It’s pop-meets-classical season at the Mann, with the Philadelphia Orchestra pairing with Beck and Dispatch

Summer is pop-classical season at the Mann Center. Pop artists get the thrill of being backed by the world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra, as the orchestra seeks to connect with curious pop fans and grow its audience.

The first of two weeklong residencies in Fairmount Park got underway this week with a fireworks-capped Tchaikovsky Spectacular, followed by a screening of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, with the orchestra playing Danny Elfman’s score.

On Saturday, it’s Dispatch, the New England indie roots band fronted by Chadwick “Chetro” Stokes and Brad “Braddigan” Corrigan, who have been a draw on the jam band circuit since the 1990s, pairing off with the Fabulous Philadelphians.

Next month, the orchestra’s second week at the Mann includes the centenary of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Marcus Roberts Trio on July 24, and genre-fluid polymath Beck on July 25.

Those team-ups “are a great way to show an audience that the orchestra to can expand beyond what they traditionally do,” says Toby Blumenthal, the Mann’s VP of operations and chief innovation officer.

. At events like Aladdin on July 27 at the Mann, Blumenthal says, Disney fans might “not realize how powerful the music is until you have 100 musicians in front of you and can feel it in a whole different way.”

Last year at the Mann — which was built in 1976 to be the orchestra’s summer home — the classical-pop program included Philadelphia songwriter Amos Lee, plus rapper Chill Moody on composer Darin Atwater’s Black Metropolis: Improvisations on Paint Factory. Earlier this year, the orchestra teamed with Sting for a pricey date night at the Kimmel Center.

“We love to introduce new people to the orchestra, and also to introduce orchestral audiences to what the orchestra can do in other creative collaborations,” Orchestra chief programming officer Jeremy Rothman said. “The Philadelphia Orchestra performs at an elite level, but it is not closed off to other genres and other forms of music. When you bring people together and get them to experience an art form for the first time, that’s the magic sauce.”

Many genres and forms will be heard simultaneously with the stylistically promiscuous Beck, who was last at the Mann in 2023 on tour with French rock band Phoenix.

This year, he is ready for something fresh.

“I’ve always been drawn to classical music,” said Beck, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s part of my musical universe.”

In 2018, he recorded a cover of Colourbox’s “Tarantula” with the L.A. Philharmonic and his friend Gustavo Dudamel for Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. His summer orchestral tour “makes sense because if you look at my records, there’s a good 25 or 30 songs — maybe 40 — that have an orchestra.”

His father, David Campbell, who’s teamed with everyone from Michael Jackson to Radiohead, is a string arranger and has worked with him on a bunch of records, Beck said.

Among those are down-tempo albums like 1998′s Mutations, 2002′s Sea Change, and 2015′s Grammy album of the year, Morning Phase.

“When we’re out on the road doing a rock show with a five-piece band, that aspect of my music doesn’t get represented. So this gives me a chance to dig into all this orchestral work we’ve done and play it live.”

Beck first played Philadelphia in 1994 at the tiny J.C. Dobbs, with “Loser” as his calling card. “That was like my Newport Folk Festival in that I had just gone electric” he said. “Before that, I had just been playing acoustic. So I was learning in public.”

He won’t ignore the hits at the Mann. “There’ll be stuff from Guero, stuff from Odelay. A little something for everybody. But it will definitely dig deep into the catalog.”

A more surprising name on the orchestra’s summer to-do list is Dispatch, the band formed at Middlebury College in Vermont in the 1990s who found a fan base in Boston, drawing over 100,000 to a free show in 2004.

It’s OK with Corrigan to call Dispatch a jam band, “though when I think of singable choruses I don’t think jam band,” he said from his home in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.

“Thirty years ago I might have said, ‘We’re a tri-vocal funk-acoustic instrument-swapping groove band … Now it’s like: ‘We make music, we sing a lot.’”

Last year, Dispatch teamed with the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap and the Colorado Symphony at Red Rocks in Denver.

They were smitten.

“Just the idea that we could meld our music together with these world-class musicians was mind-blowing,” Corrigan said. “It’s such a collaborative experience weaving us together with 60 or 70 more players and all these textures and colors and sounds, and having the conductor create the glue between these two organisms.”

Edwin Outwater will conduct with Dispatch. For Beck, it’s Steven Reineke.

“We love strings, we love brass, we love deep percussion and timpani,” said Corrigan, who makes solo records as Braddigan. “We just got giddy. It made us feel like kids again and reminded us why we picked up our instruments in the first place.”

Amos Lee understands Brannigan’s enthusiasm. The Philly singer-songwriter is a veteran of many such collabs, having first thrown himself into it with the Colorado Symphony in 2014.

Since then, Lee — whose album Transmissions is due Aug. 9 — has played almost two dozen orchestra shows. Last July, he realized his dream with the Philly Orchestra.

As is standard practice, Lee and his band had one rehearsal on the morning of the performance.

“So you have to have your charts really in order,” Lee said. “Like, impeccable.” As conduits, he relied on his longtime music director Jared Olecky and Philly classical-rock connector Andrew Lipke, a vocalist at the orchestra’s Brahms vs. Radiohead performance in 2022.

Rothman acknowledged orchestra players can be dissatisfied with pop mash-ups they find unchallenging.

“But I think people would be surprised about how open orchestra members are about different genres of music,” he said. “There’s this stereotype that classical musicians are walled off and have never listened to rock music in their entire life. It’s actually quite the opposite.”

In conversations with orchestra members — particularly bassist Joseph Conyers and cellist Yumi Kendall, cohosts of the Tacet No More podcast — Lee says the musicians he interacted with were keen to collaborate.

That enthusiasm carried over into his performance at the Mann, Lee said.

“For me, the Philly Orchestra show was one of the top five shows I’ve ever done. The orchestra was amazing, as was the venue. I love the Mann. It was a beautiful night. It was just great. And if the vibe’s not good, that doesn’t happen.”

Dispatch with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Mann Center, 5201 Parkside Ave., 8 p.m. Saturday. $39-$79. manncenter.org. Beck with the Philadelphia Orchestra ath the Mann Center at 8 p.m. July 25. manncenter.org.

A screening of Aladdin with live music orchestration is July 27. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts Mahler and Debussy at the Mann on Sept. 18. In August, the orchestra will be in Saratoga Springs with a reprise of the Gershwin program, plus John Legend and Angelique Kidjo.