Category: music

The shutdown of the Florida Philharmonic leaves South Florida without a major symphony orchestra for the first time in decades.

The San Francisco Symphony is off to Europe on tour. Robert Commanday wonders why? “A decade or two ago, the received rationale was that such tours were necessary for the promotion of record sales. Whatever truth there was in that — and no convincing evidence was ever offered — that reason certainly doesn’t hold today in today’s marginalized record market. It was also argued that the orchestra as collective instrument benefitted from the repeated performances. Again, that might have been true 20 or 30 years ago, but the current level of today’s orchestral ensemble is not going to be significantly heightened by touring.”

Instead of traveling abroad, the Detroit Symphony is spending $900,000 to tour the state of Michigan. “While international touring is about building prestige and flexing the orchestra’s artistic muscles, the 2-week swing through Michigan has another agenda: reminding audiences statewide that they, too, have a stake in the DSO.”

Minnesota Opera is staging the American premiere of Poul Ruders’ “A Handmaid’s Tale (based on the Margaret Atwood book). Company officials have already cast “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a “financial bath. They couldn’t attract a corporate sponsor, and while the opera comes from a popular book, it’s not from a beloved one. ‘Maybe it was just a backlash of the times, with the war and all, but make no mistake, we created something extremely volatile and controversial. You have illicit sex, perversion, betrayal, hope and love and such heartbreaking loss. But if audiences are going to be trapped for three hours, you have to grab and entertain them, and this does that quite well’.”

The Florida Philharmonic prepares to go out of business. “The Philharmonic changed the locks on its rehearsal hall Wednesday and faxed a legal notice to the governor’s office and mayors of the municipalities where it performs, advising officials of its intention to file for bankruptcy. That notice stated that the Philharmonic “has developed plans to permanently shut down” and that “employment separations are expected to commence on or about May 9.”

New Jersey orchestras are struggling in the recession. So why do orchestras seem to do so poorly when times are bad? “Everybody knows this is a tough environment. This will be a hard year to even come close to a balanced budget. Every time there is a recession, by definition, orchestras do badly. We are labor intensive – 80 percent of what we do goes to product, and we plan years in advance. There’s not much flexibility.”

The Louisville Orchestra was the first American orchestra to set up its own recording company. It recorded American – one of the most ambitious promotions of American composers ever. “By 1959, when the commissioning component of the Rockefeller grant came to an end, the Louisville Orchestra had commissioned, performed and recorded 116 works by 101 composers.” Now the orchestra is in financial difficulty, and its trove of historic recordings offers an opportunity…

The Florida Philharmonic said last month that it needed to raise $20 million immediately, or it would fold operations. When the absurdity of that goal became clear, the Phil revised the fundraising goal to $4 million by May 10. Now, employees at the Fort Lauderdale-based orchestra have been told that they will lose their jobs unless $500,000 is raised by the end of the week. The fundraising has not been going well, with many donors seemingly fed up with the orchestra’s constant financial crises.

The plight of the Florida Philharmonic has some members of the public seeing red over the constant pleas for a bailout. In a sampling of letters to the Miami Herald, one reader called the Phil a “bottomless pit,” forever looking to cure its own incompetence with other people’s money. But other letter-writers are begging the orchestra to find a way to stay solvent, lest South Florida be left without a professional-caliber orchestra. Writes one, “The next performance for the Philharmonic would have been Mozart’s Requiem. How fitting.”

“The four university students nabbed by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement owe thousands of dollars to the music group following a recent settlement. Pledges of support have lit up message boards, but how much help they actually will receive remains to be seen.”