Re: Re: Bad News


[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ TubeNet BBS ] [ FAQ ]

Posted by more...(previous link misbehaved) on October 16, 2001 at 14:11:07:

In Reply to: Re: Bad News posted by Newspaper links on October 16, 2001 at 13:49:45:

Can the TSO band play on?

By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
MUSIC CRITIC

Saturday, October 13, 2001 – Print Edition, Page R19
The Globe and Mail

TORONTO -- When the car is sinking, survival experts say, the first thing you have to do is get the window open. Yesterday, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra wrenched the glass down, though there's still a lot of swimming to do if the band as we know it is to survive.

An 11th-hour commitment from the orchestra's 93 players to revisit contract gains won two years ago has given the TSO additional leverage to convince the Toronto Symphony Orchestra Foundation to send more cash to the TSO to stave off imminent bankruptcy. The orchestra's crushing debt remains, however, and a financial crash is still possible.

The players voted in favour of new negotiations late Thursday night, after an opera pops concert that included Massenet's aria Va! laisse couler mes larmes (Go! Let flow my tears). The players have reason to weep: If the TSO's restructuring committee gets its way, wage rollbacks and a shorter concert season could cost the musicians $1.5-million this year alone.

The negotiations are shaping up to be a bitter replay of the crisis of 1992, when another bankruptcy scare wrung a 16-per-cent wage cut from the musicians. Their determination to regain that loss set the stage for the 11-week strike of 1999, which cost the TSO $2.5-million in lost ticket revenues and increased the payroll by $1.5-million in the contract's first year.

The TSO players aren't the only orchestra musicians in Canada being asked to give up money to keep their jobs. Last weekend, players at the troubled Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra voted to accept a 7-per-cent pay cut this year -- only to be locked out by the CPO board, which wants even bigger concessions.

The TSO's restructuring committee is asking for much more -- about 23 per cent of the players' current remuneration, through cuts to base salary levels and to the 46-week concert season. The committee has already cancelled some non-subscription shows and all preconcert chamber music performances, and trimmed its marketing budget.

A $1.5-million clawback from the musicians would go a long way to taming the TSO annual operating deficit, which ran to $2.26-million on a budget of $17-million. But the cure to what ails the orchestra will take more than money to fix.

This is a very divided organization. Edward Smith, the British orchestra executive who recently quit the TSO's top management job after just 10 months, has spoken freely and at length about what he calls the TSO's "culture of distrust, deception and jealousy."

The TSO is also divided from the city in which it lives, and becoming more so all the time. In 1988, the orchestra had 44,250 subscribers, more than any other orchestra in North America. Today it has 28,000. Subscriptions have become less popular everywhere in recent years, but such a precipitous drop suggests fewer people feel a strong connection with the orchestra.

The TSO has scarcely begun to react to changing demographic patterns in the city, where in the past decade 80 per cent of new immigrants came from countries with little or no tradition of European-style orchestral music. Capturing their interest is a long-term task, more likely to be served by education and outreach programs than by clever advertising.

The current crisis, however, contains the seeds of new opportunity. The players have for years complained about what they perceive as the inertia of the board and the stodginess of management. The negotiations to come are their opportunity to follow the lead of orchestras in Vancouver and Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., where the musicians take a leading role in all aspects of the organization.

If the TSO players have to give up money, they should insist on more direct involvement in the running of the organization, from financial planning to the appointment of board members.

Such a shift in power would begin to unite this fractured organization behind a single purpose, and bring the players into closer contact with the community. The way ahead would no doubt be bumpy, but the results could hardly be worse than the present mess.



Follow Ups: