Category: music

With deficits becoming the rule rather than the exception, and public interest in classical music stagnant at best, American orchestras are searching for ways to reinvent their product without alienating their core audience. No one’s done it successfully yet, but many people in the industry are betting that Deborah Card, the Chicago Symphony’s new executive director, may eventually lead the way. “Our responsibility as administrators is to make sure that people have the best possible access to those concerts. We have to step up to the challenge of understanding that we’re in a marketplace, and the marketplace must be attended to. We have to be sure that our product — that sounds so crass — is delivered in the way people want to receive it.”

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which stunned the orchestra world when it posted an unprecedented $6 million deficit last year, has officially balanced its books for the 2002-03 season. The CSO cut $2.5 million from its annual budget and took an additional endowment draw of $1.3 million in order to stay out of the red, while ticket sales and contributed income remained flat. However, the orchestra anticipates a return to large deficits for the current season, when it will not be able to repeat the endowment overdraw trick.

Even the most prestigious American orchestras aren’t safe from the wave of deficits and cash flow problems which has swept the nation in recent years. This week, the Cleveland Orchestra, thought by many to be the best symphony orchestra in the U.S., reported a deficit of nearly $2 million on a budget of $36 million. This is the second consecutive deficit for the group, and orchestra execs are projecting a $4 million deficit for the current fiscal year. The struggle to stay in the black appears to be twofold: “The fundamental problem is the presence of a world-class symphony orchestra in a relatively small city,” and the orchestra’s endowment was hit hard by the recession, losing more than $50 million over three years.

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, hoping to dig its way out from under a $4 million accumulated debt, has hired Mark C. Hanson as its new executive director. Hanson has run the Knoxville (TN) Symphony for the past two seasons, and received a national award recognizing his progress in both financial and artistic areas there. Hanson is quite young – 29 years old – but his record in retiring debt was apparently attractive to the MSO’s search committee, and he is himself a musician, which is often thought to be an important factor to an orchestra’s players.

The Seattle Symphony hires a new executive director. Paul Meecham is currently orchestra manager of the New York Philharmonic, but his appointment in Seattle is controversial, and didn’t win the full support of the orchestra’s board of directors. “According to musicians, Meecham had earlier made derogatory statements about longtime music director Gerard Schwarz’s conducting and recordings in a meeting with several musicians.”

The New York Philharmonic/Carnegie Hall merger was ill-fated from the start, writes Charles Michener. “It was never going to happen. As we now know, the whole farrago was cooked up by Sanford I. Weill, the megabanker who heads Carnegie’s board, and his counterpart at the Philharmonic, Paul B. Guenther. And for all the spin about the orchestra’s glorious return to the place where it flourished before its move to Lincoln Center in 1962, it seems clear that the scheme had nothing to do with nostalgia or concern for the public good. In keeping with the merger mania that has corrupted so much of the product delivered by our media and entertainment leviathans (General Electric, which owns NBC, has just added Vivendi Universal’s entertainment division to its list of household appliances), the deal was all about the bottom line.”

La Scala has appointed a new artistic director to mediate between music director Riccardo Muti and general manager Carlo Fontana. Muti has fought against what he characterizes as Fontana’s attempts to “dumb down” the famous company. “Mr Fontana had been criticised for introducing popular fare such as West Side Story to fill the 2,600 seats of the Arcimboldi theatre, built on the industrial outskirts of Milan to host La Scala’s performances while its city-centre premises undergo a £40m refit. Tension between the two men burst into the open in July when Mr Muti snubbed the official presentation of the opera’s new season.”

“As musical recordings have increasingly shed their physical form, the record industry and its customers have been at odds over what it all should cost. Music fans complain of high CD prices and copy more music illicitly than they purchase legally, while the record companies rail against the devaluation of their product and take file-sharers to court. Since legal ways to experience online music are only now becoming widely available, there is no established record of what the market will bear or how these innovations will be received. Will each song purchased online represent the loss of a whole CD sale in the store? Or will customers respond to the ease and selection of e-commerce by buying more, overall?”

The financially troubled St. Louis Symphony has been doing some management restructuring. But that “restructuring” included dismissing the executive most orchestra observers believe knows the most about how to run an orchestra. So what’s going on?

Atlanta Opera enters a new chapter, moving into the 4,600-seat Atlanta Civic Center. “The generically functional auditorium was built in the late ’60s to accommodate annual visits from New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which, for most of the 20th century, was the highlight of affluent Atlanta’s summer social calendar. It was only after the center’s final Met performance – Verdi’s “La Traviata” in May 1986 – that Atlantans, and the city’s business community, were ready to support a local opera company.”