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IN Music News THIS WEEK: Orchestrating Survival
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By Janos Gereben
No news is bad news in case of the largest US city without an orchestra a year after the San Jose Symphony played its last scheduled concert and suspended operations in face of a $3.4 million deficit. Interim manager Tim Beswick, one of three part-time employees still holding the fort, told SFCV that the transition executive committe has postponed filing for bankruptcy SJSO announced in June. At issue is if it's to be Chapter 7 finality or the more flexible Chapter 11. A meeting scheduled at the end of October may make that decision, Beswick said.
Under the catch 22 of bankruptcy laws, if SJSO raises funds to go the Chapter 11 way, it will be able to save some of its important assets, including the music library, worth as much as $150,000. If no funds come in and Chapter 7 follows, all assets will be liquidated. Meanwhile, a couple of individuals, not wishing to be named, helped out with contributions to the fund that helps musicians keep their medical insurance.
Back in June, transition committee chairman Jay Harris said SJSO could be replaced "within two years by a smaller, community-based and more fiscally responsible orchestra... if it accumulates enough money: at least one year's worth of operational funding, three to six months of reserve and a substantial endowment. At the committee meeting in three weeks, similar optimism may seem even less realistic, given the economic environment.
To the South, the Monterey Symphony is weathering tough times rather well. In addition to the general economic problems, the orchestra first lost its Sunset Center home in Carmel, then had only one concert at the Naval Postgraduate School before 9/11 happened and the resulting closure of the Navy facility. The orchestra traveled to Salinas, then ended up in the rather "basic" PGMS Auditorium in Pacific Grove. In spite of the radical migration, only 300 subscription were dropped from the record high of 1,600 last year, in Kate Tamarkin's second year as music director, on a schedule of seven triple concerts.
Executive director Joseph Truscot is proud of the community's generosity, especially the activist loyalty of Symphony board members. On a $1.5 million budget, instead of an anticipated $300,000 deficit, the orchestra ended up with a managable $25,000 in the red. What made the difference was raising $585,000 in individual contributions, $120,000 over the expected total, 40% from board members, who put their money where their music is.
In the same neighborhood, the Carmel Bach Festival is struggling with the same venue and economic problems, its Sunset Center home and temporary Naval Postgraduate School location both denied to it. Also, just when Silicon Valley audiences and money started coming in, the Dotcom disaster struck, now compounded by growing unemployment in neighboring Monterey and Santa Cruz. Manager Willem Wijnbergen and music director Bruno Weil will have their work cut out for them next season if the festival is to be maintained at current levels.
The Oakland East Bay Symphony has stayed out of the red with a razor-thin margin: $6,000 "in the black" on a $1.6 million annual budget. Executive director Jennifer Duston told SFCV that ticket sales are holding steady, but "we do seem to be working harder for income from all sources," that they have to "run faster to stay in place." With music director Michael Morgan scheduling new, often challenging, works on every program, OEBS is certainly not lowering standards to deal with economic hardship.
Berkeley Symphony executive director Catherine Barker-Henwood says Kent Nagano's orchestra is pulling together after the sudden death of board chairman Peter Henschel earlier this month. Announcement of an interim chair, "prominent in local music circles," is due next week.
Corporate-foundation donations and ticket sales are "holding steady" in Berkeley, where requirements of the $1.2 million budget are still being met without going into debt. Adelaide-born Barker-Henwood has even managed to obtain a long-distance corporate contribution from Southcorp. of Australia, daring exporters of Rosemount, Lindemann and other brands into the heart of California wine country. But beyond that good news lurks the specter of coming belt-tightening if the economy continues to tank.
New executive direct Alan Silow and music director Jeffrey Kahane of the Santa Rosa Symphony work with a budget of over $2 million, and, in Kahane's words, "like almost every orchestra around the country, we have been hit hard by the downturn in the market (especially in the area of contributed income), and are tightening our beltstrings considerably in terms of `extra' (that is, non-subscription) programming and in terms of economizing on the subscription series."
The silver lining, seen both in Santa Rosa and at Kahane's other responsibity, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, is in "robust ticket sales," which means selling out all six SRS concerts of the season's first two subscription series.
The most frustrating local orchestra story is that of the Modesto Symphony (reported in full in last week's Music News), struck by the American Federation of Musicians Local 12 over a contract dispute that's not mainly over money issues. Without an agreement (the first labor contract in the orchestra's 72-year history), the entire season may be cancelled, even though the organization has a deficit-free $1.7 million budget in place.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Symphony, one of the country's best-funded music organizations, just closed its fiscal year with a pre-audit balanced budget of $46 million and a hefty endowment fund. Just to put that in context, the Philadelphia Orchestra (where Wolfgang Sawallisch is succeeded by Christoph Eschenbach) closed the books on a sold-out season, but with a $3.5 million deficit, and and endowment of $68.5 million, the smallest among major US orchestras. (San Francisco's endowment is estimated at $180 million.)
Messiaen Prize to Robertson San Francisco Opera Chorus director Ian Robertson received a handwritten note from the composer's widow on Friday, the day of the US stage premiere of Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise in the War Memorial Opera House. She thanked Robertson for his work with the 120-voice specially enlarged chorus (which still needs to be occasionally amplified in the contest with the 97-instrument orchestra) and told him of being granted an Olivier Messiaen Foundation Prize. Recent recipients of the award include Markus Bellheim (Germany), Jean Dubé (France), Qigang Chen (China) and Alison Farr (UK), for their work on Messiaen productions.
An Excellent Rumor Information from well-informed but resolutely anonymous sources has provided a bright alternative to last week's gloomy report here about Frederica von Stade quietly ending her career in the Bay Area, perhaps without a farewell performance. No worries: this prominent resident of Alameda is still singing here and elsewhere. Deep Throat (a bass, of course) says Flicka is scheduled to do Cosi fan tutte with the San Francisco Opera in the 2004-95 season and reprise her role in Dead Man Walking as well. As to her career-completing dream of the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, she is still looking in small, "out of the way" venues because "I wouldn't dare do it in a big place yet." Meanwhile, she regards retirement as the opportunity of living a life without "rushing from place to place."
Popular Price Means Popular Opera Boston Lyric Opera found a way to "sell opera to the masses," even (or especially) during these increasingly difficult economic times. Over the weekend, the company offered two free performances of Carmen, attracting 140,000 fans, more than the company draws in the rest of its season. Over in Texas, Houston Grand Opera is facing a deficit of millions, and it has reduced the staff, cancelled two productions, cut down the number of performances, and eliminated artist recitals.
`Desecration of Opera' Charles Osborne, author of The Dictionary of Opera, writes in the September 30 edition of the London Times that there is a proliferating worldwide trend to stage "arrogant, foolishly destructive productions." He holds directors responsible: "... dissatisfied with their proper status as interpretative artists on the same level as conductors and singers, [they] have decided to consider themselves creators alongside the composers." The result, Osborne writes, is seen in productions such as Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, at Barcelona's Liceu, set in a public lavatory. When the English National Opera used the staging, the audience was greeted by an opening scene of "14 men sitting on toilet seats with their pants around their ankles... Oscar, the page, had changed sex; one of the courtiers had become a drag queen; and in Act II, we saw a young man being raped and murdered, while not far away a sailor was being offered oral sex." The Royal Opera too has its share of "Polymorphously Perverse Productions," such as the current Nabucco, directed by Tim Albery, with Nebuchadnezzar in a business suit, camouflage uniforms and machine guns for the chorus and, according to Osborne, "what people are shown doing on stage bears not the slightest resemblance to what they are singing about."
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the
Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janos451@earthlink.net.)
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