Orchestra confronts Berg, Mahler— and bankruptcy

Entering Verizon Hall for the last of David Zinman's three concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra, I saw a letter slipped inside my program announcing that the Orchestra's board of directors had voted earlier in the day to file for Chapter XI bankruptcy protection. For an institution that in its 111 years had ridden out the Great Depression and two world wars without losing its solvency, this was not a happy moment.

Of course, bankruptcy, once a moral— not to say a mortal—disgrace, has become just another way of doing business. Or perhaps you thought the Orchestra was more than a business.

I read the letter, cosigned by board chairman Richard B. Worley and Orchestra president Allison Vulgamore, and felt a powerful need to wash my hands. It speaks of "our beloved musicians" with their "incredible artistry," and speaks too of their "multiple generous concessions" at the bargaining table. These include a wage freeze in effect since 2008, which, at real inflation rates, has meant a salary reduction of 10 to 15%.

Not good enough, it seems. The board wants to tear up its contracts and cut a further $20,000 from base salaries.

This strategy works in the cutthroat, de-unionized world of modern business. It works less well when the affected employees are not tool and die workers but world-class musicians openly coveted by other orchestras, as clarinetist Ricardo Morales was by the New York Philharmonic.

And there's another contract at issue: the Philadelphia Orchestra Association's contract with its patrons, to preserve the city's most renowned cultural institution.

The only solution?

It does sometimes happen that organizations fall on hard times, and that bankruptcy is the only solution. But no neutral observer has suggested that that is the case in this instance. The board letter gave two reasons for its decision: (1) "Operating funds are rapidly dwindling and will be exhausted by June 2011"; and (2) the orchestra is "operating at a significant loss with a structural deficit of $14.5 million." End of financial discussion.

In fact, the operating deficit for the current year is an expected $5 million, according to The New York Times. The Orchestra's endowment is $140 million, triple the sum of the liabilities it claims, chiefly in pension obligations. The musicians claim that the actual pension shortfall is only a fraction of this amount.

Not being privy to the books, I can offer no opinion on this subject. But it's rare for any organization to seek bankruptcy protection when its assets far exceed its liabilities. It's even rarer— in fact, unprecedented— for one of the country's elite orchestras to do so.

John Koen, the head of the musicians' union, read a brief statement to the audience regretting the board's decision and affirming the union's commitment to the music the orchestra serves. The orchestra then played the "Nimrod" section of Elgar's Enigma Variations as a thank-you to the audience for its support.

From Brahms to Schoenberg to Berg

Guest conductor David Zinman led the performance, a gesture of his own that was clearly significant. The Orchestra stood as one after playing, a face-to-face communication with its public that made a statement of its own.

The concert itself, mercifully free of the faux-Parisian associations for which the Kimmel Center (and much of the city) have been decked out this month, consisted of Alban Berg's Lulu Suite and Mahler's Fourth Symphony, with soprano Jennifer Welch-Babidge as soloist in both works. Berg derived the suite from his ultimately unfinished opera several years before his untimely death, hoping to advertise the continuing work and provide a concert-hall primer.

The opening bars conveyed a Romantic wistfulness that was almost Brahmsian and put me in mind of the high regard that Berg's master, Arnold Schoenberg, had for Brahms. Indeed, serialism may now be seen in historical perspective as a continuation of the 19th-Century war between the camps of Brahms and Wagner. Schoenberg, originally a composer very much in the Wagnerian mode, essayed a return to Baroque and Classical forms through the 12-tone system, forms that Brahms had never abandoned.

Berg's Lulu, in contrast, represented a Wagnerian turn after the astringencies of Berg's previous opera, Wozzeck, and hence a fresh gambit in the proxy debate between Brahms and Wagner. For all its lushness, however, the work's plangency evoked, at least for this listener, a sense of the Weltschmerz that seems to me Brahms's most singular trait. As a composition itself, the Suite feels a bit meandering, but its felicities are such that one forgives the lack of a more unified structure.

Definitely not soulmates

Zinman played this work, and the Mahler that followed it, with a particular eye for detail. Mahler and Brahms are most definitely not soulmates (the exacerbated sensibility of the former notwithstanding), but Zinman seemed to reach even further back into the Viennese tradition in shaping this most relatively genial of all Mahler's works, for the sifted textures of his reading had a Haydnesque openness and clarity.

You can get weightier sound and deeper expressiveness from Mahler's Fourth Symphony, particularly in the slow movement that is the heart of the work; and the original subtitle of the Scherzo, "Friend Death Strikes Up a Dance," certainly suggests a dour subtext. But Mahler himself has been ridden to death often enough, and Zinman, in choosing to emphasize his classical affinities in this score, cast a refreshing light on him.

Jennifer Welch-Babidge, a statuesque presence, moved easily and expressively enough from the ultra-Weimar decadence of Lulu to the paradisal vision of the Mahler finale. The Orchestra responded sensitively to Zinman's guidance, and Richard Woodhams's oboe was particularly outstanding.

Act of disrespect

After the wonderful diminuendo in the lower strings that ends the Mahler, I walked with the rest of the audience into a spectacularly vulgar light show in the Kimmel atrium, set off by a blaringly canned reduction of the finale of Stravinsky's Firebird. You could hardly imagine a more gratuitous shock, or a greater act of disrespect to the live music making we had all just experienced.

Whoever is running the Kimmel as a three-ring circus these days might pause to remember that some real art actually takes place there from time to time. Those who hold the Orchestra's fortunes in their hands could take the same note.♦


To read a related commentary by Vincent Rinella, click here.