Oregonian classical music critic David Stabler just wrote an entry on his blog which talks about the recent Crosscut article and his take on the state of the orchestra.

He comes out swinging on the merits of the piece:

Stephen Beaudoin is right about one thing in his doomy Crosscut piece about the Oregon Symphony. The orchestra is struggling, but his ideas are so superficial and generalized as to be almost meaningless . . . All this stuff from Beaudoin and others about programming is tired, old thinking: “mixing popular and vernacular genres,” initiating “mini-festivals around relevant historical/musical themes,” commissioning world premieres.

Wake up, folks.

And he puts his finger on the crux of the problem facing most symphony orchestras in the country today:

Look, the symphony isn’t going away. The repertoire is here to stay and people will always want to hear it. What needs to change right away is the orchestra’s relationship with the community. The problem is, orchestras don’t know how to change. They have this thing, this music, this product and they don’t know how to adapt it to today’s market.

Stabler then goes on to talk about alternative venues, ways of formatting concerts, the nights/times that we play as areas that can be changed to better reflect the desires of our current and prospective audiences. All well and good, but to take the Sunday matinée example for a moment: we tried some Sunday matinées for classical subscriptions, and the attendance was terrible. Now, I don’t know why it was terrible - was it the fact that these were add-on concerts to fill out a series - i.e. the subscribers mostly got Saturday nights, but for one or two concerts of their series they got a Sunday afternoon, so they just didn’t go to a concert on a day they didn’t really want? Or do people in Portland just want to spend their Sunday afternoons outside and not in a stuffy concert hall? The problem is that, unless we try the idea as its own series, we’ll never know. The half-hearted, tentative way of introducing the matinée practically doomed it from the start.

It goes back to the issue I talked about some time ago: orchestras are risk-averse institutions, because if you risk it all on the wrong idea, you may never get back to even the poor place where you started. Taking smart, educated risks is the way to go, but then you’ve got to embrace the risk and go for the strategy 100 percent. A prime example is when the symphony started playing Saturday nights (back in 1995-96 or so). Instead of saying that we’d take one concert out of both the A and B classical series and try them on Saturday nights - and royally pissing off our existing ticket holders who wanted to go on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday night - management decided that to be competative with other arts organizations we need to stake out Saturday night for every series, and get rid of Tuesday nights. All at once. We lost a lot of “Tuesday nighters” as Jimmy called them, but many returned, and new subscribers came as well, and now it’s the one night on which we almost never have “comp” tickets available for orchestra members. An educated risk was taken, the long view was held, and we gained our best selling night. This is the way decisions should be made - a bunker mentality only means that you’re cut off from the community that you serve, the musicians you employ, and the ideas to which you aspire.

Stephen Beaudoin has written a response to much of the criticism which greeted his initial article on Crosscut. You can find the response here.

His suggestions:

1. Get into the community.
2. Bring in a composer-in-residence.
3. Put the music in context.
4. Bring in hotter artists.
5. Use Thomas Lauderdale in a full and meaningful way.

I agree whole-heartedly with #1. We spend a lot of time justifying our label of Oregon Symphony when in actual fact we’re more the Portland Symphony than ever before. While we cannot replace a system of music in the public schools, we can help to foster music appreciation and early exposure to classical music and instruments in the inner city schools and surrounding suburban school districts. Our audiences and funding sources largely come from the Tri-Met district, so maybe we should tend to our own backyard rather than the back 40 for the time being.

#2 - I just cannot get my mind around why this would be an essential idea to an orchestra’s survival. There are so many good composers out there today - why limit yourself to just one? I don’t think the idea is so much repertoire - we have a music director with a proven interest and knack with contemporary music, especially when you look at his work in Grant Park, where he doesn’t have to worry about funding and ticket sales. The only way I could see this working at all is an idea like they’re doing in Baltimore this season where John Adams and Thomas Adés are being brought in to conduct their music alongside the symphonies of Beethoven on the same concerts. That’s an inspired idea because they are both good conductors and their music is dissimilar to each others and very much at the forefront of what audiences are partial to these days.

UPDATE:

James W. Palermo, Artistic and General Manager of the Grant Park Music Festival, wrote the following clarification regarding my characterization of the GP’s funding situation - I apologize for the error:

“I did want to clarify one point from your recent blog entry. At Grant Park we do have to raise 50% of our annual budget from concert sponsorships, fundraising events, targeted donations and memberships (our closest thing to ticket sales. Members receive a reserved seat in exchange for a donation.)

While the $2 million we receive from the Chicago Park District allows us to present the concerts free of charge, the other $2 million required to fully fund the Festival ($4 million total budget) is raised by me, a staff and a board of directors.”

#3 has merit - I’m not so fond of those cutesy slogans for each concert either. The problem is, it takes a lot more resources to pull off showing context than an outsider would think. Someone has to think up the concept, write the script, put together examples, and make the whole thing work seamlessly without making it seem like a didactic exercise. A lot of concert goers don’t want to be talked to all evening, some love it. We’ve got the Inside the Score series, maybe that could be leveraged to provide a season-wide contextual view of a theme that over arches the entire season’s programming. Something along the lines of “opera in the 20th century” with excerpts from various operas - scenes/arias from Berg’s Wozzeck, Bartòk’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, Adams’ Nixon in China, and Adés’ Powder Her Face, for example.

#4 is right on, and I think it’s safe to say that that is going to change. We’ve got one of the hottest artists around coming in for our gala next season, which is so exciting, but I can’t reveal who it is or I’ll be hunted down and drawn and quartered by the marketing department.

#5 I totally agree with, but I just don’t think we’ve seen the full extent of the plan, such as it may be, and there may be more to come on that. If it is just a cosmetic fix, I’ll be the most disappointed person in Portland.

Terry Teachout writes on the demise of the professional arts critic in his piece for Commentary Magazine entitled “The Amateur as Critic”.  It’s worth a look.

[This was forwarded to me by OSO president Elaine Calder - a truncated version will be published at Crosscut.com.]

Response to: “Can Anybody fix the Oregon Symphony?”
Stephen Marc Beaudoin
Crosscut Seattle
Friday, November 2^nd, 2007

Of course it will take more than an endorsement from Thomas Lauderdale to fix the Oregon Symphony. But Thomas is a subscriber to our full classical series, and a classically trained musician who has appeared with the Oregon Symphony as a guest artist and will again in the future. In performances around the world, he generously credits some of Pink Martini’s success to its early appearances with our Orchestra. He cares passionately about our organization and wants to help. And he’s wonderfully tuned in to Portland and Portland audiences. As Beaudoin points out, he’s the most famous of Portland personalities. Why wouldn’t we accept his offer of help?

Let’s start by geting one simple fact straight: We’ve been losing audiences – but not supporters. Our contributed income is higher than ever, thanks in large part to the Miller match, a three-year challenge by the Miller Foundation to our audiences and donors that has greatly increased our donor base. We have many thousands of contributors including some who make six figure gifts annually. We aren’t Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles, but we do have patrons of means, and patrons with heart, who are determined that this Orchestra must survive and flourish.

And they are determined because this Orchestra is playing for them, week after week, at an exceptionally high standard of performance. No, we aren’t as “hip” as Lauderdale, and not as “unmistakably Portland” – whatever that means. But we are Portland’s local orchestra, and “local” resonates with Portlanders. We are a band of musicians who live and work in this community, providing classical and popular concerts at the Schnitz, education programs in our schools, teaching and adjudicating, and forming the nucleus and artistic leadership of smaller organizations like Fear No Music and Third Angle.

Under Carlos Kalmar our classical programming has broadened greatly. As Assistant Principal Viola, Charles Noble, points out in his blog (nobleviola.com/wordpress) subscriptions were falling even in DePreist’s final seasons, with wall-to-wall Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. In the first years of Carlos’s tenure, the Oregon Symphony has performed music by Benjamin Britten, Steven Mackey, György Ligeti, John Adams, Bohuslav Martinu, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Harrison Birtwistle, Luciano Berio, Henri Dutilleux and Alban Berg, among others.  Many of these composers’ works had never before been performed by the Oregon Symphony in its history. Everyone has an opinion on programming and every orchestra will be too conservative or too adventurous for some of its patrons and critics, all of the time.

Audiences numbers are crucial though, and we’re working to reverse the damage of the past few seasons. I use the word “damage” advisedly. Change is essential for the continued vitality of any organization, but some of the changes in recent seasons were ill-advised or insensitively handled. And at least one of them was turned into a major news story with the kind of headline usually reserved for WAR DECLARED. (Yes, the Symphony’s overall sound has improved dramatically, but that kind of improvement isn’t achieved painlessly.)

As an example: audiences were confused by the change to our classical series, with seventeen programs of two, three of four performances each, instead of the traditional format of fourteen programs each with three performances. We’ve restored the earlier schedule and seen attendance improve significantly at our concerts this fall.

Carlos Kalmar had the unenviable challenge of succeeding a much-loved, long-serving music director, and has wisely concentrated on forming his own relationships with the orchestra, our audiences, our donors and the broader community. He’s a younger man, with a busy international career, and his work with other orchestras has brought us a new and diverse roster of conductors and guest artists like Valentina Lisitsa, who opened our season in that “respectable – if safe – opening-season concert”. I suppose there’s nothing safer than Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, and Dvorak’s Symphonic Variations and Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra are certainly “respectable” – but we sold a quarter million dollars worth of tickets to large audiences who roared their approval. We’re trying to close a $2 million structural deficit, and we think the solution lies in having as many people happily paying for our performances as possible. We don’t blame Carlos for the financial problems, and he’s working with us to design programs that will attract bigger audiences and help fix the mess.

And yes, we’ve stopped recording. All those recordings with DePreist were made possible by a one-time, single gift of $1 million, which has now been fully spent. The much-revered “Nerve Endings” concerts with Murray Sidlin were only possible because we had a grant from the Knight Foundation to produce them. Recordings, broadcasts, tours and innovative programs should be part of our overall operations and not special projects, funded by one-time grants. But that’s a statement of principle, not a reality. At present, given our grave financial situation, we are focused on core activities and unable to take on unsustainable additional expenditures.

One of the writers who leaped to our defence suggests that it’s time for us to realize our community just won’t sustain what is needed to operate the Oregon Symphony as it is. Perhaps that is true, but we’re not giving up yet. I’ve been working with the organization for about a year, and I’ve concluded that the Oregon Symphony has been through so many changes in the past decade that it’s a wonder we have as strong a base of support as we still do. Some change was inevitable, and not all change is damaging, of course. A few of the most important changes have achieved a glorious new level of performance. One or two of them have helped to improve attendance and contributions. Most of the other, less successful innovations were the result of inexperience, caution, undue optimism, carelessness, hesitation – small sins, really, but for an organization as fragile as a symphony orchestra, sometimes hugely damaging.

We need a lively conversation about the role of a symphony orchestra in the 21^st century, in a city with as vibrant and varied a cultural life as Portland. We need the support of everyone who believes in what we do, and we need to be challenged and goaded, stimulated and prodded into the pursuit of excellence at every level – artistic, financial and institutional. But we need those who despair of our attempts and think they know what is wrong to support their arguments with facts and a realistic assessment of what is possible, in this place and at this time.

Elaine Calder
President
Oregon Symphony Association
921 SW Washington Street, Suite 200
Portland, OR 97205

Whenever you get a guest conductor back after a year’s absence or more, it’s often a good time to take stock of where the orchestra is at artistically, where the guest conductor is artistically, and what sort of trends you can divine from these observations. When the guest conductor is a former music director, in this case one who served in that position for 22 seasons, it’s all the more interesting. I don’t know if I’ve got anything really profound to say about the subscription series with James DePreist that concluded last night, but a few thoughts have crossed my mind in the five days of rehearsals and concerts.

The orchestra, I’ve noticed, has become much more responsive to conductor inputs. With us Jimmy has largely been a hands-off type of conductor. He prefers to give the larger gestures and let the solo winds and other melodic line-holders sort out the small stuff. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” could be his motto. The approach lends itself well to large-scale pieces that are Romantic in nature - the Rachmaninoff Second Symphony is a perfect case in point.

It was interesting to note that it took some time for us to get our footing in rehearsals (and concerts, I must admit) in the Rachmaninoff, despite the fact that it’s a piece that we’ve done many times (and recorded) with Jimmy. We’re used to the tension of fighting against a very determined will with Carlos - if we start to push, he really holds us back, and I think that there’s a healthy tension there - even if it might be a bit frustrating at times. With Jimmy, there’s not that sense of being held, it’s more like being gently herded - parts of the orchestra respond quicker than others, and some don’t respond at all, and the general sense of listening to other parts of the orchestra also goes by the wayside. When you have long, spun phrases, this can be ok - there’s more than enough time to let it gel. But the intricate filigree, that never really comes together, sadly.

Anyway, back to the responsiveness idea that I neatly took a tangent away from - when Jimmy gave a very clear and unmistakable cue or gesture that indicated a certain character or tempo or feeling, the orchestra gave it to him quickly and clearly. As soon as the focus from the podium waned - whether a miscue, or lazy upbeat or just a marking of time with no other inputs - you could feel the orchestra slacken as well. I remember from a New York Times article about 10 years ago concerning a conducting masterclass with Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra which was held at Carnegie Hall: the writer said that it was almost cruel to put a student conductor, no matter how talented, in front of the Cleveland Orchestra - they would do whatever she showed them, whether a good idea or not. I think we’re approaching that level where we can give very keen, brilliant, chamber-music like performances if we’re given that kind of leadership, but if someone comes in and gives less than 100 percent, we’re likewise likely to equal less than the sum of our parts.

That being said, I found there were some very enjoyable moments throughout the concerts this week. Nadja Salerno Sonnenberg was entertaining, and thought-provoking with her very individual interpretation of the Bruch Violin Concerto. I wasn’t sure what to expect, not having heard her live for some time, but she gave committed performances and the chemistry between her and Jimmy was the usual fireworks display we’ve come to expect. The Wagner Prelude to the Act III of Die Meistersinger was a nice easy way to open the concert, and showed off the wind and brass sections to good effect with some nice sustained and sonorous playing. I have to say that I have listened to the original version which does not hit a final cadence (it just goes into the next scene without interruption) that I actually prefer that sense of unease that results from the lack of harmonic resolution. It’s a minor quibble, though, and a lovely piece that I enjoyed getting to perform. The Rachmaninoff had its scary moments as well as its delights, and I won’t go into them here - it was good to see the obvious enjoyment on the faces of our three audiences this week, and nice to revisit this piece for one last time with Jimmy.