Philadelphia Orchestra visits home for free "neighborhood" concert

It would be understandable if anyone left the Philadelphia Orchestra's second and last free "neighborhood concert" of the season feeling bemused.

The point of these concerts, started a decade and half ago, is to bring the orchestra to audiences who don't ordinarily go to it. Holding Thursday night's neighborhood concert in Verizon Hall, the orchestra's home, represented a certain up-is-down logic that perhaps only the orchestra and its sponsors could appreciate.

The concert wasn't exactly free, either. The audience paid by listening to seven minutes of speeches. (A regional bank officer talked about how sponsorship translates into doing good, the kind of messaging moment we've come to expect well beyond the traditional halls of commerce.)

When Kimmel Center president Anne Ewers asked the audience for a show of hands of those who had never been to the arts center, the concert's co-presenter, she oohed at the result - even though relatively few hands went up. Maybe hands rose in homes around the globe, as the orchestra was streaming the concert live.

And then orchestra president Allison Vulgamore told the audience what a terrific orchestra we have. Such matters should be self-evident. The problem was that even though there were moments in this concert when the orchestra was terrific, truly, the ensemble also sometimes sounded threadbare and in need of maintenance.

All this happy talk mixing with certain challenges in standard Berlioz and Ravel seemed like two distinct orchestra eras waving at each other in the uneasy night - one having to tell people the orchestra is great, and the other with the orchestra actually being great.

This orchestra has off nights - all do - and perhaps this was one. The main personality on stage was that of principal guest conductor Stéphane Denève, who proved to be the hardest-working conductor in show business.

The theme of the concert was bells, he said, and he brought two volunteers from the audience on stage to try out the bells, used later in the "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath" from Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique.

Denève conducted the audience in a round of "Frère Jacques." He asked listeners whether it was anyone's birthday - and then rewarded a lucky Kaitlyn with free tickets to a future concert and led the orchestra and audience in song. He breezed through Bernstein's Overture to Candide, produced tight ensemble in John Williams' Sound the Bells, found lovely details in Jennifer Higdon's blue cathedral, and only scratched the surface of coloristic possibilities in Ravel's La valse.

But his neatest trick of the night was shifting the hand-holding-to-music ratio to a brave new high. Six pieces were played, including a Rachmaninoff/Stokowski Prelude in C Sharp Minor encore - about 48 minutes of music on a program that (once it started, after the speeches) lasted 72 minutes. By my math, that makes Denève not just a conductor, but also classical music's merriest and most voluble game-show host.