Sting’s concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra are its highest ticket price ever. Both shows are sold out.

These days, you can snag a ticket to the Philadelphia Orchestra for as low as $25, or, for $200, splurge on a really great seat.

But for two forthcoming performances, tickets to the orchestra are going for $400, $800 — and even $1,500.

Is the orchestra bringing back Rachmaninoff himself?

No, this pair of March concerts features the orchestra with Gordon Sumner, also known as Sting. Ticket prices for the March 8 and 9 concerts are the orchestra’s most expensive ever, and if the group thought they could get away with these kinds of prices, they were right. Both concerts sold out, and quickly.

Some patrons, however, were less than thrilled to encounter this new frontier in ticket prices.

Carrie Stavrakos scrolled upon a Facebook ad for the concert, clicked, saw the prices, “and said, ‘No, I’m not participating in this.’ I would have stretched maybe for $75. Three digits is too much for me. That’s like a bill payment.”

Veteran concertgoer M.J. Fine said she shelled out $399 for a pair of tickets — the most she’s ever paid.

“Seeing Sting with the orchestra seemed like it would be a special and rare opportunity as well as a dynamic and exciting musical collaboration,” said Fine, who went to 74 shows last year and averaged closer to 150 in the years before the pandemic.

She said she got caught up in the frenzy of trying to secure tickets online in October in the typical mad rush of a big name show on-sale date.

“The way ticketing works now leverages the unknown to encourage panic and FOMO,” she said. “I didn’t know the prices and the process was frustrating. … I became more worried that the show would sell out before I could complete the process than I was about the cost of this event that might never happen again. Instead of having a calm space to weigh the costs, I was in panic mode.”

The orchestra anticipated the public appetite for the shows.

“The rarity of the occasion combined with the just incredible global stardom of the artist … we knew there would be monumental demand for this event, and we priced it accordingly,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center Inc. “It is a once-in-a-generation type opportunity to hear Sting up close and personal with the Philadelphia Orchestra.”

Not all of the ticket prices are in the mid and upper hundreds. Still, the lowest price for a Philadelphia Orchestra concert with Sting is almost as much as the top ticket price for a regular night at the orchestra.

Out of the 4,800 available tickets in Verizon Hall (two shows at 2,400 seats each), about 100 tickets sold for $800 each; 2,000 tickets sold for $400; 850 sold for $300; 800 for just under $250; and about 1,000 tickets sold for $173. With service fees, the actual amount paid by patrons was higher.

And some prices zoomed higher still. About 40 ticket buyers each parted with $1,500 to hear the concert and meet Sting backstage.

Ticket prices for this concert and others are a function of the orchestra’s dynamic pricing system — prices that go up or down in response to demand. Several concerts after the new year were put on sale for $20.24 per ticket, and tickets for a special Yo-Yo Ma-John Williams concert this month ranged from $36 to $399 and sold out months in advance.

“Prices for all of our performances are based on what the market can bear,” says Tarnopolsky, “and what the costs to the institution are for putting on the event.”

And Tarnopolsky is not wrong about what the market will bear. On StubHub, asking prices for resale tickets to Sting’s two shows with the orchestra range from $422 to $2,819. Each.

Among forthcoming Philly concerts, that range is topped only by the most in-demand show of the year: Olivia Rodrigo’s July 19 show at the Wells Fargo Center, where asking prices run from $400-plus to upward of $5,000.

Sting performed with the orchestra once before — in 2010 for the Academy of Music Anniversary Concert — and has often sung in an orchestral setting.

In 2010, he re-recorded versions of songs originally released with the Police or as a solo artist — such as “Roxanne” and “Englishman in New York” — with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. On the Symphonicities tour that year, his accompanied-by-an-orchestra dates included a concert at the Borgata Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City.

Sting appeared with the Pittsburgh Symphony in January 2022, where tickets ranged from $99 to $350, with VIP options at $450 and $750. Earlier this month, the singer appeared alongside the San Francisco Symphony, with tickets going from $75 to $500.

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Sting tickets sold out soon after going on sale. Attendance has flagged at some orchestra concerts since the end of the COVID-19 shutdown, as it has across the arts and culture sector. But the popularity of the Sting concerts has once again proven the post-pandemic axiom that performances perceived as special events tend to sell extremely well, inflation sensitivity be damned.

The popular appeal of the singular “once in a lifetime” event in a relatively intimate setting for a classy evening with a sophisticated rock star and a world class orchestra on a weekend date night is also striking because Sting has played Philadelphia so recently.

» READ MORE: ‘It’s all about surprise.’ Sting and Shaggy’s One Fine Day festival is happening only in Philadelphia

Just this past September, the singer and bassist staged “One Fine Day,” an all-day only-in-Philadelphia festival the rock star presented in tandem with Shaggy, the Jamaican reggae artist with whom he’s developed a musical bromance. That fest played the Mann Center, a far less intimate space with a capacity of over 14,000. But with a bill that also included acts like New Orleans funk band Tank and the Bangas and Trinidadian soca group Kes — and far cheaper tickets prices than the concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra — the show was not a sellout.

Unlike Sting’s Academy of Music appearance in 2010, the March shows, conducted by Damon Gupton, are a full two hours, said Tarnopolsky. Likely tunes on the program: “Roxanne,” “Englishman in New York, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” “Fields of Gold,” “Shape of My Heart,” “King of Pain,” and “Every Breath You Take.”

Sting has dabbled in the classical music realm before, recording works of English Renaissance composer John Dowland, and appearing in Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale.

Tarnopolsky called Sting’s Philadelphia concert a “pretty extraordinary value for the money, especially when you’re thinking about seeing him in a 2,400-seat venue,” but acknowledged the unusually high price tag.

“The thing to remember here is, we do hundreds of performances a year. We do many free performances. You can buy a ticket for as little as $25. So we are very focused on accessibility throughout the season.”

Plus, he said:

“The high ticket prices, relatively speaking, help sustain … a great orchestra in Philadelphia.”