Jaime Weinman asks: should there be more streamlining for orchestras and opera companies as funding diminishes?
It was what music critic Alex Ross called “Black Monday” for U.S. music. The New York City Opera, the city’s second most-important opera company, filed for bankruptcy, and the Minnesota Orchestra lost its music director, Osmo Vanska, after a labour dispute that has crippled musical life in the city due to what music critic Norman Lebrecht calls a “highly aggressive board, weak English manager, isolated group of players, a complete absence of mutual respect and good faith”; even the intervention of George Mitchell, a former U.S. senator who brokered peace talks in Northern Ireland, couldn’t save the once-great orchestra. With the Philadelphia Orchestra recovering after a bankruptcy of its own, and many orchestras shutting down or cutting back performances, the question about classical music is whether it can survive in its current form—or whether it should.
Some people are already trying to find new models. Scott Dibble, a Minnesota state senator, is co-sponsoring a bill that would create community ownership of the orchestra. He tells Maclean’s that “we had a world-renowned orchestra, one of the very best ensembles in the world, and now that’s been thrown in the trash.” Many people feel the same way about the New York City Opera, which was once considered superior to the Metropolitan Opera and is now just trying to stay alive. These collapses, Dibble says, prove that it’s no longer viable for wealthy people and musicians to think of music as “a private concern that we need not worry about. Now they’ve betrayed that. So maybe it needs to be taken away from them.”
It was what music critic Alex Ross called “Black Monday” for U.S. music. The New York City Opera, the city’s second most-important opera company, filed for bankruptcy, and the Minnesota Orchestra lost its music director, Osmo Vanska, after a labour dispute that has crippled musical life in the city due to what music critic Norman Lebrecht calls a “highly aggressive board, weak English manager, isolated group of players, a complete absence of mutual respect and good faith”; even the intervention of George Mitchell, a former U.S. senator who brokered peace talks in Northern Ireland, couldn’t save the once-great orchestra. With the Philadelphia Orchestra recovering after a bankruptcy of its own, and many orchestras shutting down or cutting back performances, the question about classical music is whether it can survive in its current form—or whether it should.
Some people are already trying to find new models. Scott Dibble, a Minnesota state senator, is co-sponsoring a bill that would create community ownership of the orchestra. He tells Maclean’s that “we had a world-renowned orchestra, one of the very best ensembles in the world, and now that’s been thrown in the trash.” Many people feel the same way about the New York City Opera, which was once considered superior to the Metropolitan Opera and is now just trying to stay alive. These collapses, Dibble says, prove that it’s no longer viable for wealthy people and musicians to think of music as “a private concern that we need not worry about. Now they’ve betrayed that. So maybe it needs to be taken away from them.”