In June, 2008 the Grant Park Music Festival planned and hosted a pair of branded Take A Friend To The Orchestra concert events. In addition to special programming, the organization scheduled a post-concert Talk Back event after the first concert and a pre-concert Coffee Talk session before the second concert. Both events were free to the public and attracted more than a few hundred participants.
Grant Park Music Festival's "Take A Friend to The Orchestra" concerts.
Both events went wonderfully The weather simply couldn’t have been better and both concerts filled the park to capacity (12,000) with a few thousand more spilling over to the walkways and adjacent grassy areas. During the Coffee Talk session before the final performance, the festival’s Artistic and General Director James Palermo (2007 TAFTO contributor), music director Carlos Kalmar (2008 TAFTO contributor), and I discussed the ideas behind the “Take a Friend” concept and answered patron’s questions.
Grant Park’s TAFTO concerts garnered an enormously favorable review by Bryant Manning in the 6/20/2008 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times and the organization discovered that their “Take A Friend” initiative attracted hundreds of first time listeners thanks to Jim Palermo taking a moment during his pre-concert announcements to ask by a show-of-hands how many first time listeners were in attendance.
All in all, both concerts were a big hit and an excellent resource for other groups to use in designing their own “Take A Friend” event. If you are interested in learning more or if there is anything I can do to help with putting an event together, just get in touch. In the meantime, check out some photos from both concert events below.
~ Drew McManus
