When conductor and music director Arild Remmereit takes the podium on Friday, September 30, for opening night of the 2011-2012 season of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, he will be trying to create "an orchestra of necessity, not just an orchestra for a few people," he says.

Sitting front and center in Kodak Hall after the opening-night red-carpet walk with Remmereit and the RPO musicians will be Charlie Owens, president and CEO of the RPO - a man who will be paying as much attention to box office receipts as to the opening notes.

So far, Owens says season ticket sales are going strong and are keeping pace with last year's season ticket sales at this same time. "I think it says a lot about the Rochester audience that they are already out of the gate, sight unseen," says Owens. The "unseen" is a reference not only to Remmereit beginning his four-year contract as RPO conductor and music director, replacing longtime and beloved music director Christopher Seaman, but also to Remmereit programming well known composers like Johann Strauss, Jr. on the same night as relatively unknown composers like Amy Beach, Johan Halvorsen, and Johan Svendsen.

Even Remmereit says, "This season is, indeed, a risky season. The challenge is to get you to come out to hear it, to get people to buy tickets for what they don't know."

The bold moves of Remmereit, Owens, and the RPO come on the heels of a barely balanced 2010-2011 RPO budget, in an economy of persistent recession, and just one season after bankruptcy filings by orchestras in Syracuse and Philadelphia. Still, with season ticket sales at 7,534 a week before the premiere, everyone within the RPO organization is abuzz with the possibility that the RPO just might have the winning formula to get the organization to a new high note.

The story of this unconventional concert season begins in 2006, when the RPO board of directors hired Thomas W. Morris, a national orchestra consultant, for a year-long, institution-wide process of asking questions and analyzing data to create a strategic business plan. Morris, a Rochester native who attended RPO concerts at a young age, was also a former executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra and general manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The result was a 2006 report entitled "Ensuring a Vibrant Future."

"I was not quite here yet," says Owens, who began his tenure with the RPO in November 2007. "But it was clear that leadership of the RPO made a pact with itself that it would not allow the dust to settle on that strategic plan. It was clear when I joined on in 2007 that at least on an annual basis, we were going to revisit the goals of that program and make revisions accordingly."

The 2006 report opens with the words, "Since its founding in 1922, the persistent challenge facing the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra has been: how to continually develop, nurture, and support a nationally recognized orchestra in a midsized community."

Included in its remarks were "the existing policy of spending less but doing more cannot continue; cost cutting as a way to finance future growth is not a realistic option."

But not long thereafter the RPO did have to cut costs. The 2008-2009 RPO concert season suffered an operating deficit of $776,000. In a January 20, 2010 press release announcing a fundraising campaign called the "Million Dollar Community Challenge," then RPO Treasurer Elizabeth F. Rice called the 2008-2009 season "a year of two halves," citing a decrease to 70 percent of concert goals from January to June 2009, a net loss of 769 donors, and a shortfall in endowment earnings due to stock market losses. (Rice is now the chairwoman of the RPO board.)

To the orchestra's credit, the very next season, it was Owens at center stage, announcing that the RPO had achieved a balanced budget for the 2009-2010 season with total revenue and support at $9,202,307, and total expenses at $9,199,891. Owens describes the positive balance as a "razor-thin margin as of August 31, 2010."

The RPO made it into the black through a combination of $520,000 of wage and benefit reductions by musicians and staff, and by a fundraising campaign raising $1.1 million from more than 1,800 donors. The musicians are organized and represented in wage and benefit negotiations and collective bargaining agreements through the Rochester Musicians' Association, Local 66.

According to the 2010 annual report, revenues were down $1 million. "For two years, cost cutting in a pretty dramatic fashion really was essential for our survival," says Owens. "We would have run out of cash in either of the past two years if we hadn't taken about $1 million out of our budget. It was absolutely essential that we get our house in order that way."

The annual report for the RPO's 2010-2011 season with fiscal year ending August 31, 2011 is not due out until January 2012, after the auditors examine the financial records. Owens believes it will demonstrate another balanced budget.

But now Owens, too, is also of the opinion that further cost-cutting could have negative long-term consequences for the RPO. "When more than half of the cost-cutting happens on the backs of employees and musicians, over the long term, it will erode artistic quality, the ability to maintain and retain artistic talent," says Owens.

The RPO is part of a very small group of orchestras nationwide to be a professional orchestra with an operating budget at or above $5 million. According to the League of American Orchestras data from April 2011, there are more than 1,800 orchestras nationwide, but only approximately 350 are "professional orchestras" with paid musicians. The rest are volunteer, collegiate or conservatory, or youth orchestras.

The RPO, like many businesses, was hit by the impact of the global economic recession, beginning in the fall of 2008. "The impact of the recession put a lot of our aspirations on hold," says Owens.

Still, Owens says, "We haven't deviated from our goals, but the impact of the recession, coupled with Christopher Seaman's decision to step down at the end of the 2010-2011 season and the start of a new music director search, caused us to take our focus off some of those longer-term objectives."

Owens says he is ready to make recommendations to the board to "go for growth," including getting musicians and staff back to pre-recession salaries and benefits. Owens has experience with growing orchestras: during his eight-year tenure with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, he grew the organization's budget by 60 percent, increased annual attendance by 52 percent, and increased individual donations by 76 percent.

Owens says that a "new strategic plan" for the RPO has been in the works for the past year or so, but he is "not quite ready to go public with the fundamentals."

"Our long-term objectives really haven't changed, but some of our strategies have changed as a result of the modern-day economic realities and a very specific artistic vision that Arild Remmereit brings. He has a very clear and specific vision of how he would like to grow the organization, certain types of partnerships, certain types of technologies - his priorities become our priorities."

Remmereit, too, is making the RPO his priority, one that involves moving from Vienna, Austria, with his wife, Honami, and infant son, Leonardo, to live in Rochester. Remmereit was born in Norway in 1961, and graduated in 1986 from the Norwegian Conservatory of Music, where he studied piano, song, and composition. He has lived in Vienna since 1987.

"I am going to work hard on the most obvious part of my duty to secure the artistic quality of this orchestra and its good musical spirit, and I am going to involve myself in being a Rochesterian - a fresh one - to involve myself in establishing connections with a larger audience, working as an ambassador in the community for this orchestra," says Remmereit.

Remmereit's vision for the RPO comes out of what he calls his "hobby" of searching out "the others." "I am having a conducting career of almost 20 years, and it has been a hobby of mine throughout," says Remmereit. "I am asking myself, ‘What about the others?' I have always been curious to find out about the others."

"The others," as he calls them, are those composers who Remmereit has discovered through years of intense research, and who may be composers of whom you have never heard. It would seem an appropriate interest for the conductor who, in 2005, the New York Times music critic James R. Oestreich called "the hottest conductor you've never heard of."

Remmereit goes on about the others, and, while talking about American composer William Henry Fry, he says, "I'm so excited about it; I'm almost jumping as we speak."

"We are facing a situation where programming becomes a little bit restricted out of fear for failure," says Remmereit, "so we end up programming - this is worldwide, not just in Rochester - we end up programming a small number of pieces that we [know] with research are selling fairly well. A marketing process has brought it to the point where we don't dare to program things that are not brand names."

Remmereit's daring programming isn't just programs of knowns with unknowns, it's adding new elements to the equation. While visiting Rochester, Remmereit found his way to BOA Publications and Writers & Books, perhaps the center of the Rochester writing community, and he decided to initiate collaborations. "Whether it ends up being poems written by Rochesterians or students in Rochester, or poetry from around the nation related to Rochester, there will be a link to poetry in all my concerts," says Remmereit. "Poetry will walk with us from this first season."

Remmereit also decided to connect to photography. "Another initiative is to reach out to photographers to have them showing us their work while we are playing so that there will be a small exhibition at one or several of the concerts, and perhaps while we are playing," says Remmereit.

"Another thing that immediately I got inspired by in Rochester is Susan B. Anthony and women's rights," says Remmereit. "All my concerts, which are eight in total, will have at least one woman composer on the program."

Through his approach, Remmereit is hoping for two things to happen: to present new repertoire to the core RPO audience and to expand that audience beyond its core members.

What we won't know for some concerts to come is whether Rochester is the location in which to conduct this grand experiment, or whether Remmereit has the magical baton with which to do the conducting.

Remmereit acknowledges that this is his first engagement as a music director in America. "I haven't had an opportunity to program in America for a whole season," says Remmereit. "As a guest conductor, I have had one or two concerts at a particular orchestra at the very most."

Remmereit first came to Rochester as a guest conductor in May 2009. His first American guest-conducting appearance was with the Madison Symphony in Wisconsin in 2003.

But, Remmereit is quick to add he is passionate about presenting "firsts" and claims to have found "significant success" with this formula for individual concerts in Detroit, Pittsburg, Seattle, New Jersey, and Dallas.

Exciting though it may sound from an artistic perspective, all things artistic cost money, and there is the reality that Remmereit's artistic vision will increase orchestra expenses. "For the Mahler performance this season, the extra players alone will cost $40,000 extra," says Owens, reflecting that the orchestration will require a number of additional musicians for the five-movement, near 90-minute work depicting the beauty of the afterlife and the resurrection. "What we're doing now very aggressively is to try to line up underwriters for that - ideally new underwriters. We'd like people to step up and be inspired by Remmereit's multi-year programming of Mahler."

And, with approximately half of the 2011-2012 season being works that have never been performed by the RPO, Remmereit's programming choices have increased the library budget another $35,000 to $40,000, according to Owens. Works new to the RPO require the purchase of scores and/or payments of royalties. "We're looking for underwriters to close that gap as well," says Owens.

The RPO's operating budget comes from several funding sources: ticket sales (40 percent), donations (40 percent), draws and distributions from the endowment fund (10 percent), government grants (4.5 percent), special events (4 percent), the Youth Orchestra (1 percent), and miscellaneous sources like recordings and the gift shop (1 percent). (Figures are rounded.)

Ticket sales break down into roughly an equal combination of season ticket sales and single concert ticket sales, according to Owens, and these are two different types of concert goers. The season-ticket holders, says Owens, are typically purchasing the very same seats year after year. The single-ticket purchaser is more program sensitive, and might be a new member of the audience, might be coming out for a special performance, or might come once or twice in a season.

Looking at the 2011-2012 season, the most famous name on the marquee is violinist Itzhak Perlman, performing in a single concert on Sunday, January 22, 2012. Owens reports that the Perlman concert is almost sold out.

According to annual reports, attendance for the 29 philharmonics concerts during the 2009-2010 season was approximately 40,200, down roughly 7 percent from comparable figures for the 2008-2009 season of approximately 43,000. Owens expects the next annual report to reflect increased attendance, partially in response to it being Christopher Seaman's last season with the RPO.

Working in the RPO's favor from ticket sales to donors is the impression that greater Rochester may be home to more musicians per square mile than any comparable location nationwide. The womb of the Rochester classical music community is the Eastman School of Music. As of September 2011, there were 921 students enrolled in Eastman with more than 130 faculty members.

And, Eastman's curriculum includes an arts leadership program, including the business side of classical music and entrepreneurial skills. "This program dates back almost 20 years," says Jamal Rossi, executive associate dean at ESM. "Now these programs exist at places like the New England Conservatory because of ESM alumni."

Rossi emphasizes that it's not the economy as much as it is the cuts to music-education programs across the country that could have the greatest long-term impact on the future of classical music. "If children don't experience the sheer joy of making music, why would we expect them to go to a concert 30 to 40 years from now?" Rossi asks.

Another aspect of RPO financing is government grants. While Monroe County has maintained its approximately $160,000 per year funding levels to the RPO through the recession, New York State Council on the Arts and money from individual members of the New York State Assembly and Senate has declined.

Owens points to a decrease in Council on the Arts funding of more than $150,000 and an aggregate decrease in member-item funding of more than $600,000. According to the annual reports, government grants went from 7.7 percent of the 2009 operating budget down to 4.5 percent of the 2010 operating budget.

What has remained consistent during this same period are the approximately 6,000 individual donors supporting the RPO, with individual gifts in categories as high as $25,000 and above - a list that includes Betty Strasenburgh, after whom Betty's Café at the Eastman Theater is named. Also among the donors are the 29 current RPO board members, each of whom is expected to contribute at least $9,500 per year, plus engage in numerous fundraising activities to encourage donations from their peer group.

Owens says that if Remmereit's first season with the RPO does not meet financial expectations, adjustments can and would be considered for the second season. Unlike the proverbial widget company, an orchestra's ability to make changes during a season is limited.

For Owens, tracking numbers for the 2011-2012 season will be milestones in November (how did the season ticket sales and revenues start?) and then in January (how did the "Nutcracker" and Holiday Pops concert sales and revenues progress?). According to Owens, the "Nutcracker" and Holiday Pops concerts alone can account for approximately $600,000 of the season's revenues. "We will go in on the first day of the new calendar year and take a close look at the capital campaign and the holiday results and make some decisions about whether we need to tighten our belt in the second half of the year."

Owens says that "only as a last resort would we interrupt programming for the spring."

It would not be a complete business analysis without reference to the various orchestra bankruptcies that swept through symphonies from 2008 to 2010, including the nearby Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, which filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceeding on April 5, 2011, during its 50th anniversary season, with liabilities of $4 million exceeding $325,000 in assets, and liens extending even over the orchestra's 9' Steinway D grand piano.

Last spring, the RPO reached out with an offer to Syracuse Symphony Orchestra patrons, allowing purchased SSO tickets to be used to attend specific RPO concerts. According to Owens, "several dozen" patrons from Syracuse did so. The RPO also invited SSO patrons to a reception with the RPO board members. (Owens tactfully cautioned though that the RPO wants to be "careful" about courting that audience while there are reports, including a recent newspaper article in the Syracuse Post-Standard, about various efforts to start a successor organization.)

The RPO draws its audience from the greater Rochester area, a market, according to the 2010 Census Bureau data, that includes Rochester's population at 210,565 within the broader Monroe County population of 744,344.

While the RPO may do some increased marketing to the Geneva-Clifton Springs area, Owens says that, "It's really only the exceptional programming that would prompt someone to drive the hour and a half" to get to Rochester from Syracuse or Buffalo - a drive Owens himself made to hear the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra last February in its performance with the percussion ensemble Nexus in the rarely performed work by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, "From Me Flows What You Call Time."

Both Remmereit and Owens express themselves during the interviews with a bit of nervous excitement about the new season. "I have been given the trust to be responsible for the programming and I believe in the salability of it here in Rochester," says Remmereit. "A certain portion of risk is necessary to be able to see growth. A risk can also be change for the worse, but we can only see when we try."

Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra: Arild's Inaugural

Friday, September 30, 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, October 1, 8 p.m.

Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre, 60 Gibbs St.

$15-$92 | 454-2100, rpo.org