You Know the Symphony Is in Trouble When…

On Sunday I saw an ad in the Trib for a concert two days later that I thought my 11-year old godson would enjoy—The Chicago Symphony performing Scheherazade under Charles Dutoit at Orchestra Hall.

A few years ago, the idea of getting good tickets for the CSO on two days’ notice would have been laughable. The most you could hope for would be seats in the rafters, and you couldn’t count on that.

Well, going through no special channels (simply using the CSO’s website), I got three seats in the thirteenth row of the main floor, on the center-right aisle.

This seems to mean two things. It means the CSO, and probably symphony orchestras all over, are in a predicament.

But it also means that if (like me) you have often avoided (or not even thought about) seeking tickets to individual symphony concerts on the assumption that no good seats can be had on short notice, that assumption can happily be revisited.