The Minnesota Orchestra Rebounds From a ‘Near Death Experience’
By DAVID ALLEN
FEB. 25, 2016
MINNEAPOLIS — Outside the office of Kevin Smith, the president and chief executive of the Minnesota Orchestra, a creed hangs on the wall: Enrich, Inspire, Serve. Elsewhere that mission statement — part management cliché, part heartfelt philosophy — might be cast on a plaque. Not here, at an organization where permanence has been shown to be an illusion. No, these guiding principles are drawn in block letters on three large, slightly crumpled pieces of paper, as if to say that, like the medium, the message is fragile and, once damaged, a challenge to repair.
After succumbing to a nearly devastating lockout that hit at the height of their collective power and lasted 16 months before ending in January 2014, the orchestra has staged a recovery. In May, it beat more prominent orchestras to be the first American ensemble to visit Cuba since the thaw in relations with that country. And on Thursday, March 3, the Minnesotans, along with a considerable contingent of traveling fans, will return to Carnegie Hall with a program of Sibelius that was canceled during the lockout in 2013.
“This orchestra is stronger,” Osmo Vanska, the beloved music director, said. He conducted the players during the lockout, a period of limbo when they were barred from their home here, Orchestra Hall. He eventually resigned in protest, only to be later rehired. “It is playing better,” Mr. Vanska said. “It is in really good artistic shape.”
Nobody here doubts that much work remains. Even though the musicians signed their most recent contract early, committing to it until 2020 by then, musicians’ wages will still be lower than they were in 2012. That contract stipulates a roster of 88, but the players currently number only 76. Subscriptions are growing but remain 12 percent below 2011-12, the last season before renovations to Orchestra Hall and the lockout led to a drop. And the orchestra confronts the same socioeconomic pressures as other musical institutions.
Nevertheless, in a minor miracle, the budget was balanced in the 2014-15 season. Ticket sales have held steady at 83 percent of capacity for two years running. In a sign of the trust fostered since the resignation, in August 2014, of Michael Henson, Mr. Smith’s predecessor and a lightning rod during the conflict, in December the musicians closed down the nonprofit they had created during the lockout and donated the $250,000 remaining in its accounts to the orchestra.
Most important, artistic standards are rallying under Mr. Vanska’s leadership. A February program here included the premiere of Olli Kortekangas’s turbulent “Migrations” but was dominated by wild, searing accounts of Sibelius’s “Finlandia” and “Kullervo,” so overwhelming that they consumed the thoughts and haunted the ears for days afterward. Performed (and recorded) with the singers Lilli Paasikivi and Tommi Hakala and Helsinki’s rambunctious YL Male Voice Choir, “Kullervo” was played as if something far more than an evening’s entertainment were at stake.
How do you rebuild an orchestra that had, as Mr. Smith calls it, a “near death experience”? The question is not particular to the Twin Cities. Orchestras from Detroit to Atlanta to Philadelphia have been threatened with extinction in recent years and have dragged themselves back to life. But interviews with players, management and Mr. Vanska suggested a transformation specific to Minnesota. The heat of the lockout forged a rare bond between orchestra and audience; the hope now is not to let it corrode. Dreadful as the labor strife was, all agreed that an orchestra better suited to the future has emerged.
A core strategy has been to preserve elements of a structure that sustained the orchestra during the lockout. Once the players refused, in October 2012, a contract offer that would have cut base pay by more than 30 percent, they set up what the bassist Kathryn Nettleman said with a laugh was a “mom and pop shop,” organizing concerts in venues other than Orchestra Hall. “The first concert we played,” recalled Sam Bergman, a violist and the current chairman of the musicians’ committee, “our poor English horn player had to figure out how to rent a venue, create a ticketing system and get 3,000 people through a single set of double doors.” The players convened around a dozen committees, governing themselves. “You name it,” Doug Wright, the principal trombonist, said. “We had people doing it.”
When the orchestra returned, that ad hoc apparatus did not simply dissolve. Instead, successive board chairmen and Mr. Smith, who had retired in 2011 after 25 years in charge of the Minnesota Opera before he became the orchestra’s president, decided to incorporate it. Musicians have been placed at the organization’s core. Their faces beam more prominently from programs and wall displays than at most other orchestras. They sit on governing committees that also include board members and staff. They work with an 11-strong management team, seven members of which are new to their roles, and who have been keen to continue innovations begun by players during the hiatus, including a Symphonic Adventures series aimed at high school students.
The effect has been to foster harmony throughout the institution and among supporters who sprang up to show how much the orchestra was valued. (Three leaders of the patron groups Save Our Symphony Minnesota and Orchestrate Excellence have since been elected to the board.) While the musicians now feel more involved in the administration, they also have greater respect for a staff they have become closer to. “Just because they’re not grabbing a French horn and playing doesn’t mean they’re not part of the Minnesota Orchestra,” Ms. Nettleman said.
A jam-packed Beethoven marathon in January was dreamed up by the players, not the staff. “Quite honestly,” Mr. Smith said, chuckling, “if management had come up with the idea to have these guys do what they did over a two-, three-week period, they would hate our guts.” Increased trust is now reflected in the orchestra’s collective bargaining agreement, which includes a clause that states, as Mr. Bergman put it, that “every once in a while someone is going to come up with a great idea that runs afoul, and we’re all going to say O.K.”
Consciously translating a European model across the Atlantic, Mr. Vanska returned insisting that musicians had to take care of their own future, and he has deliberately delegated to them some artistic control. “It’s so simple,” he said. “If you are playing something you have planned, then the commitment is there.” That sense of ownership has, he said, become audible in a more energetic, more febrile sound.
Last year, Mr. Vanska married the orchestra’s concertmaster, Erin Keefe, and signed a contract through 2019, including the same pay cut his players took. Praising their hard work, Mr. Vanska called the situation today “like paradise.”
Still, the issues that precipitated the lockout have not gone away. The orchestra’s surplus last season was just $15,000 on a budget of $31.1 million, a result made possible by over 7,000 donors contributing 58 percent of revenue. Ticket sales and other related income brought in $6 million. While the board drew on an endowment to pay off some debt — as well as a feasible 5 percent of operating costs — the orchestra faces over $21.8 million in liabilities (such as pensions and renovation costs).
As he tries to right the ship before his contract ends in 2018, Mr. Smith faces a similar struggle to that before the lockout. He sees a persistent $5 million gap between income and outlays, now covered by individual gifts. The old administration tried to close that gap by reducing wages. Mr. Smith is taking the opposite approach: “We’re dealing with it on the revenue side,” he said, “rather than on the expense side.”
Growth, then, is the battle, as it is elsewhere. Plans are being laid to develop the endowment, expand the donor base and experiment with the balance between traditional concerts and pops — in the direction of core, classical programming. The question is whether those beginnings will have happy endings. Pure growth, the economist Robert J. Flanagan warns in his 2012 book “The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras: Artistic Triumphs and Economic Challenges,” is not often enough.
Mr. Smith, though, argues that the market is shifting so quickly that the opportunities are there. Audience data before the lockout, he said, have proved practically useless after it: “It’s hard to predict whether or not the growth is sustainable, or whether we’re going to plateau. I don’t think so. There’s a lot of audience out there. I’m just an optimist, I guess.”
“What we’re not doing,” he added, “is saying we’re sure that we can get that $5 million down to nothing in five years. I’m not promising, nor do I think it reasonable to promise, that we’re going, in perpetuity, to solve the economic issues around having a major orchestra. If we don’t make it work on the revenue side, then down the line we’re going to have another crisis of some kind.”
In the meantime, it is full speed ahead with a plan as simple as it is brave. “We are striving,” Mr. Wright, the trombonist, said, “to grow ourselves into greater prominence within this community and beyond, rather than diminish ourselves into greater irrelevance. Ultimately we’re all doing what’s best for all of us.”