Maestro Michael Gesme leads the Central Oregon Symphony in this May 2022 photo. 

Central Oregon Symphony’s decades-long home auditorium may no longer stand, but its talented musicians will present the annual Fall Concert in a new location, Caldera High School in Southeast Bend.

The concert featuring Sergei Prokofiev’s classic Romeo & Juliet Suite No. 2 and Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 will be a learning experience for longtime maestro Michael Gesme and the community orchestra’s leaders and volunteer players.

That’s because, with last summer’s demolition of the 1,400-seat Bend High School Auditorium, which was the largest auditorium of its kind in Central Oregon, the orchestra will offer a matinee and evening performance Saturday, and a matinee on Sunday of its Fall Concert in a new, much smaller space: the 600-seat Caldera High School.

Bend High auditorium demolition: Almost all contents destroyed

“It’s a 60% reduction in seating for us, which poses some major challenges for how we have done business in the past,” Gesme said. “We’re trying to figure out what the best way forward is, and it will probably take this season to figure it out.”

Because the Southeast Bend high school seats just 600, unless you are already a donor to the nonprofit Central Oregon Symphony Association, which manages the orchestra jointly with Central Oregon Community College, odds of catching one of the three performances are not in your favor.

Donors have long had two tickets supplied to each of the Central Oregon Symphony’s seasonal concerts with their tax-deductible donation of at least $75.

“We want to make sure that we honor our commitment to all of those folks. You make your $75 donation, which is still a heck of a deal, (and) you get two tickets for four different shows,” Gesme said.

It is a good deal, as were the plentiful free tickets the COSA used to make available to the public.

“We used to have hundreds and hundreds of complimentary tickets we put out in bookstores,” he said. “We flat-out don’t have the seats for that.”

Needless to say, there will not be rush tickets available for those who show up without a ticket either.

Down the line, the orchestra could look into adding more shows, perhaps across two weekends, Gesme said.

“The issue at that point is, looking at my cadre of musicians who are all volunteers to double the number of performances across two weekends. We may go to that at some point if the demand is so high, but I can’t ask all of these people to volunteer themselves for an entire other weekend without having a sense of, really, how this is going to work.”

Search for seats

Even before the demolition of Bend High’s auditorium, arts proponents have seen the need for a large, modern performing arts hall. For over two decades, Gesme has been on the committee to bring to life the Central Oregon Performing Arts Center, a nonprofit group working to build a venue for the performing and visual arts. It recently landed a $25,000 Cultural Development Grant from the Oregon Cultural Trust, supporting research into such a venue, a fundraising feasibility study, site assessments and more.

In the short term, losing the spacious Bend High Auditorium has sent arts organizations that traditionally performed at Bend High in search of new venues. Central Oregon School of Ballet will hold its performances of “The Nutcracker” at Mountain View High in December.

“That 1,400 seats, while not be filled regularly by many of the groups that used it, for the groups that did use it because of the size, there is no substitute, period,” Gesme said. “There are a lot of balls in the air right now, and we’re just going to do the best we can … to figure out the best way forward to do what our mission is, which is to perform live symphonic music for as many people as we can possibly perform for.”