San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Major-league music: We can Spur it on here




By Susan Yerkes

from the San Antonio Express News 8/28/98



Top-secret suggestion to City Council: Get the Spurs to take over the symphony.

This is the time, Mayor Peak.

You have the leverage. Negotiation on a Tax Increment Financed Spurs arena development hasn't even begun yet.

Moreover, you have fertile soil for a symphony handover.

"We plan to be in the entertainment business," Spurs veep Russ Bookbinder told the San Antonio Express-News editorial board during a recent presentation on the plans for the Longhorn quarry arena.

The Spurs already are in the entertainment biz, of course.

But the desire to diversify with more entertainment, which they would do as booking manager for a new year-round arena, is in line with what many major-league teams are doing nationwide.

Major-league sports involve major-league entertainment: big audiences, big marketing and ad campaigns - capitalism at its best.

Even folks who can't buy Spurs tickets can support the team with a gimme cap or tank top with David Robinson's No. 50 on it.

Having a major-league team is about city pride, city image, we're told.

Which is where the symphony comes in.

The symphony, as Joe Nelson said this week, is "too important to this city for it to be allowed to lose its prominence."

Oops.

That's Joe Nelson of Houston, talking about the Houston Endowment's $3.5 million gift to that city's symphony this week, announced as half of a debt-elimination bailout to keep Houston in the musical majors.

San Antonio's symphony has floundered in financial straits off and on for years.

One of the reasons, supporters say, is an onerous contract for use of the Majestic Theater - a result of city and symphony negotiators simply being outgunned by the folks on the profit-making end of the deal. (Sound familiar?)

In recent years, music director Christopher Wilkins has pulled off miracles in terms of entertainment expansion: bringing the symphony to various parts of town to perform in different venues, assembling programs to reach out to all kinds of audiences beyond the traditional, giving far more of his personal energy than required, and inspiring many of the symphony musicians, despite their union status, to join him.

Hey! The Spurs understand unions, too!

And Holt and his managers shouldn't bat an eyelash at base salaries under $30,000 a year for major-league musicians, should they?

Surely, this far out, architects could reconfigure arena plans to include some sort of symphony-friendly concert hall in the quarry setup, and maybe champagne concessions.

And if all else failed, we'd be the only major-league city in the nation with an orchestra playing halftimes.



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