardly stood by like a deer in the headlights. The orchestra has been tinkering with concert presentation since early in the Wolfgang Sawallisch era, putting live video screens in the Academy of Music; dressing musicians for Halloween concerts; devising Access concerts at which a guest takes apart the score with discussion, then puts it all together; holding social events for singles, and talks and postlude concerts to reward audiences for their loyalty.

But you get the feeling, with plans for 2008-09, that for the first time these experiments have been organized into packages with a lot of forethought about who the customer is and what her level of musical education might be. The orchestra’s new brochure – designed and written, perhaps significantly, not by a hotshot ad firm but by in-house staff – is the cleanest and most sophisticated marketing piece I’ve seen come from them. Looked at another way, it’s also a smart blueprint for the future.

In short, what the orchestra is now saying is that you can experience it any way you want. The orchestra has researched its audience as part of a larger study by nonprofit consultants WolfBrown, and has responded by crafting “collections” – series of concerts aimed at constituencies with distinct tastes and levels of expertise. The “masterworks” collection, for instance, focuses on warhorses – a curiously under-deployed ambassador for introducing novices to classical music.

If you’re an expert, you can assemble a package of concerts that are exactly like the ones you’ve been hearing since Aunt Bippy took you backstage to meet Stokowski. But other concerts will use projection screens to show close-ups of playing musicians. Some will be followed by parties, or feature talking on stage.

To give you some idea of the scale of change, consider the fact that only half the orchestra’s presentations next season will follow the traditional concert format. That’s practically a revolution.

It’s easy to criticize the glacial pace of change, but the orchestra is bound to the conservatism of its audience, and there’s no more delicate balancing act than the one that leans one moment toward following public taste and the next toward leading it.

No question, next season follows the public. There’s not a single world premiere in sight. The orchestra has a responsibility to advance the art form, so let’s hope this is a brief retrenchment. Audiences love new pieces, too, and yearn to stretch their own definitions of music even if that attitude might not show up in audience surveys.

The same research that encouraged the orchestra to market directly to the stratified audiences with distinct “collections” shows another phenomenon, this one rather alarming.

Turns out young audiences who did not grow up with classical music are perfectly willing to try it. But the level of engagement felt by listeners with no preexisting connection to specific repertoire or artists is severely stunted. What these audiences are saying is: “We went to the orchestra once. We did it. Why come back?”

Art museums have answered that question with the blockbuster show, periodically luring audiences back with their newsiness. Orchestral analogues are harder to find. And anyway, blockbuster attendance has little lasting power.

Long-term education of audiences, especially while they’re young, is a more promising if labor-intensive pursuit. There’s just no getting around the fact that very few listeners appreciate Manfred very much if they’re walking in the door hearing the music for the first time.

How many listeners in the six-county area can be given a deep feeling for how great Schumann is? The orchestra might not know how to answer yet, but now at least they’re asking the right question.