I had planned to devote this space to a pair of Carnegie Hall concerts by the Minnesota Orchestra, which was to have performed the complete symphonies of Sibelius in the course of the season. The concerts, scheduled for November 2nd and 3rd, did not take place, and the remainder of the Sibelius cycle was cancelled. The formidable Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, who had been working wonders as Minnesota’s music director, resigned on October 1st, after a yearlong labor dispute. Citing deficits, the Minnesota Orchestral Association had announced a thirty-two-per-cent pay cut; the musicians balked, and the management locked them out. In the war of words that followed, the musicians easily held the high ground: the management had stooped to ruthless union-busting tactics, going so far as to buy up Internet domain names that could be used to support the musicians (SaveOurMinnesotaOrchestra, SaveOurOrchestra, and so on). George Mitchell, the Northern Ireland peacemaker, tried to mediate a compromise: the musicians accepted his proposal, but the M.O.A. rejected it. A number of players have taken jobs elsewhere, although those who stayed have been mounting concerts on their own. The swift plunge of this magnificent orchestra looks to be one of the most flagrant cases of mismanagement in the recent history of American classical music.
There is competition, however. The same week that the Minnesota Orchestra went into a tailspin, New York City Opera entered bankruptcy proceedings and ended its seventy-year existence. The company had been in financial trouble for a decade, and never recovered from a disastrous series of decisions in the period from 2007 to 2009, when it raided its endowment and put itself on a year’s hiatus. George Steel, who took over in 2009, wrested a few strong productions from the wreckage—including an insolent valediction, in the form of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Anna Nicole”—but he couldn’t make the slimmed-down, itinerant company viable.
Professional worriers in the classical business have portrayed the Minnesota and the City Opera situations as symptoms of a systemic disease. To be sure, many other institutions find themselves on shaky footing. The Brooklyn Philharmonic, which has been struggling for years, currently has no staff. More than a few opera companies have scaled back their schedules and ambitions. But other organizations are in surprisingly robust shape. The Chicago Symphony reported a record year of attendance and fund-raising. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is basking in wealth and thriving on innovation. The Cleveland Orchestra has increased revenue by attracting thousands of students to its concerts. And the Detroit Symphony is gradually rebounding from a fractious labor dispute a few seasons back, even as the city contemplates selling off some of its art collection. The Great Recession drew a clear line between soundly run groups and the rest.
Mismanagement cannot be blamed for all ills. Unions are too quick to jump into conflict mode: recent strikes by well-paid musicians in Chicago and San Francisco lacked the nobility of the players’ stand in Minnesota. There is a need for greater flexibility on the musicians’ side. It was sad to see a local union leader blaming City Opera’s demise partly on its decision to “abandon an accessible repertoire”; in fact, new and challenging work was part of City Opera’s mission from the outset. Still, the players have been doing their jobs, often with extraordinary finesse. The blogger Lisa Hirsch succinctly writes, “If an opera company or symphony orchestra finds itself in financial trouble, it’s rarely because the musicians can’t play and the costumers have forgotten how to sew.”
If there is a crisis, it stems from the culture at large. The extant network of orchestras and opera houses is an artifact of a very different America. City Opera, a pet project of Fiorello LaGuardia, emerged from the ethos of the New Deal, when government funds were allotted to the propagation of the arts for the masses. These days, political leaders are largely absent from the discussion, and the winner-take-all economy is as prevalent in the arts as everywhere else. While smaller groups struggle, donors flock to the Met and other deluxe institutions. A week after City Opera’s demise, Juilliard announced a sixty-million-dollar gift from Bruce Kovner, a hedge-fund billionaire. Mayor Bloomberg, when asked about the fate of City Opera, feebly commented that “the business model doesn’t seem to be working.” In the face of this mentality, it’s remarkable that “the People’s Opera,” as LaGuardia called it, lasted as long as it did.
On the weekend of the cancelled Minnesota concerts, I took comfort in a sprawling, mildly chaotic, and often riveting six-hour new-music marathon at the Greenwich House Music School, staged by the violinist Hilary Hahn. She was to have performed the Sibelius concerto with the Minnesota; her Greenwich House event, tied to a new recording titled “In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores,” had already been planned, and it helped to fill the vacuum created by the cancellation, and showed how much life resides outside of multimillion-dollar organizations.
Hahn, who is in her early thirties, first gained notice as a prodigy playing obvious fare. She has matured into one of the most creative and unpredictable virtuosos before the public, deploying her star power on behalf of modernist masters and living composers. “In 27 Pieces” stemmed from a desire to update the repertory of well-masticated encore chestnuts. Hahn spent hours in front of her computer, bouncing from one Web site to another, and commissioned twenty-six composers from seventeen countries, ranging in age from thirty-two (Nico Muhly) to eighty-five (Einojuhani Rautavaara). She also ran a contest for the twenty-seventh commission, which drew more than four hundred entries; Jeff Myers was the winner. At Greenwich House, in league with the pianist Cory Smythe, Hahn ran through the entire repertory in four forty-five-minute recitals. In addition, a corps of assisting musicians—including the JACK Quartet, TILT Brass, the composer-guitarist Elliott Sharp, and the pianists Anthony de Mare and Mackenzie Melemed—presented programs devoted to Hahn’s chosen composers. All proceeds went to the school, which has been a West Village institution for more than a century.
New-music events are often insular affairs, betraying the ideological biases of whoever organizes them. Hahn, guided only by her inquisitive ear, has spanned a dizzyingly wide range of styles, from the luminous avant-gardism of Richard Barrett to the autumnal neo-Romanticism of David Del Tredici and the post-minimalist bustle of David Lang. Navigating an ever-changing terrain, Hahn showed a commendable willingness to tackle unusual challenges and a mesmerizing ability to master them. In Somei Satoh’s “Bifu,” she sustained a ghostly legato for five rapt minutes. In Sharp’s “Storm of the Eye,” she obeyed instructions to produce a harsh, feedback-like sonority. (The score repeatedly commands, “Grind!”) In Kala Ramnath’s “Aalap and Tarana,” she used sliding tones and well-timed grace notes to evoke the vocal style of Hindustani classical music.
Whether these pieces will fulfill their intended mission remains to be seen. Only a few—notably the Satoh and the Del Tredici—had the self-contained, pearl-like quality capable of eliciting “ah”s and “mm”s from mainstream audiences. More often, they felt like the restless beginnings of bigger things—and larger-scale works may well emerge from Hahn’s new-music safari. In any case, the project was fully justified by the loose, lively atmosphere of the mini-festival that grew from it. Toward the end of the day, I sat in a small classroom on the fourth floor of the school as the young players of the Pannonia Quartet—participants in the Kauffman Center’s teen-age Face the Music program—gave an impeccable account of Muhly’s gently kaleidoscopic suite “Diacritical Marks,” with the composer watching. The perpetual crisis of big-league classical music seemed far distant; it felt as though we were ready to begin again, in the present tense. ♦