About an hour before they were going to leave, my mom went on the website of the Wachovia Center, where he was performing, to get an idea of the layout of the building and the best way to get to their seats, that kind of thing. Imagine her surprise when she found out that the concert was canceled!
Mom called the ticketing office to complain. "Oh, didn't you get a phone call?" asked the agent. "You should have gotten a call." Obviously not. As she told the guy on the phone, if she hadn't been on their website, they would have made the trip for nothing. Philly's not a huge inconvenience (it's about an hour's drive from here), but it was still an inconvenience.
She said that they have a refund coming for the cost of the tickets. It's not clear exactly when the decision to cancel the Philly concert was made, but it was apparently Bocelli himself who decided to do it. Instead, he held the concert at the Mohegan Sun casino -- in Connecticut. So anybody who had paid to see him in Philly was just out of luck. But yeah, the Wachovia Center never bothered to tell my parents "by the way, the concert you paid to see has been canceled."