I am in Raleigh, North Carolina, unexpectedly invited here by my old friend Grant Llewellyn, who is in his first season as music director of the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra and enjoying both the challenge and the celebrity status it gives him in the university- and technology-rich region known as The Triangle. Llewellyn has been treating his audiences to a mini-festival of contemporary American and British music. I am about to hear what turns out to be a fine concert in the orchestra’s handsome new Meymandi Hall of works by George Benjamin, Robin Holloway, Nicholas Maw and James MacMillan.
According to your point of view, the United States of America might be God’s own country, land of opportunity, freedom and righteousness. Or it might just be the most arrogant, power-intoxicated nation state of our times, dangerously ruled by a man whom one of its own citizens has rather appealingly described to me as a ‘trumped-up fratboy’. What it isn’t, surely, is a place where artistic idealism is eagerly supported and thus easily flourishes. The market rules in the arts as in all things.
Yet here I am, in an American city where such idealism seems to be the order of the day. It’s true that the North Carolina Symphony has always enjoyed certain advantages over its fellow American orchestras. It’s in the unique position of having almost a quarter of its budget paid for by the state (most orchestras get no more than 5 per cent, if that), thanks to a law passed in the 1940s and referred to locally as the ‘Horn Tootin’ Bill’. In return it gives its concerts all over the state, actively engaging with local communities. Even so, its previous music director, Gerhardt Zimmermann, was careful not to rock any boats, offering only a staid repertoire in, I’m reliably informed, pretty staid performances of mainly Austro–German classics. Had Zimmermann and his management team cast a wary eye in the direction of those who control the other 75 per cent of the purse strings? And if so what is it that has emboldened the current team?
The man to ask about the power of corporate and individual donors over what American orchestras do and do not play also happens to be in Raleigh during my visit. Henry Fogel was for many years chief executive officer of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Now he’s president and CEO of the American Symphony Orchestra League. I put it to him in the NCSO’s impossibly plush offices that corporate support always comes at a price, whether in Chicago or Chattanooga. ‘My opinion is that our system limits orchestras less than the European system, where government agencies sometimes have total control. If you have only one donor that’s bad, because they can kill you if they just decide to one day. And really there aren’t many examples of American orchestras which have significantly changed what they did because of the wealth and power of their donors.
‘I’ve seen only a couple of attempts by a donor to have an impact on programming, and they were rebuffed. In one case there was a donor in New York who offered the Philharmonic a considerable gift if a not very good conductor was given a subscription week. The Philharmonic management said thank you, but no thank you. And in Chicago I had a corporate donor, the wife of a corporate CEO, tell me that we couldn’t take any 20th-century music on a tour. And we said we are going to programme what we are programming and we hope it won’t affect the sponsorship. And it did not. And don’t forget that you have some donors…who have a real passion for new music.’
Nevertheless, although many orchestras are now making a point of bringing in the new, much of the sort of new they are bringing in is designed to give only shallow pleasure. Names like John Williams and Michael Torke tend to haunt the American Symphony Orchestra League’s lists of orchestras given prizes for innovation. And even in Raleigh, to be brutally honest about it, the programme hardly represents British music’s sharpest cutting edge, though in technical terms it represents a new, tough challenge for the players. They seem invigorated by that fact.
One would understand such caution were the economics of the American orchestral scene fragile. But Fogel swiftly disabuses me of that notion, and he’s not merely toeing the party line in doing so, it seems. I’m astonished to learn from him that America actually supports around 400 professional orchestras. Four hundred. Even in this vast country that seems a lot. They’re fed by a vast pool of talent. Each year 3,000 players of high professional standards emerge from universities, music schools and conservatoires, jostling to fill just 150 orchestral vacancies nationwide. (Which raises the inevitable question of what the unsuccessful 2,850 end up doing.) Some — like the seven symphony orchestras of Montana — work with tiny budgets, in those cases between $250,000 and $500,000 per annum each.
‘They survive because they adapt themselves to their local communities,’ says Fogel. ‘Each of them has figured out the demands of the marketplace where they live. In all cases there’s a real will to try to stretch that market and make it as good and as big as it can be.’ Although, he acknowledges, some find themselves going too far and having to step back to avoid alienating their audiences. Idealism has its limits when seats and coffers have to be filled.
‘On the whole I think the American scene is healthier than many people believe. There was a lot of publicity surrounding the deficits a few years ago. When the economy tanked, it tanked very quickly, and it happened after an upswing. With the biggest orchestras there was a difficult period in turning themselves around, with diminishing pension funds and endowment values. But actually that’s one of the things the small orchestras could do more easily. Without a system of guarantees to players, you could readily change a programme from Mahler’s Third Symphony to a much cheaper Mozart evening, for instance. What we saw was a period from 2002 to 2003 with big deficits. There are still one or two which are struggling, but they all have plans and they have enough reserves so that they are not in any danger of going out of business.
‘But what’s happening here in North Carolina is a stunning example of the success of an exciting conductor with an adventurous mind for programming. The concert we are to hear tonight has sold out. It’s the end of a four-week festival of contemporary music to which the audience has reacted with great enthusiasm. And there are other conductors besides Grant who have begun to change the face of programming. Robert Spano in Atlanta, Michael Christie in Phoenix. This is vital. You can’t keep playing only music that with each passing generation the audience is one generation further removed from. It just doesn’t work.’ That’s music to my ears, as long as these brave new musicians and managers don’t play safe with a new repertoire full of razzmatazz but devoid of substance.
Comments