San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

A silver lining and two clouds for the symphony




By Mike Greenberg

from the San Antonio Express News 6/7/98



The San Antonio Symphony has somehow made it to the end of its 59th season without going into bankruptcy.

After months of late payrolls, the symphony's musicians and staff have finally been brought up to date, and the financial picture looks a little brighter.

Recent weeks have brought heartening grass-roots support - a gift from the Judson High School Band, an apparently successful appeal by lawyer Thad Harkins to his local colleagues. Good prospects for some very large corporate and foundation gifts wait in the wings.

There's a good chance that next season will prove less, um, exciting than the one just ended.

That said, here are a couple more thoughts about the symphony's financial situation:

Although San Antonio is one of the nation's smallest cities to sustain a major symphony orchestra, this is also one of the nation's largest cities without a professional ballet, opera and theater companies competing with the orchestra for donations and ticket-buyers.

Paradoxically, however, the symphony is probably hurt more than helped by the absence of other major performing organizations. In other mid-sized cities, the local orchestra gains a sizable revenue stream and, typically, four to six weeks of work by performing for local opera and ballet productions.

Opera and ballet companies divert some money from orchestras, but some of that money goes back to symphony coffers anyway. Those companies also get money from people who aren't interested in orchestral music.

Moreover, the presence of several major performing groups raises the general level of awareness of and interest in the arts. There are more ads and reviews in the newspaper; there's more word of mouth, more of a sense that the arts are worthy of notice and money. And there may be more political clout for the arts.

I suspect the absence of local ballet and opera companies may cost the symphony half a million dollars a year.

There is no doubt about the half-million that goes to performance fees and preservation surcharges for the use of the city-owned Majestic Theater.

When a blue-ribbon panel commissioned by the city studied the symphony's finances several years ago, it urged the city to provide the symphony a cost-free venue. The city never did.

As it happens, I don't fully endorse the notion of a cost-free venue. Some portion of what the symphony pays represents personnel and maintenance costs that legitimately should be borne by the theater's users.

But the annual bill is high by national standards, inviting the view that it's a thinly veiled subsidy for the commercial Broadway show series of Arts Center Enterprises, the for-profit operator of the Majestic.

Some symphony supporters wonder if there might be something to be gained by enticing ACE to vacate the Majestic in favor of the cty-owned Alameda Theater, currently under renovation.

Preliminary plans for the Alameda's new stagehouse showed a stage only 40 feet deep; the Majestic has a barely adequate 42 feet. But there's room to give the Alameda a 50-foot stage, the current standard. Loading and wing space would also be better for ACE's purposes at the Alameda.

But could ACE coexist on mutually advantageous terms with Centro Alameda, the non-profit that has been designated to operate that theater?

And would the symphony really get a better deal at the Majestic with ACE out of the picture?

I'd give you definitive answers to those questions, but, darn it, I'm out of space.



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