“A lively crowd fills downtown’s Sambuca Restaurant on a recent Friday night,” writes Colin Eatock in Thursday’s (12/31) Houston Chronicle (Texas). “About 50 people split off for a private party upstairs. They don’t look much different from the crowd downstairs—young professionals, in their 20s and 30s. But the upstairs group has just come from a Houston Symphony concert in Jones Hall, down the block. They’re members of Young Professionals Backstage … a 100-member group between the ages of 20 and 40…. ‘It’s a lovely way to connect to the symphony and to connect with other people,’ member Lela Brodsky, 30, says. … A basic subscription includes tickets to three selected Houston Symphony concerts. ‘Each of the designated YPB concerts has a happy hour before the performance, and then afterward, there’s an event at a different location,’ she says…. Houston Symphony chief development officer David Chambers says that younger audiences aren’t necessarily the objective—as long as people eventually find their way to the performances.” Says Chambers, “Often, it’s after people raise their families that they go back to the things they enjoyed when they were younger. Symphony, opera and ballet may be just some of those things.”
Posted January 6, 2016
