Category: music

The cash-strapped San Antonio Symphony will end its season more than a month early, and attempt to retool its finances in order to have the funds to mount a full 2003-04 season. The orchestra has been in dire straits for months, with its musicians frequently playing without pay. Orchestra officials say they are optimistic about plans for next season, but acknowledge that the new season may be a shorter one, and might not happen at all if new sources of local funding can’t be found.

In many ways, the San Antonio Symphony has long been considered a model of what a small, regional orchestra should be. So what could be preventing the orchestra’s leaders from reviving their gasping organization? Mike Greenberg says the problem is simple: San Antonio’s big-money types are flatly refusing the symphony’s advances, and ignoring its pleas for relief. “The doors have slammed so consistently that some observers inside and outside the symphony have suspected a coordinated effort by donors to force the symphony to reconstitute itself as a smaller or part-time ensemble.”

How are the new music industry downloading services doing? “Various analyses of the half-dozen or so services put the total of their combined subscribers at between 300,000 and 500,000. Emusic, the one legitimate music service that discloses its subscriber numbers, claimed 70,000 subscribers as of year-end 2002. Meanwhile, Kazaa, the leader of the file-trading services not sanctioned by the music industry, has been downloaded more than 200 million times.”

The Philharmonic of New Jersey’s “Discovery Concert Series of interactive music-appreciation events is attempting to extricate classical performances from the miasma of modern life, where it plays second fiddle to everything from linguine to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Since it began last year, the concert series has proven to be a huge success, selling out months in advance. Concerts take place in Newark at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and are aired on local and, increasingly, national PBS stations. The concerts are interactive in the style of a college class in music theory and have covered pieces by Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, and Claude Debussy.”

Large orchestras may be facing massive deficits and concern for their future across the country, but some smaller ensembles with less overhead and fewer staff are actually thriving, despite a dismal economy. One case in point is Red, a Cleveland-based chamber orchestra specializing in contemporary music. Red, founded a year ago by Jonathan Sheffer (of Eos Ensemble fame), “is ending the season with no deficit on a budget of $407,000,” and has apparently been a hit with Cleveland concertgoers.

Even as Red thrives, another Cleveland-based ensemble specializing in new music is in danger of closing up shop. “The Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the admired professional ensemble in residence at Cleveland State University since 1980, is in turmoil and in danger of closing at the end of the 2003-04 concert season. Members of the Chamber Symphony are scheduled to meet today with Cleveland State President Michael Schwartz to discuss the ensemble’s future. But its fate might be sealed. By May 2004, when founding music director Edwin London retires, the group could be out of money.”

Did psychotherapy turn Rachmaninov from “a composer of ambitious discordances into a tinkler of popular tunes?” So maintains a new book. “It was a kind of unconscious Faustian pact, in which he was seduced into giving up his revolutionary rage in exchange for peace of mind and endless pleasanteries.”

The Oregon Symphony has become the latest in a long line of North American orchestras to announce severe fiscal problems and a series of deep cuts to deal with them. Over the past few years, as the American economy has nosedived, the orchestra’s endowment has lost fully 50% of its value. To make up the difference in revenues, Oregon will cut several staff positions, slash salaries, and even reduce the pay of its conducting staff (including legendary outgoing music director James dePriest) by 10%. The ensemble is also asking next season’s guest performers to voluntarily reduce their fees, and although no cuts are immediately being made in the salaries of the orchestra’s musicians, the subject is sure to come up when their contract is renegotiated next year.

“Whenever the coverage of arts on the box is discussed, an assumption is voiced that opera is a cornerstone of public-service broadcasting which doesn’t feature strongly enough in the schedules. I’m not convinced. The fact is that there has always been quite a lot of opera on BBC2 and Channel 4, and it rarely draws the viewing figures of a million that can, crudely speaking, justify the time and expense. Opera does not normally make very gripping or alluring television.” Yet, it can work…