San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Odd fit might prove right for symphony




By Mike Greenberg

from the Express News 5/23/99



Maybe it's a promising sign that John Binkley, the San Antonio Symphony 's new executive director, comes from a family that built to last.

Though he was born in Illinois, he has lived in San Antonio since 1987, and he has deep roots here.

In 1840, his great-great-grandfather built a house and attached store in the Irish Flat, on Eighth Street a few blocks north of the Alamo. The old building still stands. Restored a few years ago, it's occupied by a design studio.

Binkley's selection was abold move for the symphony board, a conservative group stocked by representatives of the city's big banks, businesses and foundations, along with three musicians.

The exectutive directors of most major orchestras have either been executive directors or high-ranking staffers at other orchestras.

Binkle has spent nearly all his adult life as a producer, director and writer of children's television, including highly successful dramatic series for PBS, Nickelodeon and England's ITV.

But the fit is not so odd as it may appear at first blush. As a TV producer, he has had to exercise the same broad skills that orchestra managers need - the care and feeding of artists, the understanding of the creative process, the juggling of complex operations, the management of large but tightly constrained budgets.

Doubtless the job will require some specialized knowledge Binkley doesn't have, but he strikes me as a quick study.

Anyway, several orchestras have founderedunder career-track managers. Quoth Will Rogers: It ain't what you don't know; it's what you know that ain't so.

On two occasions last week, when Binkley was asked about his long-term goals for the orchestra, he gave precisely the right answer.

Long-term goals, he said, were really the purview of the music director, Christopher Wilkins. Binkley's aim is to stabilize the organization "to give the music director the artistic freedom to take initiatives, that are appropriate for this community."

Binkley's own artistic bent, however, is hardly irrelevent to the orchestra's long-term prospects or to Wilkins' interests.

If the symphony is to thrive in the next century, it needs to find effective ways to reach children and teenagers today.

Moreover, as symphony chairman Charles Lutz has noted, the arts audience is looking for a "total experience."

In part, that means the urban environment around the concert hall and theater can affect patron satisfactionand ticket-buying.

But it also means the competitive advantage goes to the art forms that appeal to the widest range of the senses. That's why, nationally, the opera audience is growing and getting younger, while the symphony audience is stagnant.

For these reasons Binkley's experience in children's television, far from being an odd fit, may be the best fit of all for a symphony orchestra - especially one whose music director is already thinking along those same lines and actively trying to reinvent the art form.

The San Antonio Symphony enjoyed a remarkable recovery from near-death last year.

Major gifts for endowment and operations have risen, the current season is expected to end in the black, and the orchestra itself has regained most of the ground it lost in last summer's talent flight.

Big challenges lie ahead.

Too many seats go unfilled. The board needs to make serious progress on the goal of a $25 million endowment. Revenue needs will rise significantly in two years with a contracted, long-deferred and richly earned 9 percent increase in musicians' salaries.

But at no time in the past 20 years has the symphony had more reasons for justifiable optimism. Binkley appears to be one of them.



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