The musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra have to listen carefully to each other to perform. However, it is the organization as a whole that is beginning to hear better the call of the marketplace, as seen in the programming for its next season.

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This first collaboration of musicians and staff has put the PSO on the road toward what an orchestra season should contain: substantive repertoire from a range of musical genres wrapped in a more marketable form. And they didn't even need a music director. (The PSO does need one eventually, but that's a subject for another column.)

The just-announced 2006-07 season has flaws, but overall it impresses as the result of a change in philosophy. Traditionally, orchestras organize seasons horizontally because attendance is built on season subscriptions. Seasons often have themes that develop across the entire year, not quite as cohesively as an episodic TV show like "Lost" but designed to have some connection between concerts or to build up to key soloists or symphony works. But the recent explosion in entertainment has challenged that approach. Today's world is driven by the event; live music must compete with a host of options from Netflix to sports to touring shows.

Opera has been ahead of the curve on this because its fewer presentations of each opera mean each gains more of a buzz. Next season, the Pittsburgh Opera doesn't have to add much pizazz for its productions -- "The Magic Flute," "Romeo & Juliet," "Pagliacci" and "Billy Budd"-- to make them events.

In contrast, the PSO's 22 concert weekends require the planning and patience many patrons just don't have these days. This is part of the reason the orchestra went to smaller subscription packages rather than offering only the entire season. The PSO's touting of its significant increase in subscriptions needs to be taken in the context that the total number of seats sold has not actually risen much. The PSO needed to do more than offer flexible subscriptions packages (although they are important to spurring donations). It had to change its outlook to offer compelling events.

The good news is that the 2006-07 season has finally taken the vertical rather than horizontal approach, creating individual concerts that stand on their own thematically and that will be competitive for patrons' entertainment dollars. You can quibble about some choices, but this framework should build excitement based on content of concerts, not just on the PSO's reputation.

Case in point -- 2006 is a Shostakovich year. In previous years, an emphasis on the Russian composer would be stretched over the entire season, or at least the half of it in 2006, the 100th anniversary of his birth. Instead, this time the PSO will celebrate the centenary in one concert weekend, with an all-Shostakovich program. Sure, it would be nice to hear one of his symphonies that we haven't heard recently, instead of Symphony No. 5 (again), but the program is stout (also with Piano Concerto No. 1, performed by Vladimir Feltsman, and the lesser-known suite from "The Bolt"). It will allow the audience to become acquainted in depth with this composer and is the sort of thematic arrangement most concert-goers expect.

The PSO is doing the same with a Brahms concert conducted by Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, a "Don Quixote"-themed night with works by Richard Strauss and Manuel de Falla (the latter using puppets) and a Scandinavian night with Grieg and Nielsen. Andrew Davis will lead the orchestra in a special concert of Olivier Messiaen's "Turangalila-symphonie," in which he will play the themes of the piece first. Another standout is a concert centered on art music of the '20s and early '30s, juxtaposing Gershwin and Ravel with Honegger.

There still are several concerts appealing to the traditional set, they all contain a new or "new to the PSO" work, including Claude Debussy's "La plus que lente," Bach's Viola Concerto, Sofia Gubaidulina's "Feast during a Plague," James MacMillan's "Confession of Isabel Gowdie," Esa-Pekka Salonen's "Foreign Bodies," Witold Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra and more. The only world premiere is Christopher Theofanidis' Concerto for Violin. Typically this would lead to a torrent of criticism from me, but I actually think that contemporary music is served better by a balance of premieres and recent works deserving of additional hearings.

Only six of the concert weekends remain steadfast in the old Great Works mold. That's impressive. Themed concerts should never replace the thrill of hearing a world-class orchestra playing the masterworks. But with its new approach, the PSO has taken a step toward remaining the hot item week in and week out that it should be, considering its talent, wherewithal and stature.