San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Shuttle diplomacy forged end to symphony crisis




By Mike Greenberg

from the San Antonio Express News 10/4/98



Bougainvillea twined in bright sunlight, then in shade and finally in darkness on a terrace outside the plush conference room.

Inside, seven San Antonio Symphony musicians and their lawyer sank into ankle-deep carpeting, glanced at the law books lining the walls and digested a big deli lunch as they waited for an answer.

Their counterparts from the management side also waited and pondered in a similar conference room on another side of the terrace.

Just before 9 p.m. Tuesday the answer came. Yes.

The musicians and the Symphony Society of San Antonio, mired for two months in slow maneuvers to renegotiate a contract that would allow the music to resume, had arrived at an agreement that gave each side what it desired most.

The symphony got a balanced budget that enables it to collect on $5 million in new pledges over the next five years and get back in business.

The musicians got a deal they believe will preserve the orchestra's quality and reputation.

Financially, the deal frontloads the pain and backloads the gain for the musicians.

• They accepted a four-week cut in the current season to 35 weeks - the loss of three weeks was already an accomplished fact - and a pay freeze at last season's $732 weekly base minimum for this season and next.
• The third season will bring the musicians a raise to $800 a week for 39 weeks.
• The size of the orchestra remains unchanged at 77 positions, a point that was crucial to the musicians. A cut in numbers, they believed, would damage the orchestra's quality.

The deal still comes to a $400,000 concession from the musicians - the amount the symphony had wanted - but the difference is in the how, not the how much.

Mediation, which was required by the musicians' existing contract when collective bargaining didn't produce an agreement after 30 days, helped clarify the how.

The previous week, the musicians and management had agreed on their choice of mediators - Fred Zenone, a cellist for the National Symphony in Washington, was the musicians' choice. Management picked Nick Webster, a former executive director of the New York Philharmonic.

"I really think that they were essential to the resolution of this, because of their credibility to both sides," said flutist Jean Robinson, chairwoman of the musicians' negotiating team.

"You can't beat a former executive director of the New York Philharmonic. He had the business credentials to give him credibility with businessmen. And Zenone is a legend in the orchestra world for his experience and wisdom and ability to resolve conflicts."

"They put aside their schedules and just came down here."

The two arrived in San Antonio last Sunday. On Monday, set up in an office at NationsBank downtown, the two held a round of private information-gathering meetings with the musicians, management and "stakeholders" - the business and foundation leaders who had offered the $5 million rescue package.

Chief among the stakeholders were banker Tom Frost, who led the corporate drive, and Palmer Moe, director of the Albert and Bessie Mae Kronkosky Foundation, which had offered a $2.5 million challenge grant to restock the symphony's endowment. The foundation also paid the mediators' expenses and fees.

How did the mediators break the deadlock? Robinson's answer is disarmingly simple.

"They cut through the rhetoric and asked us what it would take to make a deal, and we told them," Robinson said, although she undoubtedly telescoped some details. The Monday meeting lasted from noon until 5 p.m., she said.

At noon Tuesday, musicians and management occupied their separate conference rooms in the law offices of Wells Pinckney & McHugh, on the eighth floor of One Alamo Center downtown. The mediators played shuttle diplomacy.

David Schillhammer, the symphony's executive director, declined to comment on details of the mediation from the management team's point of view.

He agreed with Robinson's estimation of the mediators, however.

"They were excellent," Schillhammer said. "They had instant credibility and respect because of their positions or former positions in the industry."

Of the mediation itself, he would say only: "The day went as mediation often does, with both sides contemplating their positions."

For the musicians, it was crucial that the season's length and the size of the orchestra not be reduced.

Robinson said management had offered higher weekly pay, but for fewer weeks and for fewer musicians. That offer was turned down.

"We have definitely sacrificed financially to retain all 77 members of our orchestra," Robinson said.

"At $28,000 a year, you gotta know there is something else in it for us (besides money), and that is the satisfaction in our excellence. It was everything to us to be able to maintain an exceptional level of performance. And I didn't want to support a contract in which the contract itself would stand in the way of our quality."

As it is, it will take several months to fill slots vacated since last season by musicians who won auditions with other orchestras or just left town.

The strings saw the most defections. In Friday's opening concert, the violins sounded notably less silken and polished than they had last season.

One publicly stated demand of the musicians was not reflected in the written agreement. They had asked for a shakeup of "top management" - a term that clearly applies to Schillhammer.

A source close to the negotiations has said the two sides have an unwritten understanding that Schillhammer will not long remain with the orchestra, though symphony Chairman Charles Lutz has consistently voiced praise for him.

Asked directly about his future with the orchestra, Schillhammer said only, "I love the San Antonio Symphony and want to do everything I can in support" of it.

And if the musicians had to make a short-term sacrifice, they received some compensation in the warm ovation with which the audience greeted them Friday.

Quoting one of her colleagues, Robinson said: "Applause is food for the soul of a musician."



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