May 28, 2005. 11:35 AM
RON BULL/TORONTO STAR
Bittersweet symphony
After lacklustre seasons and lagging sales, orchestras are getting their
voices back
WILLIAM LITTLER
“Winnipeg Symphony can’t pay musicians, may collapse”
“Calgary orchestra seeks $1.5 million to survive”
“Orchestral manoeuvres in the red”
“As funds disappear, so do orchestras”
These are only a few of the newspaper headlines to have appeared in
recent seasons above stories of gloom and doom in the symphonic world.
The situation is not a new one. Chronically underfunded, our orchestras
lurch from crisis to rescue and back to crisis again, without achieving
long-term stability.
“Our orchestras are dysfunctional,” accuses a blunt Ed Wulfe, recently
re-elected president of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, traditionally
one of North America’s Top 10.
“The musicians have their own goals, management has its agenda and
so has the board. But our orchestras can only work if everybody is
playing on the same team.”
Ed Smith came to the same conclusion. When he accepted the Toronto
Symphony Orchestra’s managing directorship, the man who discovered
Simon Rattle found when he arrived in Canada an organization divided
in its goals and unable to work as a team. It took his subsequent
resignation to expose the depths of dysfunction.
That was only a few years ago. Today, according to the available
evidence, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra is a different organization
and Andrew Shaw credits the board chairmanship of former provincial
premier Bob Rae with bringing about much of the change.
“It was a matter of leadership,” Shaw recalls. “He pulled the
organization together and had people speaking to each other again. He
bought us time.”
He also helped recruit Shaw, himself a former orchestral player,
credited with turning the Royal Conservatory of Music’s publishing
arm, the Frederick Harris Music Co., into a profitable business,
as the orchestra’s new president and CEO.
“It was a real mess 3 1/2 years ago,” concedes Shaw. “Negative press,
negative attitudes inside and outside the organization. Our goal the
first year was just to be able to get to the end of the year and set
up a search committee to find a new music director.
“The second year we developed a market plan and set the stage for
the music director to make a statement. Some people thought it was
an impossible timeline, but we had to work quickly. Nobody is going
to give money to an abstraction.
“Engaging Peter Oundjian (as music director) was a bit of a risk,
but he has turned out to be a dream come true. He is so intelligent,
so aware of what needs to be done.”
The upshot? Over a three-year period, audiences have risen by 25 per
cent. There are now 25,000 subscribers and the orchestra sells 230,000
seats per season. More than 20,000 young people (aged 15 to 29) have
been recruited to the new “tsoundcheck” program alone, offering them
good seats over the Internet for only $10 a ticket. The price makes
going to the symphony competitive with a first-run movie.
Has all this put the Toronto Symphony Orchestra where it needs to be
to achieve long-term stability? Not yet.
Although its endowment, at about $20 million, stands second among
Canadian performing arts organizations to the Stratford Festival ? an
unprecedented figure for a Canadian orchestra ? this is still only a
fraction of what the major American orchestras have at their disposal.
He also wants to eliminate the accumulated deficit of $7 million. It’s
less than the Houston Symphony Orchestra’s $10 million, but Toronto’s
red ink flows from year to year. “We still have a $1-million structural
problem annually that has to be addressed,” Shaw admits.
`Our orchestras are dysfunctional.’
Ed Wulfe, president, Houston Symphony Orchestra
“So we are taking a page from the health services and universities. We
have to have an integrated approach to fundraising. And our operation
has become lean, if not mean.”
As Shaw and his colleagues have worked behind the scenes to improve
the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s bottom line, Oundjian has worked out
front to put a new face on what happens in and around Roy Thomson Hall.
Within a few weeks, he will have reached the end of his first full
season as music director, sometimes making music before full houses,
often speaking informally with his listeners to introduce the music
and soloists. The atmosphere is warmer in the hall than it has been
in many years.
“My opening season with the Toronto Symphony continues to be an
incredibly rewarding and fulfilling experience,” Oundjian says. “The
orchestra is filled with extraordinary musicians who continue to
share their love and passion for music with the audience.”
Some of those musicians are new and some have returned to the
orchestra in order to make music with him. Principal double bass Joel
Quarrington came back from Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra,
principal trumpet Andrew McCandless from the much richer Dallas
Symphony Orchestra. Winona Zelenka has made her mark as new principal
cellist and Teng Li has turned out to be a principal violist worthy
to follow in the distinguished footsteps of Steven Dann.
Orchestras sometimes fail to acknowledge the visual impact they make,
conditioning the way audiences listen. The Toronto Symphony has had
more than its share of apparent zombies over the years, particularly
in the string sections, but under Oundjian even some of the sitting
dead are beginning to look re-energized.
The strings are a symphony’s backbone and his credentials as former
first violinist of one of the world’s foremost chamber ensembles,
the Tokyo String Quartet, have given him the background and impetus
to improve the string sound.
His credentials as a conductor have been less impressive, since it is
only for the past several years that he has been waving a stick. The
performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony with which he opened the
season sounded more like a reading than an interpretation, and much
of the seasoning necessary to turn a talent into a maestro has yet
to take place.
The good news is that he and the orchestra seem mutually engaged. And
for a new music director to inaugurate a contemporary music festival
(New Creations) in his first season bodes well for his commitment to
revitalizing the repertory. All 11 of the works presented over three
programs were being heard in Toronto for the first time.
Talking conductors is a controversial issue. Even Leonard Bernstein
was raked over the critical coals for daring to converse with his
listeners. With his lightly English-accented voice (although born
in Toronto, he received most of his education in England), Oundjian
simply has a better knack than most of his colleagues for breaking
the ice verbally.
If there is starch in his collar, none of it is attitudinal. He
radiates friendliness from the stage and in these days of fierce
competition for the cultural dollar, symphony orchestras can use all
the friends they can get.
A radical? He is obviously not that. Balancing the New Creations
Festival was a Mozart Festival, just about the safest programming
imaginable. But as his quartet-playing years demonstrated, this
man knows his Mozart, and there isn’t a composer better suited to
cultivating refinement in an orchestra.
Mozart will return in 2005-06, along with New Creations. So will
some of the conductors around whose special talents the orchestra
is building a complementary support structure to balance Oundjian’s
12-week exposure. Former music directors Sir Andrew Davis and Gunther
Herbig continue to make welcome returns, along with Gianandrea Noseda
and Thomas Dausgaard.
It used to be said that the Toronto Symphony is a far better orchestra
than the world knows. That situation has not changed. Largely through
its Decca recordings and the tours flowing from them, the Montreal
Symphony has been the Canadian orchestra with an international profile.
Having lost its record contract and its truly distinguished music
director, Charles Dutoit, Montreal’s orchestra is now far more
debt-ridden and dysfunctional than its Ontario rival. Whether the
appearance of the high-profile Kent Nagano as music director in 2006
and the still-unfulfilled promise of a new concert hall will be the
catalysts for change remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, with sister orchestras in Calgary and Winnipeg in trouble,
and others across the country barely holding their deficits at bay,
the Canadian orchestral world is increasingly looking to Toronto as
a model for recovery.
“I don’t think a lot of orchestras got over the cutbacks of the early
’90s,” suggests Mike Forrester, Toronto’s vice-president for marketing
and development. “When they downsized, they lost marketing people
trained at a level to close the income gap.
“We have expanded our fundraising and we’ve targeted new audiences in
ethnic communities. We run ads in Cantonese and Mandarin newspapers
and work with the Russian and Korean communities. And we’ve lowered
the average age of our audience, with the help of our tsoundcheck
program and singles series. There is now such a thing as date night
with the Toronto Symphony. Who’d have thunk it?”
Who, indeed. Year One of the Age of Oundjian seems to be ending on
one of the highest notes the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has hit in
years. The struggle continues, but the smiles are returning to Roy
Thomson Hall.
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress