By Elizabeth R. Miller, Knight Foundation

Watching four children and their parents shuffle onto the main floor of the Knight Concert Hall to hear Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Holly Hudak had a moment. Hudak is the managing director of Cleveland Orchestra Miami, and it’s easy to understand why every orchestral performance moves her. Yet watching a new generation of orchestral fans develop, she began to “feel at home,” in her new home, she said. “In that one moment, I saw the potential for the work we’re doing in terms of developing orchestra audiences for the future.”

Supported by Knight Foundation, Cleveland Orchestra Miami recently expanded its subscription season and plans to increase its educational engagement of students. Below Hudak shares why she moved to Miami and what audiences can expect over the next year.

You moved from Chicago about a year ago to become the new managing director. What drew you here? H.H.: I was so impressed with what Cleveland Orchestra Miami had built. It has one of the highest average house fill rates of any orchestra series in the country: 88 percent! That means it’s achieving the goal of getting people in touch with music. Of course, we’d like it to be at 100 percent. But more than anything, coming here was about exploring a sense of possibility. For a person whose entire life has revolved around bringing more diversity and access to the arts, this city offers tremendous opportunity. It’s incredibly diverse with people from all socioeconomic backgrounds, not all of whom have had exposure to classical music. Plus, I’ve never spent time in a warm climate. I was seduced by the great beauty of Miami.

You’ve spent your career immersed in arts organizations. How did that prepare you for this role? H.H. I have 25 years of experience working in arts education in Chicago. The landscape there is different, but the skill set I acquired there resonates with the work in Miami.  My focus has been on connecting young people with music and creating access and opportunities for them to be involved in music. On the personal side, I’ve always had a passion for classical music.  As a teen, I played the flute and trained to be a professional musician.  I studied music at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore and later played in the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. I eventually landed the League of American Orchestra’s fellowship in orchestra management and was subsequently hired by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  I stayed there for 15 years and had a variety of wonderful jobs, culminating in the oversight of all of their education, community relations and diversity programs. Just prior to coming to Miami, I worked for nine years as the president and executive director of CYSO-Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras. That provided a great base of experience for managing a small arts organization and working with young people, as well as my “content” specialties.

Tell us a little bit about your first year as managing director.

H.H.: Right off the bat we expanded from three to four subscription weeks a year, so we’re spending a lot of time enhancing the organizational infrastructure to accommodate that shift. Cleveland Orchestra Miami is a young organization; it’s exciting and we’re looking forward to creating more programming. Big picture wise, our chairman, Daniel Lewis, is in the process of bringing [national and international] experts on orchestral programming to Miami for a series of meetings and discussions to further define the artistic vision.

Did any particular performances from your first year here stand out?

H.H.: I can’t tell you which program was necessarily the best; that’d be like asking a parent which child is their favorite. I will tell you that for the first set of performances I attended right before I officially started [Mahler’s Third Symphony] the hall was 100 percent full. I realized, here we’re in Miami, at the very tip of the United States with this diverse audience that was absolutely enthralled. Twenty-six percent of the audience was of Latin background, very unusual for an orchestra performance everywhere else in the country.  You could hear a pin drop; people were completely connected to the performance. It spoke volumes to me about the importance of the work we want to do.

What can people expect over the next year as you grow your programming?  H.H.: In terms of on-the-ground programming, we’ve just launched a new ticket program for families. Adults who purchase a ticket anywhere in the Knight Concert Hall for our performances can now receive a free companion ticket for anyone under 18. We’ll continue our work with the Miami-Dade Public School programs, offering small performances and question-and-answer sessions when musicians of the Cleveland Orchestra are in town. During the fourth week of our subscription series, the orchestra will perform Gustav Holsts’ The Planets.  This modern classic tells the story of the solar system through beautiful musical illustrations.  In addition to the music, there will be high-definition NASA images projected above the orchestra on a large screen. What a great example of a program that is sophisticated enough for adults to enjoy, while being educational and fun.  These last two qualities are especially important to the 4,500 fifth-graders who will attend two education concerts featuring a shorter version of this program during the day on Thursday, March 20. Also in 2014, our ongoing collaboration with the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, which enables college-age music students to perform side by side with Cleveland Orchestra musicians, will expand from one to two weeks with performances in both February and March.

How do you envision classical music in the future? H.H. Dennis Scholl recently gave a great lecture at the City Club in Cleveland. He talked about how people who work for performing arts organizations need to think about how they can enable audiences to curate their own experiences. That’s a very interesting, and also a very tough challenge for us. I think it has to do with understanding better how we can use technology and digital media. We need to experiment with developing some sort of application or piece that can help bring a greater understanding and appreciation for classical music to people. I can’t tell you exactly what that is going to look like yet, but it’s something I’m thinking more about.