It was a dramatic weekend for the Philadelphia Orchestra.
On Friday night, audience members waited in the Kimmel Center for the start of
its opening-night gala, until the orchestra’s president, Allison Vulgamore,
came onstage and announced that the musicians had gone on strike. (The gala
dinner was held anyway.) Meanwhile, across the state, the musicians of the
Pittsburgh Symphony were picketing; they called a strike Friday morning. And in
Texas, the Fort Worth Symphony is finishing the third week of its strike, with
no end in sight.
But on Sunday night, the Philadelphia musicians and
administration announced that they had come to a tentative agreement. At the
Kimmel Center, at least, the music will go on.
Indeed, there has been little reason for hand-wringing
about the future of classical music in recent months. Two of the most bitter
orchestral labor-dispute stories — the Detroit Symphony strike of 2010-11 and
the epic 15-month lockout of the Minnesota Orchestra through 2013 — have
unexpectedly turned into renaissances. A couple of weeks ago, journalist and
pundit Douglas McLennan, founder of ArtsJournal.com, wrote an article titled,
“Some of our orchestras seem to be thriving. Is this a new trend?” But the
three orchestra strikes at the same time brought with it the threat of a whole
new round of decline-of-classical-music articles.
The truth lies somewhere in between. It’s no secret that
the new information age represents a challenging time for large arts
institutions. Some have found creative ways to tackle huge hurdles, such as the
Arizona Opera, which brought itself from the brink of collapse to financial
health within a couple of years (the executive director responsible, Ryan
Taylor, was snapped up last year by the Minnesota Opera).
But other institutions have consistently struggled — and
the Philadelphia Orchestra has been one of the most troubled. Despite a history
of artistic excellence, it has been through a bad strike in 1996, a public
falling out with its music director, Christoph Eschenbach, in 2008 and, in
2011, a bankruptcy filing. Not even the arrival of a popular and aggressively
populist music director, Yannick N é zet-Séguin, has been able to significantly
boost ticket sales or help resolve the budget deficit of several million
dollars. Musicians, who have taken a number of pay cuts and freezes, voiced
concern that the decline in their base pay was compromising the orchestra’s ability
to attract top talent.
Pittsburgh, too, has been facing long-term challenges and
a declining audience. With a gifted but micromanaging music director in Manfred
Honeck, the orchestra has seen significant administrative changes in the past
couple of years; when the new management assessed the orchestra’s current
situation it discovered, the orchestra’s board chairman told the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, “that we were facing an imminent financial crisis.” The musicians
argue that the situation is not as bad as management claims.
The bottom-line argument remains largely the same for
most of the recent and ongoing labor unrest in classical music institutions.
Musicians are in high-pressure jobs that require years of training, the
purchase and maintenance of expensive instruments, and irregular working hours,
and they want to be compensated accordingly. Management finds that the money is
harder and harder to get — depending, of course, on the community. (San
Francisco, whose symphony last year signed a contract with base pay of $150,000
a year, is more affluent than Baltimore.)
The Pittsburgh Symphony’s base salary is $107,000 a year,
according to the Post-Gazette, and the Philadelphia Orchestra musicians’ is
about $128,000. The base pay at the National Symphony Orchestra, for
comparison, is $139,260, according to an NSO spokesman. Under the Philadelphia
Orchestra’s new contract, the musicians’ base pay will rise to about $138,000
by the contract’s end — still not quite what the musicians were hoping for,
although when talks broke down, the two sides were allegedly only half a
percentage point apart.
Pittsburgh’s situation is less easy to resolve; the
musicians struck after management proposed a 15 percent reduction in salary.
Similarly, Fort Worth musicians are striking after a proposal to reduce their
annual contracts by three weeks. Still, one could hope that the rapid ending of
this weekend’s Philadelphia story might inspire other orchestras to find
equally swift resolutions. And in Philadelphia, Simon Rattle will be able to
come in on schedule this week to start rehearsing the Mahler Sixth — a good way
to put a double-bar line on labor stoppage, and move on.
Source: The
Washington Post
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