On a stormy night last week, 6-year-old Sophia Corrao was all set to hear the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Dressed to the nines, with a frilly dress and blond hair brushed to a gloss, she stood in the lobby of Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church beside her mother, Trina, a longtime arts enthusiast who used to have season tickets to the Guthrie Theater back when she lived in Minneapolis.

Now she and her husband, Jay, live in Apple Valley, and there's no way a typical Thursday night would see the family driving all the way to St. Paul to see the orchestra at the Ordway. But their home is just a few blocks from the church, where the chamber orchestra was about to give the kick-off performance of its first season in Apple Valley, the newest of the neighborhood concert series the orchestra offers in half a dozen Twin Cities suburbs.

"It's nice to have a bit of this kind of culture in our neck of the woods," Corrao said.

The Corraos are exactly the kind of people the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra went in search of four years ago when it conducted a series of focus groups to find out "why people who look like they should be coming to concerts aren't coming," said Jessica Etten, the orchestra's director of marketing and communications.

Those people are well-educated and interested in the arts, but it turned out that several barriers were keeping them away from the orchestra's Ordway concerts, key among them money and the hassle of driving in from the suburbs and finding parking.

So the orchestra started breaking down the barriers. In 2004, it added a Stillwater venue to its schedule, along with the churches in St. Paul, Minneapolis and Eden Prairie where the orchestra had given concerts for decades. Since then, it has added more concerts, at locations including United Theological Seminary in New Brighton and Bethel University in Arden Hills.

It also slashed ticket prices at all its neighborhood venues. Tickets to the orchestra's Ordway concerts can run as much as $50, but at neighborhood venues, they sell for $10 or $25.

To turn the neighborhood concerts into family events, the orchestra thought, "Let's make it cheaper than going to a movie," Etten said. Kids now get in for $5.

Other groups follow road to suburbs

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is one of several major Twin Cities arts groups that are reaching out to the suburbs. Since 2005, the Loft Literary Center has offered classes at suburban locations including Plymouth and Shoreview. The same year, the Minneapolis-based MacPhail Center for Music worked with Paideia Academy charter school in Apple Valley on the first of its two suburban "access sites."

The Loft initiative was started partly because of a study showing that the bulk of the Loft's students lived in Minneapolis and St. Paul, leaving the suburbs largely untapped, said Linda Greve, the Loft's director of special initiatives.

The Loft also hoped to spare its suburban students from traffic congestion, she said. And it was running out of space.

"When we moved into the Open Book building [in downtown Minneapolis] in 2000, we had lots of classroom space we hadn't had before," Greve said. But class registration has more than doubled since then, to more than 5,000 last year.

MacPhail's suburban sites have also grown the center's student base. Of the center's 7,500 students, 450 attend classes or lessons at Paideia Academy or in White Bear Lake, where the center has a similar arrangement with Birch Lake Elementary.

"If you concentrate on just downtown, you're going to lose a strong customer base," said Paul Babcock, MacPhail's executive vice president, who said the center plans to add another suburban access site next fall.

Move helps turn around ticket sales

For the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the neighborhood series concerts are the biggest factor in a major turnaround in season ticket sales. Five years ago, the orchestra's subscriber base was in decline, Etten said. Since then, it has grown by 28 percent -- an increase illustrated by packed events such as the Apple Valley concert last week, at which the audience thanked the orchestra for its performance of Mozart's "Linz" Symphony with a standing ovation.

The crowd's reception suited Fred Bretschger, a double bass player who said the orchestra's suburban audiences are often like "kids in a candy store."They were clapping between every movement," he said. "That doesn't bother me -- some people say, 'Oh, you should wait till the end of the whole piece' -- but I figure they were liking it."