Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner OT: San Antonio Symphony closes

Thought some might be interested

https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/san-antonio-symphony-orchestra-closes-wages/

Sad, isn't it.

Maybe this is just wishful thinking but my immediate thought was, this leaves a vacuum that will pretty soon be filled.

I mean, hey -- I can't help imagining that some wealthy person in town, or some of the musicians themselves, will immediately realize that nobody's stopping them from starting up an orchestra....

Consider it a prediction.


P.S. I see that the mayor's quoted statement (near the bottom) kinda sorta suggests something like this.

I hope it is a prediction😊. San Antonio is too large of a city not to have professional music.

Offering the musicians just $17000 is insulting. And this, from the directors board, allegedly people who values music. I wonder where this director's board comes from.

That sort of happened to my local orchestra. Mis-managed for over a decade, went bankrupt, wealthy person stepped in and built a superb new hall, they rose from the ashes. That was 15-20 years ago. And they have survived covid upheavals with community and city support.

BUT as a reduced core group with extras hired for the "big" concerts. It works because the new hall is so good, but the smaller group would have been sonically lost in the old, dead hall. Maybe the numbers will creep back up with continued good management.

This is very sad, but unbelievably so given the storied history of the San Antonio Symphony. The first full performance of a symphony in Texas was Mendelssohn’s Symphony #4 in San Antonio by the precursor of the SA symphony. The current organization that just folded was started by Max Reiter in 1939. Reiter was a protege of Bruno Walter.

Because of Reiter’s connections with the musical elite of Europe, the orchestra was able to schedule Jascha Heifetz as a soloist in its first season.

Thanks so much for the wonderful history! I hope the community will launch a rebuild under different management.

It is very likely that the directors do not have the money, no matter how much they value the music.

Poor support for the SA symphony by residents of SA had been a problem for a number of years. The 2003/2004 season was canceled due to a bankruptcy, and there had been a previous season canceled for financial reasons. The city clearly hasn’t adequately appreciated an orchestra that played the world premieres of a number of works by Richard Strauss.

I believe also that Stravinsky once appeared as a guest conductor for the SA Symphony.

For the board to propose a 50% pay cut resulting in an offer for professional musicians of below the living wage, suggests that the financial condition was catastrophic. The musicians were apparently on strike anyway, so that would have made matters worse for the board and musicians, and will not have helped to generate potential audience sympathy in a period of very low ticket sales anyway. It sounds like an example where the board was between a rock and a hard place, and the musicians decided it was better to be unemployed. No winners here.

One blog online reports that the orchestra brings in annual revenue of $5M but has $8M in liabilities, and suggests that it would take $10M/year to fully fund everything the orchestra normally would take on in a year.

$10M is also the annual budget for the 6th highest individual salary among players on the San Antonio Spurs basketball team, so it in part is a matter of what the residents of the city want to pay for.

I'd say the basketball example isn't a great one for this, because pro basketball salaries aren't very dependent on what the residents of the team's city want to pay for -- pretty indirectly at most.
The main thing there is media fees, especially TV, which are more national than local.

But I don't disagree that the orchestra situation is about what the local people want to pay for.

People will cry when stuff like that shuts down, but they won't support it (by attending concerts or whatever) when it's operating.

I own and operate a movie theatre so I keep a fairly close eye on the industry and over the years I've seen several theatres shut down due to low attendance (lack of local interest).

When that happens the people who complain the loudest are the same ones who attended maybe one movie there in the past ten years, or perhaps none at all.

I guess it's human nature; when you've got something you just assume it's going to be there forever and when it's suddenly gone it's a shock. "We're entitled to have a movie theatre. We've always had a movie theatre. How could it possibly be closed?"

I'm sure exactly the same thing is going on here with this orchestra.

The single salary of the 6th highest paid player likely would be covered by ticket sales.

If locals were willing to pay for symphony tickets what they pay for NBA game tickets instead of buying the NBA tickets, the Spurs would be leaving town instead of the symphony.

We have no idea if the symphony instituted any policy or programming that would affect interest. We have a symphony in my town and I was a loyal subscriber until they changed the focus of the orchestra. It had been primarily classically focused with a couple of pop themed concerts. Now, every performance is some variation of ‘an evening with the pops’. I dropped my tickets,

We also don’t know how well the board managed the symphony: not just the programs, but special events and fundraising. All I’m trying to say is that the reason for closing and bankruptcy may be due to a number of reasons.

I agree. It is the culmination of 20 years of financial struggles.

In Poland we have actually a lot new world-class concert halls, one of them being most probably best concert hall in the world, and this really did a wonderful thing: it became fasionable to go there. Fortunately the trend is stable from 8 years and for good concerts tickets are almost sold-out for months before.

Unfortunately piano recitals with well known names are selling not too good, even if we have MA Hamelin, Garrick Ohlsson or Grigory Sokolov.

But orchestra is not easy thing to manage, definitely.

Here in the UK, we regularly get broadcasts on Radio 3 from concerts in Poland made available to the BBC, from two Chopin-related festivals: Chopin & His Europe Festival in Warsaw and the International Chopin Festival in Duszniki-Zdrój. You regularly get big names (previous Chopin Competition winners, especially) alongside Polish performers in them, but of course I have no idea how well-attended they are, so I'm surprised that even the big names don't attract large audiences. I've lost count of how many performances of the Chopin concertos I've heard from them, not to mention Paderewski's piano concerto which is hardly ever performed outside Poland.

Last time I was in Poland, I attended a free concert in Wilanów Palace, Warsaw, given by Polish graduates from the Chopin Conservatoire. The impressive & resplendent hall was full despite the program of rarities - Andrzej Panufnik's Piano Trio and a song cycle by Szymanowski (Rymy dziecięce), and apart from our small group of British tourists, everyone in the audience was Polish.

Orchestras in the US, in the past, survived on season ticket sales, which were healthy. But any given performance, there were lots of no shows among subscribers, which looked bad to those who infrequently walk up and and buy tickets right before a concert.

If the joint is not at least 50% full, people say to themselves, "Where, more interesting, is everybody else?"

Of course with the pandemic, comforts of home, on-line streaming, etc., it's hard to chart the course forward. But we can't just have all live, big performances dry up and die.

Sadly, in the dog-eat-dog environment of US arts funding and sustainability, you DO sometimes just have to let things die and start over with a totally new managing corporation. That is soooo ultimately wasteful, though.