Inquirer.com – Zurich DR

Author: Peter Dobrin

Philadelphia Orchestra has a new assistant conductor. She likens the job to a Formula 1 reserve driver.

When Sara Aldana auditioned for the coveted Philadelphia Orchestra assistant conductor spot in April, she tried out in front of the ensemble with Copland and Bartok.

For the third piece, she chose an excerpt from Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2. The Russian composer is closely associated with the Philadelphians — he once called the orchestra the greatest in the world — and the second symphony, Aldana said, was close to her heart.

“I was like, whatever happens with the audition, I just want that memory of — wow — doing Rachmaninoff Two with Philadelphia for five minutes.”

Now she’ll be spending many more minutes with the Philadelphians. Aldana won the audition, and is the orchestra’s next assistant conductor, the group announced Wednesday.

The position is a junior one, though it has been a steppingstone to bigger opportunities. Aldana follows Naomi Woo, who has already been engaged as a guest conductor next season.

Aldana studied with Philadelphia Orchestra principal guest conductor Marin Alsop and worked as a cover conductor with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. As assistant conductor in Philadelphia, she will lead family and special concerts and give pre-concert talks.

One of her biggest responsibilities will be one that the public may never get to see — or that could make her career. She will serve as cover conductor, which means she could be tapped to lead a Philadelphia Orchestra concert at any moment if the scheduled conductor falls ill or is otherwise unable to perform at the last minute.

“I always think it’s like the Formula 1 reserve driver, you know? You might not be driving the car, but you could get a call and you have to get on, driving the car,” she said Aldana.

Conductor Marin Alsop — who has worked with Aldana — leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, May 28, 2026, in Marian Anderson Hall.Joe Lamberti / For The Inquirer

Aldana, 30, was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and earned an undergraduate degree in violin performance at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a master’s degree in orchestral conducting from the University of Michigan, where she studied with Kenneth Kiesler, and did further studies with Alsop and Joseph Young at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.

She has served as assistant conductor of the Reno Chamber Orchestra and is a 2026 mentee with the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship.

Aldana was at Peabody for a year, but left after winning the Philadelphia audition.

That tryout ended with five finalists for the job. Each had a short time conducting the orchestra, dipping into excerpts of various styles — Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin Suite, and the third piece, which the finalists could choose themselves from among three possibilities.

All five chose the last few minutes of the famously emotive third movement of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2.

Why this piece?

“I’m a violinist by training, and so I absolutely love Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2.”

The audition lasted all of 15 minutes.

“Fifteen minutes is a short amount of time, but you realize with Philadelphia, it’s all you need to get a good idea of who they are as an ensemble and the culture that they have as a group. It just happened to be a beautiful connection.”

Although Aldana started out as a violinist, she long harbored, even as a child, an interest in conducting.

“Your instrument is the orchestra, all these colors, and it’s just getting to play with all of them — how you create sound, balance, getting to discover, you’re continuously learning. That’s something that really appealed to me.”

The double bass section of the Philadelphia Orchestra performing on opening night of the 2025-26 season in Marian Anderson Hall, Sept. 25, 2025.Elizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer

Aldana’s official start is Sept. 1. Her first scheduled concert with the orchestra is a Jan. 2 matinee in Marian Anderson Hall of Strauss family waltzes and other works.

Asked what piece she might dream of someday conducting with this orchestra, Aldana said any Tchaikovsky symphony, but especially the Sixth.

“There was an Ormandy recording that I remember listening to a lot. I was obsessed with this piece — obsessed. I remember that lush of the strings in the most heart-wrenching moments.”

Is there a piece she would find too daunting to conduct?

“Daunting. Hmm. I don’t think so.”

Does that mean she’s musically fearless?

“I am a little fearless,” she said, “when you have one of the best orchestras in the world in front of you.”

July 1, 2026
City budget cuts force Mural Arts and Philadelphia Cultural Fund to slash programs

In past years, the city’s budget process has followed a certain pattern for Mural Arts Philadelphia and other groups.

The mayor’s proposed budget lists city funding at one level; City Council and others advocate for modifications at a higher level; and the budget goes back to the mayor and is finalized with the higher allocation in place.

This year was different.

Philadelphia’s nationally acclaimed program that puts colorful murals in neighborhoods and provides jobs was hoping for a boost in city funding.

Instead, the budget ultimately agreed to by Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration and City Council cut funding to Mural Arts — from $5.1 million in fiscal year 2026 to $3.7 million in 2027.

Likewise the Philadelphia Cultural Fund. The group — which awards hundreds of grants to arts groups throughout the neighborhoods — was looking for increased funding in the city’s newly approved $7.1 billion budget for the fiscal year starting July 1.

But the arts nonprofit, established by the city recently, learned that it will get substantially less — $3.5 million instead of the $5 million it received from the city for the fiscal year now ending.

As a result, both groups say they will have to make deep cuts to programs.

Philadelphia’s arts and culture sector had greeted the start of Parker’s term 2½ years ago with optimism for increased funding. Today, it is “alarmed” by the cuts to Mural Arts and the Cultural Fund, said Patricia Wilson Aden, president and CEO of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

“We always say that your budget tells a story, and I have to say that the cultural community is disappointed and frustrated with the story being told by this FY27 budget,” she said. “Cutting the budget of signature programs like Mural Arts by 26% or decreasing funding to the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, that’s going to have ramifications throughout the city.”

Parker was not available for comment, a spokesperson said.

Valerie V. Gay (left) chief cultural officer with the City’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, and finance director Rob Dubow (right) testify at a Philadelphia City Council hearing, Aug. 8, 2024 on the collapse of the University of the Arts.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Valerie V. Gay, the city’s chief cultural officer, said it was the city’s view that funding for the two groups had remained flat from 2026 to 2027, since the base allocation stayed the same and it was only the added amount that did not come through — though she allowed that “absolutely I can see how it can be perceived.”

A ripple effect

The resulting cuts at both groups promise to be substantial. The Cultural Fund will be forced to reduce the number of grants it had been expecting to distribute in the coming year, from 332 to 232. It has changed its eligibility requirements, which will eliminate grants to a pool of midsize organizations currently eligible.

“It’s going to be a ripple effect. People are going to feel it and communities are going to feel it,” said Philadelphia Cultural Fund executive director Gabriela Sanchez.

“An investment in the Philadelphia Cultural Fund is more than a budget line item,” Sanchez wrote in a statement distributed by the group. “Funding to PCF represents how the city values neighborhood theaters, cultural centers, museums, arts education programs, festivals, dance companies, community storytelling initiatives, music programs, and cultural traditions that bring Philadelphians together. These spaces are where young people discover their creativity, where seniors find connection, where communities celebrate their heritage, and where residents gather across lines of difference.”

Jane Golden (center right) speaks with press at the Wawa Welcome America media preview for the Philly Fair 250, outside the Please Touch Museum in West Philadelphia, June 18, 2026. Mural Arts held a ceremonial unveiling of a 10-story-high mural replica, originally titled ‘CityKids Speak On Liberty,’ and created by Keith Haring.

Mural Arts director Jane Golden declined to comment, but an initial assessment from the group obtained by The Inquirer says that “hundreds of residents in at least 15 Philadelphia communities will lose the opportunity to develop public art projects,” and that opportunities for paid work, job training, and mentorship through the Mural Arts Restorative Justice program will be reduced by 25%.

Mural Arts will also have to cut by 75% its program of restoring and preserving the city’s murals, “putting at risk community landmarks that took years and significant public investment to create,” the impact statement reads.

Of the program reductions at both groups, Gay said: “I am always sad that any cuts are made or that any organizations are unable to do the work they thought they were going to be able to do. That’s always a sad time for us, and I’m looking forward to when we are a fully funded sector.”

A city spokesperson was unable to provide a full list of groups that in past years had received higher allocations after advocacy from City Council and others, but this year did not.

What’s behind the cuts

Aden says arts and culture has seen some significant recent “wins” from city government. Among them is the advancement of a referendum that, if approved by the mayor and then by voters this fall, would enshrine the city’s office of arts and culture, called Creative Philadelphia, in the City Charter.

The city has approved $500,000 a year to develop and implement a cultural plan for Philadelphia that would document financial needs and could identify potential pathways to establishing funding.

The ‘Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design’ exhibition at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Nov. 1, 2025.Elizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer

Sometimes the city’s support is for regular operations, and other times it is for specific capital projects. In an unusually large commitment, the city has pledged $50 million to the African American Museum in Philadelphia for its relocation to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

The city is providing nearly $32.5 million to arts and culture in FY27, according to a list provided by Parker’s office. While that total includes small items that might seem mundane — paying utility bills at various facilities, for instance — it also shows multimillion-dollar allocations to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dell Music Center, and Philadelphia Zoo.

But the arts and culture sector often finds itself fighting for adequate funding in the annual budget process. Arts leaders and others say it has been standard practice in recent memory that funding is listed at one level in the mayor’s proposed budget and after City Council testimony in budget hearings ends up being higher.

This year, the mayor “could have funded [the arts] at a higher amount,” as she did last year, but did not do so, Councilmember Rue Landau said.

The cuts came after a budget that passed without a series of tax increases proposed by Parker, including a $1 tax on rideshare services, after failing to win support from City Council. After Council signaled it would reject Parker’s tax proposals, the administration would not agree to any last-minute line items for new funding requests from lawmakers.

Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, a consistent arts supporter who, like Landau, is an ex-officio Mural Arts board member, said that with the lack of new tax revenue and the city’s extra allocation of $48 million to cover the Philadelphia School District’s budget shortfall, the funding pie for other allocations got smaller.

“This budget year, a lot of attention and advocacy went toward schools,” Thomas said. The funding cuts to Mural Arts and the Cultural Fund were “extremely unfortunate,” he said, “and I wish we could have done something different.”

The need for ‘predictable, stable, reliable’ funding for the arts

While the city’s budget is now final, there is another potential window of opportunity for funding through a midyear budget transfer process in which the city might see expenditures in certain areas coming in lower than expected, and then transfer money from those categories to other areas.

Asked whether funds might be restored through a budget transfer to Mural Arts or the Cultural Fund, Gay said:

“I think anything is on the table, but I also think nothing is guaranteed.”

Patricia Wilson Aden, president and CEO of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, at S. Broad Street and Walnut along the Avenue of the Arts, Feb. 15, 2023.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer

Any restoration of funds would happen after arts groups have already put cuts in place, and this kind of unpredictability “makes planning by these organizations very, very difficult,” Aden said.

“The practice of underfunding the arts and having Council and other entities have to go on an advocacy campaign to increase funding is illogical,” Landau said. “It is clear as day that we should be supporting the arts with additional funding every single year, so we don’t have to go through this and it won’t ever be a question mark for them.”

What is really needed, Aden said, is a dedicated arts fund in Philadelphia and the region.

“We’ve seen other regions benefit from this predictable, stable, reliable funding. And instead, here in Philadelphia, each year we have this conversation about increases and decreases and their impact. We are sometimes left to the will and whim of elected officials, and we would like to take the creative economy out of the political realm and put it solidly within our larger civic interest, so that it is stable and has the investment that is required to reach its full potential.”

Staff writer Anna Orso contributed to this article.

June 26, 2026
S. Broad Street gets a new landscaped median — and it’s just the start of what’s planned

A new landscaped median under construction for months in front of the Kimmel Center has reached completion — the down payment on a promised major redo of the Avenue of the Arts streetscape.

The leafy ribbon down the middle of Broad Street from Spruce to Pine Streets was officially unveiled Wednesday morning with speeches and a ceremonial sprinkling from blue watering cans onto the new plantings.

“We aimed high and we met our lofty expectations, and we’re off and running,” said Carl Dranoff, chair of Avenue of the Arts Inc., which is spearheading the project.

There is a practical, traffic-calming intention behind the raised median: It leaves less space for drivers to make U-turns on the block occupied by the arts center and residences, and creates a barrier to thwart pedestrians jaywalking across Broad Street.

Attendees watering the new redesign of the South Broad Street median outside the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Pa., on Wednesday, June 24, 2026.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer

But the slender, shapely strip of trees, shrubs, and ground cover atop a granite base with metal skirt signals a larger transformation to come.

In spring of 2027, work is expected to begin on an ambitious beautification of the heavily trafficked block. Sidewalks will be landscaped, sculptures installed, and pop-up performance space carved out, creating what planners say will be a markedly different vibe.

That will give the project’s leaders something tangible to point to when raising money for the entire streetscape project, which is envisioned as eventually stretching from City Hall south to Washington Avenue.

“The idea of a beta block was to get everybody on board and excited about what can be accomplished — the doability and to create buzz,” said Dranoff, who said the median was the first step in turning South Broad Street into “one of the great streets of the world.”

Oliver Schaper, Ubran Designer for the Project with the New York office of Architecture/Design Firm Gensler, waters the plants in the redesign of the South Broad Street median outside the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Pa., on Wednesday, June 24, 2026.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer

That larger, 10-block effort is expected to cost about $150 million and take years to design and complete, with funds anticipated from both government sources and philanthropy.

The design of each segment will vary, said Oliver Schaper, an urban designer for the project with the New York office of architecture/design firm Gensler.

“The requirements of adjacent buildings are different on every block, the left-turn lanes are different, even the length of the median is different from block to block,” Schaper said. “We wanted to make sure that all the design elements can act as a kit of parts and adjust, so each design of a block will be an application of that kit of parts so they feel like cousins, but specific.”

Some design professionals have criticized the median as intrusive to sight lines, but the design and landscaping were chosen to preserve sight lines, Dranoff said.

Carl Dranoff, Chair of Avenue of the Arts Inc., speaks about the redesign of the South Broad Street median outside the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Pa., on Wednesday, June 24, 2026.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer

“All of the trees were specifically selected to have long trunks and very narrow canopies, all the vegetation.” The designs adhere to standards for safety, he said, “so we are very confident that we will not block views.”

The flora — about three dozen kinds of native and adaptive plants — were chosen by OJB Landscape Architecture to withstand “the abuse that they will be subject to in terms of the winters and the salt and all that,” Schaper said.

Looking ahead, the blocks farther north from Spruce Street are anticipated as having fewer trees, to preserve the view of City Hall.

“We even designed, as you get closer to City Hall, standing areas for brides and photo ops, so that we’re not taking anything away from people,” Dranoff said. “We have parade areas so that Mummers and other parades have performance areas between the medians.”

City Hall seen in the back near the new redesign of the South Broad Street median outside the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Pa., on Wednesday, June 24, 2026.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer

But more immediate is the work from Pine to Spruce, where Dranoff’s 47-story Arthaus residential condo tower sits. The $5 million needed to pay for the median and work on the infrastructure beneath the street “is accounted for and that was utilized,” Dranoff said, “and of the $10 million for the sidewalks, we have several million lined up and more to go, and we’ll have it all by the end of the year.”

Construction on the sidewalk portions is expected to begin in 2027 and be completed by the end of the year “or thereabouts,” he said.

Schaper said part of the goal is to rebalance the dynamic between pedestrians and other factors.

“I think as designers at some point we take a position, and our position was, ‘Let’s design for pedestrians.’ There are, of course, very specific requirements that we need to adhere to — for example, it’s reflected in conversations that we had with the Kimmel Center about their bus queuing, and we made adjustments to continue to allow that to happen.”

The new redesign of the South Broad Street median outside the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Pa., on Wednesday, June 24, 2026.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer

But, he said, the plan sets out to be “an advocate of the pedestrian experience, and not think that private car access is the model of the future for cities.”

Dranoff said construction of this first median phase, running much of the block from Spruce to Pine, was delayed by the unusually harsh conditions of this past winter, but workers made up for lost time.

“Philadelphia’s going to be a hotbed this summer, and the whole point of this was to show what we can do and be more beautiful and more attractive and more compelling to Philadelphians and to suburbanites and to the world.”

June 24, 2026
A century of sound: A history of music in Fairmount Park
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A Century

of Sound

A history of music in Fairmount Park

By

Peter Dobrin

Published Jun 16, 2026

Coverage in The Philadelphia Inquirer of the opening of the Robin Hood Dell in July 1930.

Philadelphia Inquirer

July 8

1930

Admit One

The Robin Hood Dell in East Fairmount Park opens with an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people attending the concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Later that month at the Dell, a young conductor named Eugene Ormandy conducts the ensemble for the first time.

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July 24

1931

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The popular Hall Johnson Choir performs — the first Black artists to appear there.

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Aug. 30

1933

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Samuel Barber’s *Overture to the School for Scandal* receives its world premiere at the Dell.

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a brief pause for this advertisement

July 18

1940

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More than 12,000 attend and thousands more are turned away from Marian Anderson’s Dell debut the year after her historic Easter concert at the Lincoln Memorial.

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July 1

1943

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Judy Garland, age 21, performs at the Dell in her first public concert.

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July 17

1944

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Dean Dixon becomes the first Black conductor to lead the Robin Hood Dell Orchestra (the name used for the Philadelphia Orchestra at the venue at the time).

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Frank Sinatra at the Robin Hood Dell, July 6, 1945.

The Philadelphia Inquirer © 1945 Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. All Rights reserved. Used under license. The Philadelphia Inquirer photograph collection, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries.

July 6

1945

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Frank Sinatra sings in an unscheduled performance when Dinah Shore calls him up to the stage from the audience.

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July 22

1948

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Following a shutdown of the Dell after poor ticket sales and a deficit, businessman Fredric R. Mann takes over as board president.

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June 27

1949

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Leonard Bernstein makes a splash with a concert version of Wagner’s *Tristan und Isolde*.

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July 25

1949

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Duke Ellington and his Orchestra appears with the Robin Hood Dell Orchestra — the first time a Black orchestra and a white orchestra perform together on the Dell stage.

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Summer

1959

Admit One

The Dell season opens with competition: noise from the Schuylkill Expressway, which had recently opened nearby. Soon, leaders begin to consider a new site in the park.

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A poster for Van Cliburn's Aug. 1, 1963, debut appearance at the Robin Hood Dell.

Photo courtesy of Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts Archive

Aug. 1

1963

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Superstar pianist Van Cliburn makes his Dell debut.

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June 22

1964

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Verdi Requiem in memory of John F. Kennedy.

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Aug. 8

1967

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Jerry Blavat produces and emcees Rock ‘n Roll Jamboree, drawing 19,000 ticket buyers for a concert including the Soul Survivors and Patti LaBelle.

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Detail from a 1976 promotional brochure for what was then called the Robin Hood Dell West.

Photo courtesy of Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts Archive

June 14

1976

Admit One

The Robin Hood Dell West officially opens in West Fairmount Park. Artists, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, perform in that first season.

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Summer

1978

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Fully staged opera and ballet are presented.

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June 13

1979

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The Dell West is renamed the Fredric R. Mann Music Center.

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July 6

1981

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Mann debut of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, age 25.

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1982

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Between 1982 and 1984, the Mann hosts the Kool Jazz Festival, with artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie.

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Riccardo Muti leading the Philadelphia Orchestra with pianist Andre Watts at the Mann Center, June 30, 1983.

Photo courtesy of Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts Archive

Summer

1990

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Conductor Charles Dutoit becomes chief of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Mann series.

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Summer

1998

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Facing financial challenges, the Mann cuts back on its free lawn ticket program.

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a brief pause for this advertisement

Sept. 16

2001

Admit One

Just days after 9/11, the Philadelphia Orchestra led by Wolfgang Sawallisch performs a memorial benefit concert.

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July 27

2010

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Aretha Franklin and Condoleezza Rice, as pianist, perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra at a gala fundraising concert.

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July 23

2016

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An estimated 10,000 people turn out for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s live-to-screen performance of *Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone*.

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Summer

2019

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The Roots Picnic is held at the Mann for the first time.

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Fans sit on the lawn at the Mann Center in Fairmount Park while Wilco performed on Sunday, August 22, 2021.

Yong Kim / Staff Photographer

May 15

2021

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At the Mann, the Philadelphia Orchestra performs for a live audience for the first time in more than 14 months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Spectators attend the second day of The Roots Picnic 2025 at the Mann Center.

Yong Kim / Staff Photographer

Oct.

2025

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The arts center announces a 12-year sponsorship agreement rebranding it the Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts.

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Staff Contributors

Design and development: Charmaine Runes

Reporting: Peter Dobrin (Source: *A Century of Music Under the Stars* by Jack McCarthy)

Editing: Bedatri D. Choudhury

Photography: Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts Archive, The Inquirer

Copy Editing: Lissa Atkins

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June 16, 2026
The renovated Highmark Mann has reopened and the vibe is national-park chic. A 195 foot-long digital wall is its new star.

Greener and roomier with a chic naturalistic look, the Highmark Mann Center officially reopened Monday after the final phase of a yearslong renovation.

Construction at Philadelphia’s outdoor arts center in Fairmount Park went not just down to the wire, but a few weeks beyond it, delayed by this past winter’s stretch of snow, ice and subfreezing temperatures. In early June, dance fans arriving for BalletX performances found the main entrance and other parts of the campus still under construction.

But on Monday, amid speeches and the cutting of a long golden ribbon, the Highmark Mann emerged polished and substantially changed from its appearance after closing for the season last October.

Stevie Wonder said it best, said Highmark Mann president and CEO Catherine M. Cahill to a crowd of dignitaries gathered at the center’s entrance Monday.

“Music is a world within itself with a language we all understand,” she said, quoting the lyrics to Wonder’s “Sir Duke” from 1976, the year the center opened. “Music offers a release from the ordinary, and today we celebrate exactly that. This new space was designed to transport us from our everyday lives into a magical, musical, immersive experience that begins with the moment you arrive.”

An opening event on Monday showcased a renovated Highmark Mann Center.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

Monday’s relaunch came 50 years and one day after the center’s opening concert.

The Highmark Mann has raised $68.6 million toward its $70 million goal in this campaign — a sum going toward operations, endowment and cash reserves, artistic and 50th anniversary projects, as well as paying for the last several years of construction projects.

The renovations unveiled Monday, designed by architecture firm EwingCole, include a redesigned plaza three times the size of the previous one, and a substantial new gateway entrance structure.

A “Hollywood”-style “Highmark Mann” sign now stands planted in the lawn, ready to serve as backdrop for selfies. A new sound system promises a truer musical experience tailored to each performance.

“If there’s a country artist, you’re going to want a slightly different response than if you are hearing R&B or classical,” said Highmark Mann vice president and general manager Evan Rogers.

Promising young plantings and a new welcome center and other structures faced in wood and stone might echo the surrounding park — Cahill calls the aesthetic a “timeless national park look” — but the centerpiece of the renovation is more like something out of Times Square.

The Satell Centennial Wall East at the Highmark Mann Center on Monday.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

A spectacular digital screen now bedazzles the main concert shed, greeting visitors with a stream of video art and programming rendered in images vivid and saturated even in bright sunlight.

The Satell Centennial Wall East on the side of TD Pavilion won’t carry advertising, Mann leaders vow, but sequences on culture, history and the like. On Monday, it displayed a feature on the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park and photo montages.

“It’s purely artistic content, which is super exciting,” said Brad Baer, digital experience/innovation adviser of the screen, which runs 195 feet on its longest side.

The Highmark Mann opened five decades ago as the Robin Hood Dell West, the local summer retreat for the Philadelphia Orchestra, and it has evolved into a bona fide arts center that feels both sylvan and city. The orchestra today is a small part of the Highmark Mann identity; this summer only six of an announced 45 presentations involve the ensemble. Pop music predominates.

An interactive jukebox in the Highmark Mann Center’s welcome center tests knowledge and rewards users by playing a piece of music at the end.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

Other recent changes include a second major performance space, the Skyline Stage, opened with a permanent structure in 2023 and a capacity up to 7,500 patrons standing; and a stylish remaking in 2024 of dressing rooms and other backstage areas whose displays of archival photographs and other materials remind visiting musicians of the center’s formidable artistic history.

The goal is to communicate that the center is “not static,” says Cahill, “whether it’s world premiere commissions, or new sound systems to engage lawn patrons who hopefully will become seated patrons at some point in their life cycle.”

All this is part of a conscious campaign of institution-building. Once considered something like an annual but ephemeral summer bloom on the edge of Philadelphia’s arts and culture community, the Highmark Mann has grown its budget and built out programs beyond concerts, like a summer arts institute for classical and jazz student and an entertainment industry apprenticeship program.

It even has aspirations to increase its number of operational months, if not to year-round, then at least well beyond summer.

The welcome center at the Highmark Mann includes a gift shop, interactive panels with games testing musical trivia, and tickers flashing the names of artists who have performed at the outdoor arts center.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

It is also now telling its own story. The center commissioned a book — A Century of Music Under the Stars, by historian Jack McCarthy — that covers music in Fairmount Park even before the Philadelphia Orchestra organized its concert series on the other (east) side of the Schuylkill in 1930.

And it is mining its own archives for the potential release of recordings of historic pop and orchestral performances that have taken place there over decades.

Concertgoers can now experience some of the center’s history in the welcome center, where an interactive video jukebox quizzes visitors with trivia about artists who have performed. Merch is for sale, and the names of musicians glide by on electronic tickers crawling up the walls to the ceiling.

Said Cahill:

“With this transformation of this campus and celebrating the 50th anniversary, this is where we thought we could bring it all together and tell the history and the incredible legacy through all this technology, which is what people in the 21st century are used to engaging with.”

Highmark Mann president and CEO Catherine M. Cahill in the center’s new plaza with the “Hollywood”-style “Highmark Mann” sign in the background.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

In the past, the center has often relied on tents to house certain amenities. Now, there are fewer tents and more buildings.

The effect is symbolic as well as practical.

“One of the things that you hate about the tents is, they go away. But all of this building, the gardens, the infrastructure — all of this sends a different message that it’s not going away when the Highmark Mann closes down at the end of the summer.”

Cahill wants to imbue visitors with a feeling that they were “someplace that mattered” and wants them to be able to say, “‘I was a part of it.’

“The Highmark Mann has a lot of people who love us,” she said. “We want to become their premier destination, for them to come here and bring family and friends and say, ‘Oh my God, look at what we have in Philadelphia. This is world class.’”

June 16, 2026
Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Expo introduced the world to ketchup and the telephone. Now, it’s inspired a new oratorio.

To bring Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition back to life, Peter Boyer and Mark Campbell could have created a nostalgic musical impression delivered like a sepia-toned postcard lost in the mail for a century and a half.

And, in fact, they have.

The oratorio will premiere Wednesday night at the Highmark Mann in Fairmount Park, the very site of the somewhat now-forgotten 1876 event that wowed roughly a fifth of the nation’s population with marvels of technology, agriculture, culture, and more.

But what the composer and librettist have created is something that is also more deeply personal than merely an account of a World’s Fair that introduced, among other things, an invention called the telephone and foods like Heinz ketchup and the banana.

The great U.S. Centennial Exposition is conjured in A Hundred Years On through five fictionalized characters and others who voice hope, a sense of ambition, progress, and prosperity but also uncertainty about the young country. With the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Crossing choir, vocal soloists, and conductor Anthony Parnther, the piece — commissioned by the Highmark Mann to celebrate its half century and the nation’s 250th — also humanizes the story of Americans who were denied a full voice in society.

In other words, although it celebrates the excitement of the Centennial Exposition, the piece in a sense collapses the span of time between then and now.

“It’s obvious, the relevance to our situation today,” said Boyer. “We’ve made some progress since the 1870s, and then in some ways we have made much less progress than we might have hoped.”

Map of the Centennial Exposition grounds and buildings, 1876.Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

“As I read about this World’s Fair, it was 10 years after the end of the Civil War, the country had just gone through a depression,” said Campbell. “This was a time when it was important for the U.S. to put its best foot forward, but it could not shake itself free from what had happened in recent history. And so there were some real dramatic possibilities there.”

Like Ignatius Thomas, a Black waiter at the exposition’s Restaurant of the South.

“Happy birthday, America,” the baritone sings, “but the speeches and the fireworks — they’re not meant for me.”

And a Polish immigrant named Marion Jozwiak, who sings in a mezzo soprano voice, says she came to America to “find a little hope” but found a “country divided, broken” — and yet still believes it’s a fair land.

“Yes, there are a few mean men who always find a way to speak the loudest and the longest. But after time, their voices die and they’re forgotten.”

In the piece, Jozwiak is standing on the torch of the Statue of Liberty, which, with its raised arm, was displayed at the Centennial Exposition before the statue’s dedication a decade later in New York Harbor.

The Statue of Liberty’s torch at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. As a way to raise funds to build a pedestal for Lady Liberty, visitors could, with a small donation, climb a staircase inside the statue and get a bird’s-eye view of the festivities.

“I think maybe it’s the most iconic image of this exhibition, it just says so much,” said Boyer. “It says ‘work in progress.’ We’re still a work in progress.”

That the progress is now in retrograde compelled Campbell to go back into the libretto and make changes a few months ago, long after it was finished.

“What we’re facing now — I’m sorry, I’m going to be very frank — with this terrible corrupt government we have, we are facing an autocracy — or, what is the word? Kakistocracy. So I wrote this in a very different place and I had to go back to the libretto and make it darker than it was when it was originally written. It was just sounding too positive to me.”

But if the piece acknowledges pain and exclusion, it doesn’t stint on idealism.

“The story certainly has humor in it, and joy and excitement about where America could be, where America could go, what America could be to the world, and I think that’s the soul of Peter’s music,” said Campbell.

In the way it deals with story, the new piece echoes Ellis Island: The Dream of America, Boyer’s work whose stirring, filmic musical language has generated about 350 performances since the piece’s premiere in 2002.

“I’m pretty clearly identifiable as an American-sounding composer, you know, which is an ambiguous term,” says Boyer, who cites Copland, Bernstein, and John Williams as influences generally.

Here in this new piece, “my love of Sondheim, my love of Bernstein, theatrically speaking, that sort of came through, because the libretto seemed to suggest it.”

Composer Peter BoyerBenjamin Ealovega

Boyer and Campbell collaborated virtually on the piece — Californian and New Yorker, respectively, they’ve yet to meet in person — and they made separate visits to the Free Library of Philadelphia to research the 1876 exposition. They also did the bulk of their work at different times to fit in with other projects. Boyer composed the music while simultaneously writing American Mosaic for the Semiquincentennial. That piece was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra in February at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Both works use visuals. American Mosaic is a collaboration with photographer Joe Sohm, and A Hundred Years On uses projections of images from the exposition designed by video artist Rasean Davonté Johnson, costumes by Millie Hiibel, and stage direction by director Tazewell Thompson.

“They’re similar and yet different in some fundamental ways,” says Boyer of his two pieces, “again with where we are in our country and here we are celebrating this incredible milestone in our history while simultaneously dealing with such disheartening times. And so, what is our role as artists and composers?

“I think it’s an opportunity that this piece can bring some history and some uplift, and that’s not a bad thing.”

“A Hundred Years On” is performed Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Highmark Mann, 5201 Parkside Ave., along with Julia Wolfe’s “Liberty Bell” and other works. With vocal soloists Mary Dunleavy, Meredith Lustig, Eve Gigliotti, David Portillo, and Malcolm J. Merriweather. Tickets are $18.76 or $50. highmarkmann.org.

June 15, 2026