by Susan Elliott | Musical America

As discussed in Part I, the newly christened Highmark Mann Center boasts of renewal, but also displays its lineage with pride. Staff is young, enthusiastic, and clearly committed; there’s a palpable sense of belonging, everywhere: A chance encounter with a hard-hatted construction worker putting the finishing touches on the new Plaza yielded a hearty “Hello!” and “What do you think?” to this wandering observer. He hastily answered for me, “Amazing, right?”

Much of the team spirit is President and CEO Cathy Cahill’s doing. A warm and effervescent presence, she arrived at the Mann Center in 2008, when the annual budget was $6 million, staff numbered 10, and there was no endowment. Now there are about 45 full-time staffers, an endowment of $11M, and an annual budget of $40M. Summertime union payroll alone reaches 1,300 to accommodate the average annual attendance of 400,000. A whopping 88% of the Center’s revenue is earned, mostly from its partnership with pop-music monolith Live Nation (other presenters are not excluded); the rest of its balance sheet comes from donations and grants. The ratio of nine to one also reflects the pop/cultural programming balance, as it does in other venues originally planned as the summer home of the local orchestra—like Ravinia for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Blossom Music Center for the Cleveland Orchestra.

Extra-musical considerations

Narrow as the cultural slice of the pie may be, it’s not all devoted to classical music. Cahill points to last year’s partnership with Mexican chef Cristina Martinez, whose on-stage cooking class was part of a weekend celebration of native music and dance. BalletX was this summer’s “opening act,” and in 2023, to honor Hip Hop’s 50th anniversary, the Center commissioned Chill Moody to write a piece to perform alongside the Philadelphia Orchestra. Film nights with the orchestra are also on the docket. “You’ve got to get the families in,” says Cahill. “They’re certainly not getting arts exposure in the schools.”

She’s doing her best to fill that gap with what she calls the “three pillars of The Institute of the Highmark MannCenter for the Performing Arts," now overseen by Frank Machos, a onetime director of arts and creative learning for the Philadelphia School District. The pillars are: Out of School Time, Youth Workforce Development, via the Music Industry Training Program (MITP); and Cultural Convening, bringing diverse populations together on the site. There’s even a summer camp. “We pay all operating expenses,” says Cahill, “the food, the busses, the instruments—we even pay for the uniforms!”

MITP is particularly interesting for its collaboration with the city’s public schools, whereby highschoolers follow a three-year training and mentorship program in non-performance arts-based skills, from lighting operators to carpenters, stagehands, etc. such that they can enter the arts sector workforce after graduation.

All of these community impact programs are free, their budget coming out of that 20 percent of the pie raised from donations. Speaking of which, an interesting note about the name change from Mann Center to Highmark Mann: Unlike the sticky situation when a then-sizable donation from David Geffen caused the removal of Avery Fisher’s name from the New York Philharmonic’s performance hall (whereby the Fisher family had to be compensated), the Mann Family had no problem with the additional name from Highmark, a new branch of a health insurance company seeking a branding opportunity in the area. Frederick Mann was honored not for a single donation but for his role in moving the Robin Hood Dell concerts (which still exist, with an entirely pop/R&B menu) across town to Fairmont Park. The Mann family thus welcomed the Highmark name.

A Hundred Years On

To reach the broadest possible audience (“Mozart and Bach don’t work on this stage,” says Cahill), most of the orchestra’s programming is classical lite or well-known staples, making the choice of Peter Boyer right on target to compose A Hundred Years On as the Grand Reopening Night centerpiece on June 17. Based on the 450-acre, 200-building exposition the U.S.A. hosted on its Centennial (discussed in Part I), the new work is scored for five soloists, chorus, and orchestra—an oratorio, of sorts.

In an interview before the premiere, Boyer explained that he had only just met librettist Mark Campbell in person, having spent the last severalCampbell in person, having spent the last several years working together remotely. The libretto came first, Campbell having created five fictional characters who might have been in attendance on a single day at that six-month post-Civil War consumer showcase: Amelia Dunning, the mother of a son killed in the Civil War; Susan McCormick, a woman seeking the right to vote; Mario Jozwiak, a female Polish immigrant from the Midwest; Horace Clarke, a young man with a particular interest in Alexander Graham Bell’s latest invention (“the wire”); and Ignatius Thomas, a Black waiter at an Exhibition restaurant that didn’t allow Black customers.

Campbell’s characters—sung, respectively, by sopranos Mary Dunleavy and Meredith Lustig, mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti, tenor David Portillo, and baritone Macolm Merriweather—each told their stories, coming together at the grand finale with words of hope for and belief in a great United States going forward. Boyer wisely used the chorus (the multiple prize-winning Crossing) to handle the lists of hundreds of inventions on display, naming them in variously numbered configurations of singers. This led to some interesting harmonic cross-fertilization, fleeting intersecting phrases about sewing machines, typewriters, steam engines, etc., that neatly balanced Boyer’s lyrical vocal lines.

Orchestrally, and preceded by the equally tonal, expansive, and richly orchestrated pre-intermission works of John Williams’s Liberty Fanfare, and Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, Boyer’s work fit the occasion perfectly, a grand, sweeping, tribute to America then and now, with such declarations as “Happy Birthday, America.” Anthony Parnther balanced the myriad forces with care and maintained appropriate focus on each as the need arose.

The 45-minute opus was accompanied by projected slides, animated and otherwise, drawn from historic images from the event itself; the costumed characters appeared in front of the orchestra, the chorus behind it on risers, all coordinated by Tazewell Thompson’s stage direction. Boyer’s craft as an orchestrator was on full display, as were strains of Copland, John Williams, and Walt Disney’s Alan Menkin; with practiced skill he managed to build to a finale that brought the house down, the raucous standing ovation further fueled by the final slide, “We Welcome You to Philadelphia.”

A splash of artful clamor

As preamble and palate cleanser, programmers sandwiched Julia Wolfe’s ten-minute Liberty Bell between Williams and Sousa, a joint commission among several orchestras and marking the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first reading, here without most of the principal players. The huge video screens at the sides of the 4,500-seat Pavilion showed a percussion section hard at work on this namesake tribute, with flanks of noise-makers, tuned and otherwise, including a thunder-sheet enlisted in Wolfe’s musical realization of what she so aptly states in her program note: “Obtaining liberty is not a quiet tidy process. It is a messy, boisterous, ongoing, interlocking struggle…Music is my way of adding to the clamor.”

That she does, artfully, in a fully populated stylistic stew of chugging minimalist pulses, bursts of brass choirs, rock and roll drum riffs, jazzy rhythms, twittering upper reeds, and bells—lots of bells. The piece ends with a single clang, whose resonance Parnther managed to sustain—arms up—into the evening air, until its natural end.