From the outside, Symphony Hall looks like a dour Victorian train station, its weathered brick facade the least attractive of any of the institu-tional faces looking out on the city’s Cultural Mile.
Never mind. It’s what’s inside that counts. And what’s inside is a unique orchestra, a unique audience and a unique administrative vision that has made the Boston Symphony Orchestra the business model for other symphony orchestras, at a time when just about everyone in classical music, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is chanting the same litany of declining ticket sales, rising deficits and aging audiences.
You just don’t find the same confluence of passionate reaction to music among symphony patrons at Orchestra Hall, not because there aren’t plenty of Chicago listeners who also take music seriously, but because there’s simply not the same depth of community involvement here — or, for that matter, at any other orchestra in America — that there is in Boston.
“We are blessed to be in the best city for classical music in the country, per capita, in my opinion,” Mark Volpe, the BSO’s managing director, told me during a recent intermission. I looked around at the audience — old, young and in between — that had filled most of the hall’s 2,625 seats, and believed him.
It’s one of the main reasons the Boston Symphony is riding high, supported by a nearly $270 million endowment, a committed staff and board, and a public that’s solidly behind its great orchestra as it embarks on an adventuresome artistic era under its new music director, James Levine.
Taking the BSO in national context, more than half of the country’s professional orchestras have downsized or accumulated red ink in the past five years, says Jack McAuliffe, chief operating officer of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Overexpansion in the flush ’90s, the bursting economic bubble and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are the usual suspects.
Though the Boston Symphony ranks last in amounts of city and state funding among the top 10 symphony orchestras in the nation, the fact is that the orchestra draws large audiences and a steady influx of revenue by virtue of its artistic excellence, history and prestige. With some of Boston’s top money managers on its investment committee, the BSO is sitting on the largest endowment, nearly $270 million, of any orchestra.
“The BSO is unique, and that is using the word correctly,” McAuliffe says. “In terms of budget size and endowment, the organization stands apart. And the fact that it is really three different brands under one roof has allowed it to be many things to many people, for a very long time.”
It helps, of course, that the Boston Symphony Orchestra Inc. — a multifaceted institution made up of the BSO, Boston Pops and Tanglewood, the BSO’s summer home in the Berkshires — taps into a large demographic extending from New England to New York, far broader than the CSO’s live audience base, which reaches from the city to the far western suburbs to the North Shore.
Then, too, as the higher education capital of the country, Boston enjoys a large percentage of advanced-degree professionals — people who have grown up with classical music in their lives. Volpe cites National Endowment for the Arts surveys that show that more than 24 percent of the residents of the Bay State had attended a classical music event in the previous year — 9 percent higher than the national average.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Boston Pops remains a cash cow for the institution, playing for millions of listeners at home, on recordings, on PBS’ “Evening at Pops” series and its nationally televised 4th of July concerts. The CSO has no exact equivalent, beyond the scattered pops programs it presents each summer at Ravinia.
$618,000 shortfall
And while the CSO ended its most recent fiscal year with a $2.3 million deficit, on a budget of $57.8 million, the BSO closed out the same period with a relatively modest $618,000 shortfall, on a budget of $63.2 million. It’s one of two six-figure deficits the orchestra has run in recent years and demonstrates the fragile nature of classical music finances in even the best-run organizations. (The budget difference owes largely to the fact that the BSO owns and operates its own summer festival, Tanglewood, while the CSO rents itself out to the independent Ravinia Festival.)
The CSO posted a $209,000 surplus in 2003, but only by withdrawing $10.4 million from its $164 million endowment — a bad business practice the BSO’s asset managers would wag a stern finger at.
While other orchestras have seen their endowments shrink, the Boston Symphony has watched its endowment grow. It first peaked at $249 million in 2000, slipped to $235 million in 2002 and, as of this year, stood at roughly $270 million, giving the organization a backstop of financial security that makes it the envy of its peers. No wonder the BSO can afford to pay its musicians a base salary of $108,000, the highest of any orchestra in the U.S.
Despite all this, Symphony officials realize that coasting on their financial success won’t move the orchestra forward. And there are always unforeseen economic dangers lurking in the woodwork. Which is why, like a Beacon Hill grande dame opening her salon to performance artists and hip young filmmakers, the BSO is taking a new look at its place in the shifting tectonics of America’s cultural life. And seeing how it can do even better.
The Levine factor
Three days of hearing BSO concerts, talking to staff, musicians and board members, and nosing about Symphony Hall, made one thing clear to me: The Boston Symphony is banking on Levine to reinvigorate the institution artistically while positioning it as a business model for symphony orchestras in the economically uncertain decades ahead.
The BSO’s first American-born music director came to Boston having spent 22 years amassing the bulk of his orchestral repertory with the Chicago Symphony under the rigorous rehearsal conditions of Ravinia. So, in a sense, the experienced symphonic conductor who travels in a limousine bearing the license plate “BSO 1” was tempered in the kiln of “Chicago’s Tanglewood.”
When the portly, mop-haired maestro, 61, arrived in Boston last fall to begin the first season of his five-year contract, he found an orchestra dulled by routine, restless for change and ripe for new challenges. Twenty-nine years of Seiji Ozawa’s music directorship had taken some of the sheen off the BSO’s fabled sound. The dowagers of Beacon Hill still were attending concerts, but many Harvard intellectuals had long since fled, and there weren’t many young bodies filling the seats they had left behind.
Levine’s mandate is to help change all that. With his seemingly limitless enthusiasm and energy, and his ability to instill his own insatiable appetite for work in the musicians around him, the music director already has infused the institution with his artistic vision.
Although some lily-eared concertgoers are staying away because of his programming such cerebral modernists as Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, even the renegades concede the city is lucky to have him. Indeed, as long as Levine can keep giving them 11 or 12 weeks a season, they don’t mind sharing him with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, his operatic conducting base for the last 30 years, where he continues as music director.
In one corner of the food-service area during the intermissions at the BSO concerts I attended this spring, I overheard a couple of sweatshirt-clad New England Conservatory music students talking about how they had just been blown away by Levine’s bracing performance of Edgard Varese’s explosive “Arcana.”
Nearby, two elderly Brahmins were shaking their heads over the thorny new work Levine had just introduced, Charles Wuorinen’s Piano Concerto No. 4, which the soloist, Peter Serkin, had attacked with brainy ferocity. “I’m not sure it was altogether to my taste,” the one woman sniffed. “But,” she quickly added, “I wasn’t bored.”
Across from the Symphony Hall stage door on St. Stephen Street, a glossy ad in a large display case proclaimed: “You and us and the BSO. The power of harmony.” The two-year buildup of anticipation preceding Levine’s arrival last fall guaranteed brisk business for his concerts. Attendance was spurred by posters UBS, the global financial firm that is the orchestra’s prime corporate sponsor, put on seemingly every lamppost in town.
Levine’s open rehearsals have attracted up to 1,800 listeners. Such a thing would never happen in Chicago, because antediluvian musicians’ union regulations here keep virtually all CSO rehearsals closed to the public.
In tune with its hall
The characteristic sound qualities of an orchestra are shaped by its auditorium, and Symphony Hall, which was built in 1900 and seats 2,625, is acoustically superior to any concert room this side of the Vienna Musikverein or the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Its warm, evenly spread resonance has nurtured the transparency, silken blend and exacting balance that have made the Boston Symphony renowned for more than a century.
The auditorium’s gilded horseshoe-shaped tiers, cream-colored walls and red-velvet-edged balcony railings remain virtually unchanged from the Opulent Era of founder Henry Higginson. The orchestra men still wear tails, while the women perform in black gowns (OK, some wear pantsuits). One obvious concession to modern technology is a cautionary message about turning off cell phones and beepers that’s projected onto the stage walls before every concert.
When New York’s Carnegie Hall went up in 1891, boxes were included so Mrs. Astor could see what Mrs. Vanderbilt was wearing. There are no boxes in Symphony Hall. “Maybe that comes from our Puritan heritage,” Volpe observes, with a grin. “This hall is about the music.”
The BSO has never sounded like any other orchestra. These days, under Levine, it sounds more like the feisty bunch of symphonic virtuosos that then-music director Serge Koussevitzky propelled to glory during the ’30s and ’40s. How many other orchestras could have mastered the varied complexities of John Harbison, Charles Wuorinen and Igor Stravinsky — on the same program? A lesser orchestra might have capitulated to the difficulties. The BSO appeared to thrive on them. You heard 106 musicians breathing and listening and reacting as one.
Levine may push his musicians to the limit, but their willingness to be pushed is based on their belief he’s the best hope of snatching the brass ring for the Boston Symphony.
Before one of Levine’s concerts, I caught up with James Summerville, the orchestra’s principal horn since 1988. Nearly 6 feet tall, with expressive, intent eyes and graying, curly hair, he rides a motorcycle to and from Symphony Hall. When asked how the orchestra had handled the interregnum between Ozawa’s departure and Levine’s arrival, he said it had primed the players for something momentous. More, Levine has lived up to expectations.
“A large number of orchestra members, myself included, find it really exciting to play for Mr. Levine,” Summerville said. “He works a great deal in rehearsal explaining his motives and ideas, talking things through, so we can arrive at a consensus.
“The issue is not that we are doing a lot of new music under him; the BSO has always done that. It’s the intensity of the approach to the new pieces we do, also the seriousness with which we address the great music of the 20th Century that’s not quite core repertory yet. He wants us to play Schoenberg’s `Gurre-Lieder’ with the same familiarity we play the Dvorak Eighth Symphony.”
The state of Levine’s health may be the subject of media speculation in some quarters, but it’s a non-issue in Boston.
The New York Times recently quoted anonymous players from the Met Orchestra who questioned whether a recurrent tremor in Levine’s left arm affected his ability to give a clear beat. But I detected no such physical problem in the Levine performances I heard, and Summerville told me the conductor’s doing fine. “I’ve never seen him more at ease physically than he was with us this past season,” he said.
Tremor `under control’
In a brief phone conversation (the chronically busy Levine declined a longer one), the conductor said the tremor is “under control,” but to avoid straining himself unduly during performances, he conducts everything from a seated position. “After you’ve done 2,000 performances and all the attendant rehearsals, as I’ve done, your body just tells you, you’ve got to slow down a little bit.”
That doesn’t seem likely to happen, at least in the near future. Next season, Levine is due to conduct a dozen subscription programs. He is launching a two-year examination of the music of two great musical revolutionaries, Beethoven and Schoenberg, exploring the parallels between the composers and how they challenged tradition while working within traditional forms. (Daniel Barenboim attempted much the same thing here last season with the CSO.)
Whether Levine can carry the audience along with him over the long haul remains an open question, according to Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe’s longtime music critic. Nevertheless, he is bullish in his assessment of Levine’s first season and says he’s optimistic about what lies ahead.
“The programming hasn’t pleased some of the older and more conservative subscribers, [but] at the same time it is attracting an audience that either hasn’t been there in years, like the professional and student-music communities, and a younger crowd I haven’t seen there before,” Dyer says.
“I also think the modernist programming has been exaggerated way out of proportion. There is not significantly more of it than there was under Ozawa; it’s just better organized. It was a kind of potpourri before, albeit with a couple of consistent threads, like Messiaen and Takemitsu.
What Levine has brought in is an interest in different composers that were not the people Ozawa was interested in pursuing. They may not be to everybody’s taste, but what matters is they are to his taste.”
Levine is scheduled to bring the Boston Symphony to Chicago’s Symphony Center in March 2006 as part of his first tour as BSO music director.
On a bright spring afternoon, I sat down to talk with Volpe over lunch in his cluttered office at Symphony Hall. To the side are a bronze bust of Higginson and a model of a proposed building expansion. The walls are lined with bound programs and autographed portraits of present and past music directors.
A brisk, genial executive who talks in staccato bursts, Volpe (who’s no relation to Joseph Volpe, Levine’s boss at the Met) is a former orchestral musician who came to Boston following managerial stints in Minneapolis, Baltimore and Detroit. He apologizes for the disarray, confessing that his office is sometimes used as a makeshift dressing room because the hall has only two backstage dressing rooms — hence the expansion plans.
Knowing that Volpe and his former music director (and fellow Red Sox fan) Seiji Ozawa were close friends as well as colleagues (Volpe’s wife once served as Ozawa’s assistant), I asked him how his working relationship with Levine differs.
“It was always hard to get Seiji to commit to programs,” Volpe says. “He needed the pressure of knowing the deadline for the season brochure was six minutes away. Jimmy has programs for us through 2027. He is so organized and methodical in his preparation, not just in rehearsal but in how he conceives programs. Every time you sit down with him to talk about personnel or a development department dinner, he’ll bring out his notebook and there will be eight more programs. What he’s trying to do is go back to an era where every program was an event.”
Rains at Tanglewood
The orchestra has an 85 percent to 86 percent subscription renewal rate, he said, but new acquisitions are harder to find, just as they are practically everywhere else in the post-Sept. 11 era. Even though the BSO reached nearly $43 million in ticket sales and fees last year, it still ran a $618,000 deficit, mainly as the result of last summer’s drenching rains at Tanglewood — “the worst in 30 years,” Volpe says — which drove away scores of outdoor patrons for six of the orchestra’s seven weekends in residence. The shortfall — the orchestra’s second six-figure deficit in two years — just goes to prove that even when you’re the business model for American orchestras, Mother Nature still can douse your bottom line.
The musician lurking deep down in Volpe says he’s happy to give Levine a reasonably free hand in artistic matters if that’s what it takes to help revitalize the institution. The CEO in Volpe worries about the reaction of old-guard subscribers to the music director’s prickly contemporary music programming. “There has been some pushback,” Volpe admits. “This year we have seen our subscription base go down 3 or 4 percent. But single ticket sales are up, running 45 to 47 percent [of capacity].
“I don’t know if the erosion is just Jim’s programming as much as people’s changing lifestyles. There has been a de-emphasis on high-end culture and a tremendous growth of competitive media. When I was growing up in Minneapolis, you had the Minneapolis Symphony and the Art Institute and that was it. There were no professional sports teams. Today you have four pro teams, the Minnesota Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Walker Art Center, theaters, opera and all the new electronic media. Demographics have changed. The country is less Eurocentric than it was.”
And much of the symphonic repertory, he adds, is mired in 18th and 19th Century European music.
Of greater concern, to Volpe and every other classical presenter in the nation, is the pitiful state of music education in America’s public schools, which have succeeded in breeding several generations of musically illiterate citizens with no connection to classical music whatsoever.
At least the Boston Symphony isn’t standing around wringing its collective hands over the situation. Because of the orchestra’s $7 million investment in music education in the public schools of Boston, “by default we have become their music curriculum,” Volpe says. Without citing specific plans, he speaks of making the orchestra more “relevant,” of “cutting through the noise” of America’s all-pervasive pop culture, of broadening the orchestra’s demographic base through more extensive community outreach and educational programs. There’s a lot on his plate, he admits.
I asked Volpe if he looks forward to the day when Bostonians bestow the same loyalty and affection on the BSO they now reserve for the Red Sox and New England Patriots. He pointed out that the orchestra has been forging close links with local professional sports teams for decades. Ozawa was a dedicated Red Sox and Patriots fan. (Levine admittedly would more likely be found browsing the stacks in the Harvard music library than cheering the home team from the bleachers of Fenway Park.)
In fact, Volpe misses no opportunity to bring the BSO Inc. to the masses. In February 2002, the Boston Pops under Keith Lockhart, its youthful and charismatic music director, made history by becoming the first orchestra to be featured entertainment at a Super Bowl game, performing a prerecorded selection of patriotic favorites (including the National Anthem, sung by Mariah Carey) during the Super Bowl XXXVI pregame show in New Orleans.
In 1998, Lockhart’s predecessor at the Pops, Hollywood film composer and conductor John Williams, took the Boston Symphony into the studio to record the soundtrack to Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.” Five years later, when director Clint Eastwood was in town filming “Mystic River,” he went to Volpe to see if the BSO was available to record his own score to the movie. Volpe immediately enlisted Boston Pops arranger Patrick Hollenbeck to prepare the orchestrations.
Facing a dilemma
Clearly the challenge facing the institution involves finding a workable balance between two seemingly contradictory impulses.
On one hand, management is reaching out to a younger and non-traditional public, selling the BSO-Pops-Tanglewood brand as the promise of a bold new future for symphonic music. On the other hand, the orchestra cannot break faith with the old-money loyalists who have subscribed to the BSO concerts for generations, still write big checks and don’t want to have the status quo unduly disturbed.
“Our focus now is to take this orchestra to a higher level,” Volpe says.
Even with a nearly $270 million endowment, Volpe and BSO board Chairman Peter Brooke believe the orchestra is undercapitalized, certainly by comparison with Harvard’s $22 billion endowment. That’s why Volpe spends much of his time going around the country stumping for funds, talking up the institution to foundation and corporate heads, members of Congress and just about anyone willing to listen and to help underwrite the Boston Symphony Orchestra Inc.
Brooke sums up their central objective when he says the orchestra wants to be the Harvard of the performing arts — a Boston cultural institution of international importance with a billion-dollar endowment.
“We have the opportunity of becoming not just one of the best orchestras in the world, but the best,” he says. “That’s what we, as a group of trustees, are trying to achieve. And hopefully we will succeed.”
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