Mariachi at Symphony Center opens new doors

Last Saturday was one of the most exciting nights of my employment at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It wasn’t significant in the way that Barenboim’s farewell concerts or Haitink’s Mahler 3 concerts were; it was significant in that it opened new doors and welcomed new audiences.

While the Orchestra was on tour at New York’s Carnegie Hall, back in Chicago we presented Mariachi los Camperos de Nati Cano, the first mariachi ensemble featured in the Symphony Center Presents special concert series. This series presents the absolute top artists in a variety of world music categories, from The Chieftains to Ravi Shankar to the Soweto Gospel Choir.

When you present something for the first time, you never really know how it will turn out, so naturally there was some anxiety. Double that when it’s a late buying crowd. But about two weeks before the concert—shortly after Thanksgiving—the bulk of the ads started to run, and the public relations efforts started to kick in; ticket sales picked up enormously.

At the beginning of the season, they asked me what special concerts I would like to take on. “Mariachi los Camperos,” I said. I had not worked much with the Latino press yet, so I was excited to initiate that relationship. Alvaro Obregon from The Resurrection Project, a pillar in the Pilsen and Little Village communities, was the best help you can imagine, as were the people from Los Camperos, setting up interviews with Nati Cano.

There’s always a feeling that you could have done more, but I was happy with three long stories in Hoy, La Raza, and Extra. A high school mariachi ensemble from Benito Juarez Community Academy went out to the WTTW studio for an appearance on “Chicago Tonight.” Telemundo and Univision featured the concert in their news and PSAs, respectively, and Nati Cano was interviewed on WBEZ and WHPK.

On Saturday, the event kicked off early with the same high school ensemble performing in Symphony Center’s Rotunda space and the Mexican Dance Ensemble in the Grainger Ballroom. As aptly described by Giles Morris on his blog: “It was pretty clear walking into the Chicago Symphony on Saturday night, that it was going to be a different kind of night at the symphony.”

Just as the crowd bought their tickets late, the crowd arrived for the concert late. Morris paints a telling picture and writes:

“Whole families were there on Saturday, complete with their Tres Generaciones. The old people were there in their honor seats, monuments of an immigrant generation. Their children had paid for their tickets, symbols of a new bi-lingual middle class. And the kids were there, the new Americans…”

I saw patrons with complete Mariachi costumes, patrons with cowboy hats, patrons in their “Sunday clothes,” but mostly, I saw patrons who were genuinely impressed and slightly in awe. It is, after all, quite a beautiful concert hall and a first visit is incredibly inspiring. The first half of the concert, I spent standing in the back of the hall. My wife, who had been working quite hard on the concert, drawing in people from the Caminos a la Musica program and taking Spanish calls in the weeks running up to the concert, was sitting in the box level with Alvaro and the Mexican Consul-General. The last song before intermission was “Michoacan,” the state where my wife’s mother’s side of the family is from, which made it all the more personal. Even for me.

Again, Morris puts it eloquently in his blog entry:

“It wasn’t a concert, it was a formal recognition ceremony. Three generations of Mexican-Americans, of Chicagoans, had come to one of the city’s most established institutions to celebrate their own heritage.”

A formal recognition ceremony. That is pretty powerful stuff. One of the main reasons why Symphony Center Presents exists is delivering music that speaks to a city so diverse. Chicago has an enormous Latin American population, but we had never presented a mariachi ensemble in that series before. Welcoming members of the Latino community in Orchestra Hall has been a longtime aspiration and the CSO has been working with the Mexican Fine Arts Museum and The Resurrection Project for some time, but opening the doors for programming such as Saturday night’s was a key aspect that hadn’t happen yet.

The fact that it did happen Saturday night was the start of something new. I believe that’s what Morris means with a formal recognition ceremony. I, for one, hope it was also an initiation ceremony, the start of more programming for the Latino community and welcoming more members from that community. Seeing how well it sold, I think it is entirely justifiable in all aspects as well.

And that is why I work in non-profit and the arts. You couldn’t get that experience anywhere else.