The Oregonian reports that Oregon Symphony and the other major arts organizations in Portland have managed to stay in the black in this tough year, largely due to belt-tightening in their budgets.
For the first time in five years, the Oregon Symphony balanced its budget, although the exact numbers won’t be known until an audit in September, said Carl Herko, a symphony spokesman. In the past three years, the Oregon Symphony posted deficits of $1.5 million (2007), $594,000 (2008) and $488,000 (2009). The orchestra has balanced its budget only four times in the past 20 years. Salary cuts to orchestra musicians and staff, furloughs, lower fees to guest artists and fewer marketing costs reduced the symphony’s most recent budget to $14 million, $1 million less than the previous year.
In addition to budget cuts, donations helped push the orchestra into surplus territory, including three gifts over $250,000 each. On the downside, ticket revenue fell $1.1 million from last year, due partly to four fewer performances. The number of paying customers per performance dropped 11.9 percent.
David Stabler has the complete news here.
The Shreveport Symphony has reached an agreement with its musicians, a two-year contract with a 45% pay cut for the players. The contract was reached after an 18 month strike after an initial proposal from management which was based upon a 75% pay reduction.
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The New York Times reports that orchestras and other cultural institutions are reaching out to patrons new and old via text messages.
Before the New York Philharmonic presented a concert in Central Park last week, the executive director of the orchestra had an announcement: Audience members could vote for an encore from the evening’s soloist by text message. The choices were a Chopin étude or, in honor of the guest musicians from the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, a traditional Chinese melody.
Here’s the story link.
City Journal posits that we’re living in a new golden age for classical music.
Anyone inclined to lament the state of classical music today should read Hector Berlioz’s Memoires. As the maverick French composer tours mid-nineteenth-century Europe conducting his revolutionary works, he encounters orchestras unable to play in tune and conductors who can’t read scores. A Paris premiere of a Berlioz cantata fizzles when a missed cue sets off a chain reaction of paralyzed silence throughout the entire sorry band. Most infuriating to this champion of artistic integrity, publishers and conductors routinely bastardize the scores of Mozart, Beethoven, and other titans, conforming them to their own allegedly superior musical understanding or to the narrow taste of the public. …
The caliber of musicianship also marks our age as a golden one for classical music. “When I was young, you knew when you heard one of the top five American orchestras,” says Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist of the recently disbanded Guarneri Quartet. “Now, you can’t tell. Every orchestra is filled with fantastic players.” Steinhardt is ruthless toward his students when they’re preparing for an orchestra audition. “I’ll tell them in advance: ‘You didn’t get the job. There are 250 violinists competing for that place. You have to play perfectly, and you sure didn’t play perfectly for me.’ ”
The declinists who proclaim the death of classical music might have a case if musical standards were falling. But in fact, “the professional standards are higher everywhere in the world compared to 20 or 40 years ago,” says James Conlon, conductor of the Los Angeles Opera. A vast oversupply of students competing to make a career in music drives this increase in standards.
Story Link.