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Was our beloved popular-music orchestra doomed by poor management? A greedy landlord? The global pandemic? We sleuth out the perp in a devastating Broad Street whodunit.
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The mystery behind what actually happened to the Philly POPS / Photo-illustration by Leticia R. Albano
It was a cold night in November 2022, and a brass quintet from the Philly POPS was performing a gig. The musicians, in heavy coats and Santa hats, sat in a circle at Franklin Square, playing the opening ceremony for the park’s annual light show. The music-making conditions weren’t pleasant: The frigid air turned their metal instruments to ice as they played “The First Noël” before a procession of city officials and sponsors took the stage. A costumed Ben Franklin interpreter said a few words. The Phillie Phanatic was there, too, gyrating and passing out high fives. It was, in a sense, a classic Philly POPS gig. Just as you could count on the Phanatic to bring unhinged pep-rally spirit to random events around town, you could expect to find the POPS performing for any number of civic traditions: Independence Hall and the Parkway on the Fourth of July, the Mann Center on Memorial Day, the Kimmel Center for the ensemble’s popular Christmas shows. The POPS might not have been the polished, renowned Philadelphia Orchestra, but in a meaningful way, it was Philadelphia’s orchestra.
As the speakers gave their remarks, Matt Gallagher, the POPS principal trumpeter, checked his email and saw a strange subject line: “The Future of the Philly POPS.” He opened the email, from POPS president Frank Giordano: “After much careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations following the conclusion of the current 2022–23 season.” Gallagher turned to the four musicians next to him. “I was like, ‘Guys, check your email, make sure I’m not insane here, but we’re done. The Philly POPS is over.’”
Gallagher had just lost his job — in the bitter cold, during the holidays, in the middle of a gig. “It was a total slap in the face,” he says. The quintet had been scheduled to play more tunes after the speeches ended, but they weren’t feeling festive any longer. They got up and left.
A Philly POPS brass quintet plays at Rittenhouse Square in December 2022. / Photograph by HughE Dillon
That same evening, the Inquirer broke the news of the POPS announcement. In the story, Giordano said that sagging audience numbers coming out of the pandemic had simply made the business of the POPS, which has been performing since 1979 and employs some 65 freelance musicians for around 30 concerts a year, untenable. The POPS, Giordano claimed, was $450,000 in debt to the Kimmel Center, where it performed most of its concerts, and $500,000 in debt to other groups. Bankruptcy had been considered, but ultimately, Giordano said, the POPS board concluded that shutting down was the only option. There was a silver lining, though: Giordano mentioned the POPS had entered an “alliance” with the Philadelphia Orchestra Kimmel Center, the new joint entity formed in 2021 when the Orchestra and its longtime venue merged, in which POKC, as it’s known, would take over the presentation of POPS concerts until the end of the season in June. Matias Tarnopolsky, CEO of POKC, said in the article it was his “hope and plan” that his organization would be able to “present pops programming in the future.”
Inside the POPS office, apparently no one had had any inkling the organization was about to shut down. Karen Corbin, the chief operating officer and the person actually running the day-to-day functions of the POPS, says she learned the news from Giordano one day before the announcement was made. “There was no plan,” Corbin says. The shutdown was just … announced. Though Giordano had held the title of president at the POPS since 2011, he’d spent much of the prior two years stepping back from the organization, busy with other commitments. Giordano has a family trucking business in addition to his gig at the POPS, and in 2018, he was also tapped to serve as full-time executive director of America250, the nonprofit planning the national celebration for the 2026 Semiquincentennial. According to the POPS’s annual filings with the IRS, Giordano went from working 40 hours a week at the POPS to just 10 hours a week in 2020. Yet he seemed to be the only one who knew in advance that the POPS was shutting down. (Giordano declined to be interviewed for this article but through attorneys disputes that Corbin was unaware of the shutdown announcement.)
The task of informing POPS staff that the organization would soon cease to exist fell to Corbin. She told her senior staff first — one of whom confirms this was the first she ever mentioned a shutdown. “It seemed to me like it was her first time learning about it,” the former staffer says. Then Corbin told the rest of the POPS employees; people were crying in the conference room as she made the announcement. No one understood what was happening. Giordano had given Corbin a document the day before showing a step-by-step timeline of how the announcement would be handled. Corbin noticed two peculiarities about the document: First, it seemed to have been compiled not by the POPS, but by the Philadelphia Orchestra’s public relations firm. And second, in the chronology, Inquirer reporter Peter Dobrin had been informed of the shutdown before she was.
Corbin wasn’t alone in the dark. While Giordano had claimed in his interview with Dobrin that the POPS board supported the decision, some members actually learned of the shutdown from Dobrin’s article or via email. There was never any vote taken to shut down the POPS. “I would never approve shutting down,” says Sal DeBunda, a retired attorney who served on the board for a decade. “Frank did.”
The POPS was divided, devastated and confused — which goes a long way toward explaining the convoluted sequence of events that soon followed. In December, the POPS performed its annual run of Christmas concerts at the Kimmel Center. The shows were sold-out; at one performance, during a pause in a piece, audience members spontaneously broke into a chant of “Save Our POPS!” This led to more bewilderment: How could the finances be so dire if the POPS was performing to full houses night after night? Then, in early January, the POPS management, seemingly riding the wave from Christmas success, announced that it was in fact not shutting down and was instead launching a “Save the POPS” campaign, aimed at raising money to keep the institution afloat. Two weeks later, the Kimmel Center, which the POPS had initially hailed as a supportive partner in its time of distress, decided to evict the organization from its longtime home in Verizon Hall over unpaid rent, hindering the ensemble’s ability to perform future concerts.
In April of last year, the POPS embarked on a new strategy for survival: It filed a lawsuit. In the suit, a different potential narrative began to emerge. In this telling, the POPS wasn’t nearly as indebted to the Kimmel Center as POKC claimed. And it had never willingly chosen to wind down its operations; instead, POKC had sought to force the POPS out of business in a bid to monopolize orchestral performances in the city. If the POPS suit is to be believed, this wasn’t the story of a frail, aging, debt-crippled institution passing away. It was murder.
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That the Orchestra might want to absorb the POPS isn’t far-fetched; it had already sort of happened once before. In 2005, the POPS and the Orchestra decided to merge. Intended primarily as an administrative cost-saving measure, the arrangement kept the POPS independent: Its members weren’t replaced with Orchestra musicians, and Peter Nero, the legendary POPS conductor who’d made his name as a jazz pianist and performed with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dizzy Gillespie, retained his baton.
But Joe Kluger, the head of the Orchestra at the time, recalls that he might eventually have sought a different setup. He hoped to put the classical and pops orchestras together under one roof, just as the Boston Symphony, one of the country’s most successful orchestras, had since its inception. “There’s some efficiency,” Kluger explains, “because you can guarantee musicians a 52-week salary, and if demand for a classical product is less than it used to be, then you can deploy them i n the pops repertoire.” (The plan would have been controversial, not least because it would have meant putting the freelance POPS musicians out of work.)
As part of the merger, the Orchestra had the option after five years to dissolve the POPS board and absorb the organization. But then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and three years later, the Philadelphia Orchestra declared bankruptcy. It became clear then that the merger hadn’t been particularly happy. In the course of the bankruptcy, the Orchestra claimed the POPS was a drag on its bottom line, running a deficit of $800,000 in its most recent season. Nero insisted his ensemble had turned a $300,000 profit. At any rate, the Orchestra opted not to absorb the POPS, and it was spun back out, sent on its way with a negotiated $1.25 million check from the Orchestra to help fund its independent future.
One of the running subplots during this period was the cost of the Orchestra’s home at the Kimmel Center. The venue, with its elegant glass ceiling, was fabulous to look at. It was also fabulously expensive. And when the hall opened in 2001, the sound was embarrassingly mediocre — a Washington Post critic called it “an acoustical Sahara.” Nor was the rent cheap: $2.5 million annually for the Orchestra. During its bankruptcy proceedings, the Orchestra said it owed the Kimmel Center $230,000 in unpaid rent; then-Kimmel Center CEO Anne Ewers claimed the actual figure was a much higher $1.2 million. (In the end, the Orchestra got $1 million knocked off the annual rent in a new long-term lease.)
The Philly POPS at Verizon Hall / Photograph courtesy of the Philly POPS
Though the Kimmel Center was built to serve the Orchestra and other resident companies, like the Opera, the Chamber Music Society, and the POPS, it wasn’t just a landlord. It also staged its own programming, including jazz shows and touring Broadway acts. Suddenly, there was a new competitor in the ecosystem — not just for patrons, but also for concert-hall dates and philanthropy. And the Kimmel Center, which opened with $30 million in debt due in part to construction overruns, needed philanthropy. Donors were now being asked to give not just to a financially struggling performing-arts group, but to the financially struggling venue itself, without which there could be no financially struggling performing-arts group.
These days, the Kimmel Center remains extremely expensive. Yes, it’s in a class of its own as a venue. But performing there can create a financial challenge. Philip Maneval, executive director of the Chamber Music Society, says it costs about four times more to perform there than at other venues. According to IRS filings, his group spent $245,000 on rent at the Kimmel in 2022 — more than half of its yearly ticket-sales revenue. In the civilian world, that’s called being rent-burdened.
But then, the economics of the performing-arts world are rather unique. The model here is to lose staggering amounts of money on performances. In 2022, Opera Philadelphia had $785,000 in ticket sales on $5.8 million in performance expenses, according to its public filings. Even the books of the mighty Philadelphia Orchestra would be splotched with red ink — $12.6 million in performance revenue in 2022 on $38 million in production expenses — were it not for the funding source that fills the gap: philanthropy. The Opera raises about $10 million a year, and in 2019, the Orchestra snagged a $55 million gift from an anonymous donor that pushed its endowment north of $200 million. (In February, the Orchestra received another large donation: $25 million to rename Verizon Hall Marian Anderson Hall.)
For the POPS, though, large-scale philanthropy has never been forthcoming. Most donors want to support the capital-A arts, not Beatles tribute concerts or Broadway show tunes. When the POPS was spun out of the Orchestra in 2011, it had $1.7 million in ticket sales, $260,000 in donations, $3.5 million in expenses, and no endowment. In 2022, it earned $3 million in ticket revenue on $5.1 million in performance expenses, of which $880,000 went to the Kimmel Center. It was a better tickets-to-expense ratio than those of many other groups, but it still wasn’t enough to break even.
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It didn’t take long for more financial drama to find Peter Nero and his POPS. In the wake of the Orchestra bankruptcy proceedings, Giordano, who’d previously been a member of a POPS advisory committee, was elevated to president. This move made a certain amount of sense. Giordano was a business guy — something Nero was not. And as a former president of the Union League, Giordano was well-connected. “He had this great reputation of being a donor, so that’s why Peter thought he would be someone good to have around,” says longtime POPS librarian Vince Leonard, who was close to Nero before the latter’s death last year.
The relationship quickly turned sour. Giordano sought to reduce Nero’s salary — an admittedly hefty $500,000 — by 40 percent, and after a bitter dispute that involved yet more litigation, Nero, the face of the POPS for more than 30 years, agreed to eventually leave the ensemble, in 2013.
Even with Nero’s salary out of the expense column, the POPS continued to limp from concert to concert. The organization was frequently behind on its bills, including when it came to Kimmel Center rent. When Corbin was hired full-time at the POPS as a vice president in 2015, one of her goals was to help stabilize its finances. She had come from a career in television programming in Los Angeles and had also done a stint at the Franklin Institute, and her strategy for the POPS revolved around increasing what’s known as “contributed revenue”: donations and grants. In Corbin’s telling, this was a success: Contributed revenue grew from $650,000 in 2013 to $1.7 million in 2019. She even landed a prestigious $300,000 Pew grant in 2022.
Regardless of growing contributions and an increase in ticket sales to $4 million, the cash didn’t change the fundamental calculation. Since 2011, POPS expenses have exceeded revenues in all but three years; the organization has routinely carried more than $1.5 million of debt — a combination of loans, bills due to vendors, and tickets sold for yet-to-be-performed concerts that amounts to a quarter of its annual budget. “That’s a big structural deficit to carry,” says Thaddeus Squire, a nonprofit consultant who works with arts organizations throughout Philadelphia and reviewed the past six years of POPS filings with the IRS.
Because the POPS was cash-poor, it developed, according to multiple former employees, a habit of putting its season-long subscriptions on sale as early as February for a season that didn’t begin until the fall. The POPS did this, one former employee says, “in order to get an influx of cash so we could pay for the current season.”
This dynamic was captured at a court hearing last July in the current POPS lawsuit against the Kimmel Center. John Meko, a POPS board member who served as treasurer, testified about tickets for concerts the POPS had been unable to perform after its eviction. A Kimmel Center lawyer began the questioning: “You said that the POPS received about $1.1 million in ticket money for concerts that have not yet been performed, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Where is that money?”
“Spent on other things.”
“Who spent it?”
“Philly POPS.”
“The POPS received that money?”
“Yes.”
“And spent it?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t put it into escrow?”
“No.”
This business model of covering current expenses with future ticket revenue is “not terribly unusual,” Squire says, though it’s far from advisable. “It’s very easy for this to get out of control,” he says. With so little cash and so much debt, any disruption — like, say, a pandemic — can prove fatal. “I would be hard-pressed to say the Kimmel Center killed the POPS,” Squire says. “This is kind of a classic case of an organization that was hanging on by its fingernails and just got blown off the ledge by the pandemic and was not at all prepared.”
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According to the rental agreement between the POPS and the Kimmel Center, payment was due at the conclusion of a given run of shows. But the Kimmel Center routinely allowed the POPS to pay late, and the POPS relied on this goodwill to remain solvent. “Every year back to 2011, we had a payment plan after Christmas,” Corbin says.
In its legal filings, the Philadelphia Orchestra Kimmel Center, which has countersued the POPS for defamation, walks through just how lenient it had been over the years. In January 2018, the POPS requested a $230,000 deferral for rent owed after its run of Christmas shows. In October of that year, the POPS requested another deferral, this time covering $63,000 of rent after a series of shows featuring Leslie Odom Jr. The POPS seemed to treat these plans like a foregone conclusion. When arranging the payment plan for the Odom concerts, then-COO Louis Scaglione didn’t exactly request it. “Assuming this is agreeable,” he wrote, adding that he’d be sending over the first check that same day. More payment plans followed. In February 2019, the POPS reached an agreement with the Kimmel Center to pay $560,000, a combination of past and future obligations accrued that season. And in December 2019, the POPS came to the Kimmel yet again seeking a Christmas-show deferral, this time for $368,000.
Each time, the Kimmel Center accepted the payment plans. And each time, the POPS would incrementally pay off the debts by the end of the fiscal year in June, though the Kimmel Center filing claims these payments were frequently late. The one plan the POPS apparently failed to satisfy was the December 2019 deferral for $368,000. According to the Kimmel Center, the POPS couldn’t even make the first payment, due in January 2020. (The POPS disputes this.) By the following month, the POPS had performed more shows at Verizon Hall, racking up more invoices, so Giordano asked to renegotiate the debt, which now totaled $545,000. The Kimmel Center agreed to this, too, and the first POPS payment was scheduled for March 15th — the day before the pandemic shut down the City of Philadelphia. The POPS missed the payment.
Corbin describes the POPS-Kimmel relationship, despite all these accommodations, as a “10-year history that was often filled with complication, miscommunication, and difficulty.” The POPS began to feel it was afforded second-class-citizen status in the building: Advertising signage was set up incorrectly, ushers ran out of programs, and green-room facilities weren’t available on time, according to a 2018 memo Corbin wrote outlining the various problems in the relationship. She claimed a Kimmel Center employee once told her to stop programming jazz shows with the POPS because “the Kimmel owns jazz in Philly.” Corbin also said the Kimmel Center had tried to book the same talent as the POPS on three separate occasions. “Not a coincidence,” she wrote.
There were signs the Kimmel Center was growing exasperated with the POPS as well. “I, too, am most hopeful that you will not need to request future deferred payment schedules,” Anne Ewers, the former Kimmel Center CEO, wrote to POPS leadership in October 2018. “Yet, if you do, we are agreed that you will provide at least 2 weeks’ notice in writing to me.”
Still, the POPS never received an eviction notice. It had routinely owed the Kimmel vast sums of money and had been so late on payments for its $545,000 pandemic-era balance that it received two separate notices of default. Each time, the parties managed to strike a deal to make up the debts.
What was strange about the January 2023 eviction was that it came at a time when the POPS no longer seemed to be in chronic debt to the Kimmel Center. In its eviction letter, POKC demanded immediate payment of $523,000 for the POPS to stay in Verizon Hall. But according to POKC’s own invoice attached to the letter, this total was accrued entirely from the Christmas concerts that had been performed just one month earlier. This wasn’t like the months-old debt the POPS had been trying to pay down in prior years. It was brand-new.
“We didn’t always pay our bills on time,” a former POPS employee admits. “Do they have a right to be upset about it? Sure. But was it new? No.” Corbin likewise struggled to understand the eviction. What had changed? Why now?
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Working at the POPS came with its quirks. The office was a small operation — never more than 16 full-time employees at its peak — and it had a particular parochial flavor. Board meetings took place at the Union League, and during the holiday season, Giordano would invite the men of the office to a Christmas party for a Union League subgroup he was involved with, the Cricket Groundhog club. This was a pretty strange event to be invited to by your boss. One year, for instance, Giordano, who always made a grand entrance, was wheeled into the room wearing a racially stereotyped Kim Jong Un mask as he stood next to a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile, flanked on either side by a model in a red bikini. (A lawyer for Giordano said this event had “absolutely nothing to do with the Philly POPS.”) “I was shocked, appalled, angry,” says one POPS employee who attended the event.
The POPS wasn’t much more functional in the workplace. When Matt Koveal applied in 2021 for a job in POPS in Schools, a program through which orchestra members would teach music to kids in the Philadelphia School District, he was asked instead to interview for a totally different position, in the concert-production department. Koveal interviewed over the course of a single day and walked out with a job. “I was admittedly a bit confused how quickly things happened,” he says. He later realized the head of the production department, his direct boss, hadn’t even interviewed him; he’d been on vacation that day.
The second odd experience for Koveal came during one of his first POPS gigs. He was chatting up a musician who said, “You’re not gonna last very long.” Koveal, confused, asked what the musician meant. The musician told him, “You’re one of many to have come through this department. Philadelphia musicians will chew you up and spit you right out.” That was Koveal’s introduction to the relationship between the musicians and management.
David Charles Abell conducts the Philly POPS at a pre-Fourth of July concert at the Mann Center in 2021. / Photograph by ZUMA Press Inc./Alamy Stock Photo
Tensions had been rising for years. According to six POPS musicians, late payments were commonplace. “You could count on five fingers, before the pandemic — 2018, 2019 — the times we got paid on time,” says Marjorie Goldberg, a violist who later became a union officer. The freelance musicians of the POPS typically earn no more than $10,000 a year from the orchestra, and the late payments were disruptive. “The excuses were as ridiculous as, ‘Well, Frank’s in Italy and he can’t sign the check,’” says Matt Gallagher, the principal trumpeter.
As the relationship with management grew more toxic, the musicians union began to take a more aggressive approach. Corbin was the most frequent object of their ire. Corbin had been moving the POPS more into education and had sought new kinds of performances, like rock shows. But many of the musicians didn’t see the POPS as an educational vehicle or a rock cover group. “We felt management was steering the orchestra, without allowing us to give any input, in a direction that we didn’t think honored the legacy of Peter Nero,” says Sarah Sutton, a violist who’s played in the ensemble for 17 years.
Eventually, in July 2022, the musicians signed a letter of no confidence in Corbin, who by that point had risen to chief operating officer. The musicians cited a range of complaints, including repeated violations of the union’s contract. Corbin’s actions, the letter stated, “have contributed to extremely low morale and a lack of trust that has fostered a climate of anxiety, fear and uncertainty.” (Corbin says the POPS policy was to settle all contract grievances and that in no case did the management ever admit guilt.)
When POPS management announced it was shutting down in November, the relationship broke down completely. At the Christmas concerts, musicians handed out leaflets to concertgoers that lambasted management. The musicians then voted to authorize a strike, with 95 percent approval.
In January 2023, when the POPS announced its “Save the POPS” fund-raiser, the musicians wanted little part of it. Their leaflets had used the “Save the POPS” phrase first — as in, “Save the POPS” from the management. The musicians seemed to be coming around to the idea that if the POPS was going to continue, it would have to be as a new entity.
That may be why so few of the musicians seem to blame the Kimmel Center for what transpired. “No landlord wants people in there for free,” says Goldberg. Gallagher points out that the union’s journey with POPS management seemed to mirror that of the Kimmel Center: repeated accommodations until one day, patience wore out. “Eventually, enough was enough,” he says. “If you’re going to continually break the contract, then we’re gonna grieve you. Period.”
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What the musicians didn’t know, what Corbin didn’t know, what practically no one at the POPS knew, was that Matias Tarnopolsky, CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra Kimmel Center, had been meeting with Giordano about the possibility of the Orchestra taking over the POPS as early as August 2022.
Their meeting took place at the Union League, according to an email Tarnopolsky sent to Giordano that was later submitted by the POPS as part of its court case. “Thank you for your openness to look at a new model for the Philly POPS’s business relationship with the Kimmel Center,” wrote Tarnopolsky, who before taking over the merged POKC had been the chief executive of the Orchestra. He went on to summarize the exchange: “We discussed today that you would meet with your Board Chair and General Counsel to discuss a plan whereby The Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center Inc. would take over the programming and production of this season, and future seasons, of Philly POPS programming.”
From POKC’s perspective, it was easy to understand the appeal of taking over the POPS. The POPS always had good ticket sales, and there was clearly demand for popular-music performances. The Orchestra knew this, too: Why else had it scheduled a live performance of the soundtrack to Elf while the movie played? The problem for the POPS, as with most performing-arts groups, was that even strong ticket sales couldn’t match the expenses. But POKC was in a unique position since its merger in December 2021: Now it was vertically integrated, owning both Orchestra and concert venue. If it could take over pops programming, it could potentially capture the $4 million in Philly POPS annual ticket revenue at a relatively low additional cost — especially if already-employed Philadelphia Orchestra musicians were the ones doing the performances. (Orchestra musicians apparently sensed this, because their latest contract, ratified last October, contains a new clause that prevents them being required to practice or perform with “Opera Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Ballet, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, or any independent pops orchestra.”)
Jennifer Hudson performs with the Philly POPS Big Band on the Ben Franklin Parkway on July 4, 2019. / Photograph by Gilbert Carrasquillo/Getty Images
Corbin didn’t learn of the August 2022 meeting between Tarnopolsky and Giordano until about a year later, when Giordano told her about it while preparing for the lawsuit. (Through his lawyers, Giordano disputed that Corbin was unaware of the meeting.) According to Corbin, Giordano told her he participated in the meeting only under extreme duress, because the Kimmel Center hadn’t yet sent tickets to POPS patrons even though the season’s first performance was just weeks away. Tarnopolsky’s email appears to confirm this. He informed Giordano that the Kimmel Center and Ticket Philadelphia, POKC’s ticketing company, “will continue to withhold all services (ticketing and venue) until POPS is either paid-up or other agreeable terms regarding a transition are settled.” Tarnopolsky claimed the POPS owed the Kimmel Center more than $500,000, which was why his organization could not “allow the current season to proceed.”
When approached for this story, Tarnopolsky initially agreed to provide written on-the-record answers to questions about the meeting with Giordano and the POPS’s allegations. But after receiving detailed questions, POKC instead sent a one-paragraph written statement. “It has never been our intent to shut down the POPS, and any suggestion that POKC or The Philadelphia Orchestra attempted to do so is simply false,” the statement reads. Instead, POKC claims the entire idea was Giordano’s: “In the summer of 2022, POPS’s then-president and CEO informed POKC that the POPS could not pay its growing debts and expressed a desire to have POKC assume responsibility for producing future POPS performances, but we never reached an agreement to do so.” (Through the attorneys, Giordano described the merger as a “collaborative idea” between him and Tarnopolsky.)
That was the story POPS conductor David Charles Abell heard when he spoke to Giordano in October 2022. “He had this idea that a merger might be a good thing for both organizations at this point in time,” Abell says. But that explanation is difficult to square with Tarnopolsky’s email to Giordano, where Tarnopolsky certainly appears to be the one instigating things: He had just threatened to cancel the entire upcoming POPS season — a scenario in which Giordano looks more like a hostage than an equal collaborator.
Whoever came up with the plan for POKC to take over the POPS, the biggest revelation from the August 2022 email is arguably something else entirely: The threat of eviction was raised for the first time, not in January 2023, but as early as the summer of 2022. In January, Tarnopolsky claimed in the Inquirer that POPS debt had surpassed $1 million, at which point POKC “could no longer allow them to keep performing.” In reality, he had made the same threat six months earlier, and over half as much money. He’d offered Giordano two options: Either get “paid up” on the $500,000 of debt — unlikely to happen anytime soon, considering the way the POPS had always paid its bills — or come to “agreeable terms regarding a transition.”
“Unless we can arrive at terms quickly,” Tarnopolsky wrote, “this means cancelling the September 16, 2022, run of the Moody Blues in the absence of further payments.” The Moody Blues show, however, was allowed to proceed, and while the POPS did make a $160,000 payment to the Kimmel Center in September, it came on the day of the performance and was for far less than the amount the Kimmel Center claimed it was owed. So why was the show allowed to take place? Presumably because conversations about a merger were progressing.
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How much money does the POPS owe the Kimmel Center? A seemingly simple question doesn’t yield simple answers.
The major accounting discrepancies appear to have begun in March 2021, when the POPS signed an agreement with POKC stipulating that it owed $548,000. This was for shows that had all been performed prior to the start of the pandemic. According to the terms of the agreement, the POPS would make one up-front payment of $120,000, then follow with monthly $10,000 payments until the debt was paid off. In court filings, the Kimmel Center claims the POPS made the up-front payment, along with the first two $10,000 installments, at which point it “failed to make any additional payments.”
The POPS, however, has submitted bank statements to the court showing it made 13 different $10,000 payments to the Kimmel Center, all after May 2021 — the month the Kimmel Center alleges the payments stopped. According to the bank records, the POPS has made just shy of $1.4 million in payments to the Kimmel Center since the two sides signed the March 2021 payment plan. These payments, it seems, went toward both the prior POPS debt and toward new performances, which returned to the Kimmel Center in the fall of 2021. According to Corbin, this $1.4 million meant that by September 2022, the POPS was completely current with the Kimmel Center. (The Kimmel Center declined to address the discrepancy between its legal filing and the POPS bank records.)
Making matters more confusing, when Tarnopolsky met with Giordano in August 2022 to discuss the POPS-Kimmel merger, he claimed the POPS owed $500,000. Corbin, as the person who oversaw finances at the POPS, would have disputed that. “I truly don’t know where that figure came from,” she says. But she hadn’t been in a position to dispute it, because she says she didn’t learn of the meeting until a year after it took place. Two former higher-ups at the POPS also say they believed the POPS was even with POKC in September. But for some reason, Giordano wasn’t relying on the POPS interpretation of the finances. Through his lawyers, Giordano says he got his understanding of the debts from POKC.
The only detail both POKC and the POPS agree on is that the POPS has made just one payment since the Tarnopolsky-Giordano meeting: a $160,000 wire transfer in September 2022. According to Corbin and the two former higher-ups, this was the payment that extinguished the prior POPS debts. When the Kimmel Center sent its eviction notice to the POPS in January 2023, the letter seemed to support Corbin’s understanding of the finances: It demanded payment of $523,643 — fees that were entirely from the recent run of Christmas performances. If the POPS had other debts, wouldn’t they have been incorporated in the eviction notice? According to the Kimmel Center, no. Its filing claims the $523,643 cited in the eviction letter wasn’t inclusive of all past debts, though the letter itself makes no mention of this supposed fact.
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Negotiations regarding the future of the POPS continued apace. On September 27, 2022, Giordano and Joe Del Raso, the chair of the POPS board, had another meeting with representatives from POKC. According to this meeting’s agenda, which was also submitted to the court, the discussion covered how to “plan for orderly wind down” of POPS business and achieve “seamless transition to POPS programming at [the Philadelphia Orchestra] next season.”
In October, the POPS board voted to allow a special committee to discuss a potential merger with POKC — never mind that Giordano and Del Raso had already been doing this. By the time the POPS announced its plans to shut down on November 16th, the board had not yet taken a definitive vote. “It was never brought to a vote, in my mind, because I’m not certain it ever had the board’s support,” Corbin says. One board member, Meryl Levitz, the former head of Visit Philadelphia, says that she, like Corbin, assumed specifics were forthcoming. “We expected a proposal — that POKC and representatives from the POPS executive committee would meet and put together a merger or a resolution, something that was like, ‘Here’s how we go on from here,’” she says. “But we didn’t ever see that.”
Corbin says she was “devastated” by the shutdown announcement. “I didn’t fully understand what process we had been in to reach this,” she says. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Donors began rescinding grants just as the POPS was about to incur giant expenses from its Christmas series.
Corbin insists she kept trying to come to a deal with POKC that would keep the POPS in the Kimmel’s Verizon Hall through the end of the season in June. (The five-year POPS lease at the Kimmel expired then, and according to Corbin, there had been no conversations about a new extension.) On the day the POPS was evicted, Corbin had a meeting with Tarnopolsky and other Kimmel Center officials. She claims she had with her a proposal that, in keeping with the model of prior payment plans, would have fully paid the Kimmel Center by June, including $150,000 up front. When she tried to bring up the proposal to Tarnopolsky, she claims, he told her, “You do not have the right to speak.” There was going to be no deal. “Money wasn’t their issue,” Sal DeBunda, the POPS board member, says. “They just wanted us to disappear.”
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The story the Kimmel Center is telling is one of an accommodating landlord who got sick of being paid late. “The POPS’s debt continued to grow to an unacceptable level with no viable plan for it to reverse the cycle and pay what it owed,” a POKC spokesperson writes in a statement. “As anyone who has ever leased an apartment will understand, if you consistently fail to pay your rent and utility bills over an extended period, at some point the landlord will have no choice but to ask you to leave.”
But that story ignores the fact that POKC was in negotiations about taking over the POPS — whoever’s idea it was — and that it explicitly linked those negotiations, as early as August 2022, to whether the POPS could continue to perform at Verizon Hall. To say POKC’s only motivation was getting paid is completely belied by its own documents discussing its desire to absorb the POPS. When the Kimmel Center was an independent organization, it was willing to accept deferred payment after deferred payment to keep the POPS performing. But after the Kimmel Center merged with the Orchestra — which had begun presenting more popular-music shows of its own — it’s possible the incentives changed.
The conversations about the future of the POPS appear to have continued all the way through the shutdown announcement in November, when Tarnopolsky and Giordano both suggested the future of POPS programming in Philadelphia was with POKC. In December, POPS conductor David Charles Abell says, he ran into Tarnopolsky at a Philadelphia Orchestra concert, and Tarnopolsky told him that the merger had hit a dead end because POPS finances were worse than the Kimmel Center had expected. Through his lawyers, Giordano offers a slightly different reason: “When POKC wasn’t paid for the Christmas shows, negotiation talks ended.”
In either scenario, POKC would have been the one backing out. And if POKC was backing out, maybe Giordano then had a change of heart about the fate of the POPS. He’d just seen firsthand, from the Christmas shows, how much the audience loved the orchestra. It was probably fairly obvious that being the guy who shut down the POPS wasn’t a PR win. Better to be the guy trying to save the POPS, which perhaps explains why Giordano went along with the campaign.
POKC had seemingly allowed the POPS to continue performing at Verizon Hall because it was in the midst of negotiating the potential merger. But if the merger was dead, what was the point in allowing the POPS to continue performing? And if the POPS was now saying it wasn’t going to fold after all, where would that leave the two sides — back to square one? That wasn’t an option. POKC was under no obligation to keep allowing the POPS to pay for its performances late. So it evicted the organization.
At least, that’s one possible explanation for what happened. There could be others. Through the fog of all the competing narratives, it’s difficult to say for certain.
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What we do know is this: After the eviction, the POPS began to spiral. In February of last year, Giordano stepped down as POPS president, and Corbin took over. But what exactly was she taking over? More than $1 million of pledged revenue had already been rescinded after the shutdown announcement. The Save the POPS fund-raiser had yielded only $100,000.
Corbin tried to reschedule the Kimmel Center shows at the Met on North Broad, but ticketholders had no interest in going there, and additional tickets sales were nonexistent, so those shows ended up canceled, too. All told, the POPS had wiped out $1.1 million in concerts for which it had already sold tickets. It couldn’t refund the ticketholders, though, because as treasurer John Meko testified in court, the money had already been spent. The only way to pay back the ticketholders, if it ever was going to be possible, would be to perform more concerts, selling enough tickets to cover the expenses.
But who was going to perform? Certainly not the old musicians. In March, they sued the POPS, alleging they hadn’t been paid broadcast royalties they were owed from the Christmas concerts. The musicians union placed the POPS on its Unfair List, which meant none of its members would be allowed to play shows for the POPS.
Corbin, meanwhile, has remained on an increasingly quixotic quest to find a way to put on the concerts people bought tickets for. “Last week, I worked 40 hours,” she said, from a conference room in what used to be the POPS offices, one afternoon in January. “I laughed at myself. I don’t know what to say. Why did I do it?”
There is, as unlikely as it may seem, a pops orchestra still performing in Philadelphia. They’re called the No Name Pops, and they’re made up of the ex-musicians of the Philly POPS. (Slogan: “No excuses. No nonsense. No Name Pops.”) The group was formed in May 2023 and has spent much of the past year performing free concerts across the city, trying to build brand recognition, which is to say letting people know that the failure of the POPS was the bosses’ fault, not that of the players. Koveal, the former POPS programming staffer, is the executive director. He says fund-raising has yielded a total in the six figures. But since No Name Pops is a new nonprofit, and with the old POPS still mired in its lawsuit and not quite dead yet, it’s having trouble getting major philanthropic support.
Despite those challenges, there was still pops music at the Kimmel Center last Christmas. The Kimmel Center hired the No Name Pops, which perhaps hints at a future arrangement. A merger might not be necessary if POKC can simply hire the old musicians as freelancers during the lucrative Christmas season.
In early February, the No Name Pops played a “Broadway in the Burbs” concert at Immaculata University in Malvern. The show was pay-what-you-wish, and the musicians, in support of the fund-raising effort, weren’t paid for the performance. Acoustically, the hall was even more of a Sahara than the early Kimmel Center, and there wasn’t much in the way of pomp and circumstance. The average attendee’s age was somewhere in the vicinity of 65, and in an audience of about 700, there was almost no one under 30. It might not have been a modern orchestra executive’s dream demographic. But the crowd was more effusive than any you’d find at a classical music performance. They hooted and hollered and shouted “Bravo!” after each piece. They loved the music, and they were glad it was back.
Published as “Who Killed the POPS?” in the April 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
