San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Orchestra in fight for future stability




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from the San Antonio Express News 9/13/98

By Mike Greenberg



Sandy Duncan wonders if she'll have a San Antonio Symphony gig next weekend.

The orchestra's musicians wonder if they'll be able to pay the rent next month. The audience wonders if there'll be a symphony season this year.

But for musicians, staff, contributors, board members and the audience, next week and next month pale as concerns in comparison with the next century - the long-term prospects for the orchestra, whose board of directors voted last week to put its 60th anniversary season on hold.

Nonetheless, the symphony continues to advertise and sell concert tickets, starting with a scheduled appearance by actress and singer Sandy Duncan on the orchestra's pops series next weekend.

Ticket revenues are being held in escrow, and the symphony hasn't said when a decision will be made to abort or not abort Duncan's concerts. As of Friday afternoon, no board meeting had been scheduled for this week.

Without a clear path to long-term financial stability, a short-term resuscitation may be pointless.

That, at least, is the position of the board majority and, crucially, of business and foundation leaders who've offered enough new aid to retire the orchestra's debt and rebuild its endowment, but only if it greatly reduces costs.

"The symphony has roughly a $1.8 million or $1.9 million deficit and no money in the bank," said Palmer Moe, director of the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation and a central figure in the group that's offered a rescue package - with strings attached.

"The symphony has had a history of operating deficits. Every few years somebody stepped up and paid off the debts. Our position is that we'd like to be part of a resolution of the symphony's problem, but not just a bailout as has been done in the past."

"It requires a balanced budget, living within their means. The symphony has had phenomenal annual fund performance. Subscriptions are very credible in terms of attendance. People bought $1.1 million in (advance) tickets for this season. But even with all that support, they haven't been able to balance the budget," Moe said.

As he sees it, the orchestra needs to overcome three major hurdles to reach long-term stability.

First, it has to retire its debt - including accounts payable and past-due pension fund payments. Then it needs working capital so that advance sales aren't consumed wholly by current operating costs.

Finally, the orchestra needs to rebuild its endowment. Currently, the endowment fund has slightly more than $1 million. By a commonly accepted rule of thumb, this orchestra needs an endowment of about $20 million.

But the symphony previously had liquidated its endowment to pay off a $5 million debt.

"That's a big red flag for anyone considering endowment contributions," Moe said.

The position that long-term stability must precede short-term help isn't held widely.

Some in the symphony family, including most of the musicians and some contributors, believe healthy growth in subscription sales and annual fund giving - about $2.9 million last season - show the ship is on the verge of righting itself.

With a short-term bailout, this theory goes, the long term would take care of itself.

This group's fear is that the cure may be worse than the disease - that financial stability may be bought by sacrificing the artistic strides the orchestra has taken in the '90s.

Stability is important to the musicians, too. Having been burned by unrealistically high wage offers in the past, they would trade a few dollars in lower pay for greater assurance that the wages actually would be paid on time.

But as pay declines, the number of other orchestras with more attractive pay scales rises. In years past, the symphony has, understandably, lost musicians to big-budget orchestras in Houston, Boston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Toronto.

But now, its musicians are starting to flee to midlevel orchestras such as the Utah Symphony.

The possibility of losing more of the symphony's best musicians, to say nothing of the symphony itself, is troubling especially to local university music departments, which have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the orchestra.

Part-time faculty jobs have given some musicians enough supplemental income to allow the symphony to keep them despite low salaries.

Though these faculty jobs contribute modestly to the musicians' livelihoods - $5,000 to $6,000 a year, on average - they contribute mightily to the universities' teaching missions.

The University of Texas at San Antonio has 13 symphony musicians teaching part time. Joe Stuessy, director of the division of music, said that without the San Antonio Symphony to supply a pool of first-class talent such as violinists Stephanie Sant'Ambrogio and Ertan Torgul, the university would have to scramble for teachers.

"Quite frankly, they're not going to be as good as Ertan Torgul. You'd either have to hire the generalist - that's what schools not in metropolitan areas have to do - or you're going to hire anyone in town who has a violin hanging around the house. Either way, you're going to drop (in) quality."<> That word, "quality," hasn't been heard much from those who hold the symphony's financial fate in the balance. The musicians are sensitive to the omission.

"San Antonio has a very cheap symphony, with musicians making about $28,000 a year," said Jean Robinson, a flutist and the musicians' public voice as leader of the orchestra committee.

"By a pure miracle, it happens to be an exceptional (orchestra). But we have been told, no, you're too expensive for San Antonio, and your quality won't be missed, either."

"This expresses a cynicism about San Antonio that the musicians do not share," she said.

Robinson's choice of words suggests the musicians are as dispirited by what they perceive to be a lack of respect for their talent and their art form as they are distressed by economic issues.

Indeed, although symphony Chairman Charlie Lutz has issued several public statements in recent weeks about the orchestra's financial straits and its need to cut costs, none of those statements mentioned, even in a pro-forma way, a desire to maintain the orchestra's artistic standards.

San Antonio Express-News Publisher W. Lawrence Walker Jr. is a member of the symphony board and past chairman.

It's possible the musicians, the board and the financial people all share the same ultimate goal of both fiscal stability and artistic integrity.

But words and symbolism matter. At the moment, the symphony remains adrift in the gulf between two conflicting values - between those concerned for the goose and those who prize the golden egg.



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