Popping onto the American stage
Although it did not acquire its name until a half-century later, what we know today as the Boston Pops Orchestra began in 1885 as a copy of a German beer hall orchestra. But, as critic Richard Dyer observed, “within its first century it [became] one of the things that define our American experience.”
In 1929 management hired Arthur Fiedler, a 36-year-old violist in the BSO, to take over the direction of its popular concerts. The crusty Bostonian led the Boston Pops for the next 50 years. By the time of his death in 1979, he had built the organization (made up of BSO members and freelancers) into a national institution, a global musical ambassador and the most recorded orchestra in the world. Fiedler was succeeded in 1980 by John Williams, who in turn was followed by Keith Lockhart in 1995.
The Emmy-winning “Evening at Pops” series begins its 36th season on public television July 3. But there will be no new shows, only repeats and a “Best Of” compilation program. Management has tried to counteract a 1 percent drop in at-tendance at the live concerts by bringing in new chairs and tables and outfitting the Symphony Hall stage with a hipper, contemporary look.
Next month the Boston Pops will release its second self-produced and distributed recording, a CD of patriotic favorites titled “America.”
On July 4, 1929, Fiedler launched the classical Esplanade Concerts held on the east bank of the Charles River. Last year, without formal announcement, the BSO abandoned this free annual series, which employs freelance musicians, not salaried BSO players. Money was the prime reason: Each Esplanade concert cost about $100,000 to produce.
The only Esplanade concerts with which the organization is presently associated are the annual 4th of July extravaganzas, with fireworks. Last year’s CBS telecast reached 6.9 million U.S. viewers, giving the parent institution unparalleled national visibility and recognition.
How BSO succeeds financially
The Boston Symphony was one of the first performing arts organizations in the nation to recognize that traditional subscription audiences were on the decline and to offer flexible subscription packages to attract new concert goers. That’s how the BSO remains a leader in audience development, according to Martha Jones, executive director of Boston’s Bank of America Celebrity Series, a performing arts presenter not attached to the BSO.
“They’ve hired a very smart director of sales and marketing, Kim Noltemy, and they’ve invested in a new ticketing system that interfaces with Internet ticketing,” says Jones. “This is the the kind of thing that is assisting the organization in reaching a broader demographic.”
As for financing the orchestra, the BSO’s endowment portfolio is outperforming others in its field, according to William Poorvu, the longtime chairman of the BSO’s investment committee. When the stock market had almost reached its technology-driven peak, the BSO cut back its tech investments — a wise decision, he says today.
“Since then we’ve had more alternative investments, less reliance on the U.S. equity market and more on some of the asset-return international equities,” Poorvu says.
BSO board chairman Peter Brooke takes a hard line when it comes to deficit management.
“We had modest losses over the last two years, and I don’t want to see those continue,” he says. They’re manageable and completely understandable, given our budget. But the fact is we cannot tolerate even moderate losses indefinitely. So my objective is to increase endowment to pay for some of the new things we are doing now, the James Levine initiatives.
“Then we have to make sure we are running the place efficiently. We are making structural changes that will allow us to become more efficient and to reduce expenses. This has to be an ongoing priority.”
“Most not-for-profits are in a continuous fund-raising mode, and you like to see your endowment increase,” Poorvu adds. “When you hire a Levine, he doesn’t come without people expecting him to do some new and exciting things. That requires additional artistic costs, so you need to continue to grow your endowment.”
Tanglewood a summer academy, as well as international music festival
The Boston Symphony owns and operates its own international music festival and education center, the famed Tanglewood Festival and Tanglewood Music Center (Berkshire Music Center until 1985), located on an estate in the Berkshire Mountains in Lenox in western Massachusetts.
The BSO played its first Berkshire Festival concerts in 1936, moving the following year to Tanglewood, where the 5,000-seat Music Shed was inaugurated in 1938. All BSO music directors also have been directors of the festival. In 1994 the BSO opened the new Seiji Ozawa Hall on an adjacent estate acquired eight years earlier.
The eight-week season includes concerts by the Boston Pops, chamber music, jazz and folk music and, since 1964, a Festival of Contemporary Music. Partly for practical reasons, there is a fair amount of repertory duplication from the winter to summer seasons. Many of the same name-brand soloists and conductors who appear at Tanglewood also appear at Ravinia.
Managing director Mark Volpe estimates that more than 60 percent of the Tanglewood audience of about 350,000 comes from outside New England, primarily New Yorkers.
The music center is a summer academy where young musicians — singers, instrumentalists, conductors and composers — continue their training under leading musicians and teachers; its star baton alumni include Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Seiji Ozawa and many other artists. Ravinia’s Steans Institute for Young Artists has similar objectives but limits its enrollment to string and wind players and singers and operates on a much smaller scale.
Every year the BSO invests $3 million to $4 million in the future of classical music through its Tanglewood fellowship program in which 155 “fellows” from some 25 countries are given fellowships to study with the likes of Levine, Kurt Masur and Christoph von Dohnanyi. Half of the BSO players are made up of alumni of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra.
New conductor’s pace is a pain for some players
Has James Levine been overworking his Boston Symphony musicians?
The BSO’s new music director has called more rehearsals than previous conductors, meaning anywhere from five to seven per week, depending on the program. Last season the BSO rehearsed 104 times; this season, it was 118, say orchestra sources. For a difficult new work such as Elliott Carter’s “Symphonia,” which Levine conducted there in October, he began rehearsing the previous season when he was still a guest conductor.
These extra rehearsals have caused some players to complain of increased physical stress levels. They even have formed a liaison committee to ask the music director to ease up the rehearsal schedule and shorten programs that have aggravated old injuries.
Most musician complaints have come from violinists, who probably play more notes per concert than any other players.
Violinist Sheila Fiekowsky, a 30-year orchestra member, said she finds Levine “a wonderful musician” and welcomes what he has done for the orchestra thus far. But the demands he has made on the BSO musicians this season have been “kind of a shock” to the members, she said.
Dr. Alice Brandfonbrener, founder of the Medical Program for Performing Artists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, believes the problem stems, in part, from a new music director trying to do too much too soon, and orchestra musicians underestimating just how much they had to push themselves. She says both parties are in for a period of adjustment.
“It’s really a question of learning to work with each other in the intensive way these people work,” she says. “Levine is a very exacting guy, a workaholic. [Chicago Symphony Orchestra conductor] Daniel Barenboim drives himself almost to the same extent.
“[The BSO players] have to ease into their relationship with him and not be asked to kill themselves every time they pick up their instruments.”
Managing director Mark Volpe said he isn’t surprised to hear internal complaints about Levine’s working regimen.
Management, he said, has hired a consultant to speak to the musicians about avoiding injury. Janet Horvath, a cellist with the Minnesota Orchestra and author of “Playing (Less) Hurt,” will conduct a session at Tanglewood this summer.
Levine, heeding the complaints, cut a 16-minute Bach work from one of his March programs and dropped a pair of Brahms overtures he had planned to conduct this summer.
Boston orchestras make it on air
Not only do the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops orchestras enjoy a rich recorded legacy, these institutions still command a degree of electronic media exposure that is unmatched by any other major orchestra in the U.S. Consider:
An estimated 40 million people tune in the BSO and Pops on weekly radio broadcasts on stations WGBH, WAMC, WCRB and WQXR (New York) and through special programs on the NPR program “SymphonyCast.” Seven million viewed the CBS national telecast of the July 4, 2004, Pops concert on the Esplanade, while 20 million weekly watched the 35th season of “Evening at Pops” on PBS.
By comparison, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra continues to be without a radio outlet. The CSO’s 52-week concert series produced and syndicated by WFMT-FM 98.7 ended in fall 2001 when sponsors could not be found to pick up the $1 million tab.
BSO audiences once known for ‘thumping of canes and umbrellas’
The Boston Symphony Orchestra began as a dream in the mind of Henry Lee Higginson, a financier, Civil War veteran and passionate arm-chair music lover. Resolved to create “a fulltime and permanent” orchestra that would “show the culture of the community,” he created in 1881 an ensemble soon regarded as without peer in America and comparable to Europe’s finest.
Higginson paid all salaries and deficits himself, giving artistic control to his conductors. Even as he made the BSO a Brahmin cultural stronghold, he reserved rush seats for non-subscribers and began “popular concerts” — the future Boston Pops.
Boston Symphony audiences, wrote Joseph Horowitz in his invaluable “Classical Music in America” (Norton), “grew more demonstrative during the Nikisch years, prone to shouting, to the thumping of canes and umbrellas, to ‘wild’ applause. They embodied a distinct community of culture, New England bred, at once brittle and fervent.” As early as 1890, Otto Florsheim, a writer in the “Musical Courier,” used Boston as a mighty cudgel against New York. “It is in the quality of the [Boston] audiences, their unflagging interest in everything musical and their true and unaffected enthusiasm that the latter city shows its musical superiority,” he wrote.
Post-World-War I Germanophobia ensured that the BSO would not have another German-born music director until Erich Leinsdorf in 1962. Music directors Henri Rabaud and Pierre Monteux conducted during a transitional era that ushered in the rich reign of Serge Koussevitzky from 1924 to 1949. The glamorous Russian championed the music of many Americans, including Copland, Barber, Hanson, Harris, Piston and Schuman, opened the Berkshire Music Cen-ter (renamed Tanglewood Music Center in 1985), began what became today’s Tanglewood Music Festival and took a young Leonard Bernstein as his conducting protege.
Koussevitzky’s successor, Charles Munch (perhaps the most warmly regarded of all the BSO’s music directors), continued the orchestra’s long French musical tradition; Leinsdorf, who followed Munch, broadened that tradition in several directions. The brief tenure of William Steinberg ended with the appointment of former Ravinia music director Seiji Ozawa, who served the longest tenure of any BSO music director, from 1973 until 2002.
Although Ozawa’s nearly three decades in Boston were not without controversy, he hired more than 75 players out of the BSO’s 106 members and worked to mold a more versatile instrument. The devotion Ozawa generated among board and staff “led to the most spectacular period of institutional development since the orchestra’s early history,” according to critic Richard Dyer.
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BSO and CSO comparison
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Founded: 1881
Residence: Symphony Hall, opened 1900, seats 2,625.
Music directors: George Henschel, Wilhelm Gericke, Arthur Nikisch, Emil Paur, Carl Muck, Max Fiedler, Henri Rabaud, Pierre Monteux, Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf, William Steinberg, Seiji Ozawa, James Levine.
Summer festivals: Tanglewood Music Center, founded in 1940.
Other institutions and services: Boston Pops Orchestra, begun in 1885; education and community engagement activities.
Operating budget: $63.2 million as of fiscal ’04, currently $72 million ($64.1 million in ’03).
Deficit: $618,000. It was only the second time in the previous eight years the orchestra suffered a loss.
Operating revenues: $39.6 million ($42.1 million in ’03).
Attendance: 805,823 tickets sold to 274 BSO-produced concerts.*
Endowment investments: $270 million ($246 million in ’03).
Operating contributions: $23 million ($22 million in ’03).
Total assets: $370 million ($344 million in ’03).
Number of musicians: 106
Musicians’ contract: Four years, signed August 2002, expires August 2006. Base salary: $108,000, rising to $112,840 in 2006. Pension benefit: $60,000.
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Founded: 1891
Residence: Orchestra Hall, opened 1904, seats 2,522.
Music directors: Theodore Thomas, Frederick Stock, Desire Defauw, Artur Rodzinski, Rafael Kubelik, Fritz Reiner, Jean Martinon, Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim.
Summer festivals: Ravinia Festival, founded in 1936.
Other institutions and services: Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the CSO’s training orchestra, founded by Stock in 1919; Symphony Center Presents; education and community engagement activities.
Operating budget: $57.8 million in fiscal ’04 ($57.1 million in ’03).
Deficit: $2.3 million ($209,000 surplus in ’03).
Operating revenues: $19.6 million ($19.8 million in ’03).
Attendance: 240,373 tickets sold to 112 CSO subscription concerts.
Endowment investments: $181 million ($164 million in ’03).
Operating contributions: $16.7 million ($17.8 million in ’03).
Total assets: $420 million ($414 million in ’03).
Number of musicians: 111, going down to 106 by attrition in the course of the current labor agreement.
Musicians’ contract: Three years, beginning Nov. 7, 2004, and expiring September 2007. Base salary $104,000, rising to $114,400 six months before the contract expires. Pension benefit: $63,000.
Sources: BSO, CSO
* Includes Boston Pops and Tanglewood
Chicago Tribune
