Fall Of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra Is Cautionary Tale

Could it happen here

That's what symphony fans all over North America will be asking each other when they have a look at a revealing little book called ``Discord.''

Recently published by Canada's Brighouse Press, written by critic and professor John Becker, the book is subtitled ``The Story of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra,'' and it's a cautionary tale with applications for any performing-arts organization.

The book tells of the spectacular rise and even more spectacular fall of the Seattle Symphony's nearest major-orchestra neighbor, which officially went out of business two years ago and since has struggled back to its feet.

In 1978, a decade before the collapse, the Vancouver Symphony had the largest subscriber list of any North American performing-arts organization: 40,854. At a time when the city population was approximately a million, the orchestra filled more than 300,000 seats in a single season.

Managers, public-relations experts, critics and marketers flocked to Vancouver in admiration, trying to discover and emulate the orchestra's amazing success.

After a coast-to-coast Canadian tour that earned enthusiastic reviews, managing director Michael Allerton announced to the Vancouver musicians:

``We had really strong plans of stunning the East. We have done that. Our next stage of development is stunning Europe and moving on down the road to becoming the greatest orchestra in the world.''

What went wrong? What led the orchestra to the kind of hate-filled impasse that found the placard-carrying musicians shouting, ``Let them burn in hell!'' as administrators anxiously waited for firefighters to assist them in an emergency gas leak at the Vancouver Symphony offices?

Personnel problems: This seems a pale phrase to describe the hostile and confrontational status of the orchestra's administration, board and the musicians, in which accusations, grievances, and even lawsuits flew back and forth over the years preceding the 1988 crash. Among the incidents Becker recounts is a Watergate of sorts, in which the chairman of the orchestra's negotiating committee illicitly entered the administrative offices during a holiday to seize and photocopy important personnel files.

Delusions of grandeur: Under the reign of Allerton, the orchestra expanded its programs and its subscribership so far and so fast that the situation was impossible to sustain. The orchestra just couldn't keep up with its expenses, much less the costly tours of Japan, the U.S. and Canada.

Trying to please everyone, the orchestra played predictable programs without much challenge, and the artistic quality suffered. Furthermore, a recession starting in 1981 dried up much of the contributor base.

Freeze from the feds: The Canada Council, a northerly cousin of the National Endowment for the Arts, gave the orchestra an unfairly small stipend compared to the larger, more established Eastern orchestras. If Vancouver's grants had been commensurate with the grants to other orchestras, Vancouver wouldn't have incurred a deficit. Worse still, the government imposed a funding freeze on federal agencies, which meant that the council couldn't possibly keep up with Vancouver's phenomenal rate of growth.

Goodbye, opera: Like the Seattle Symphony today, the Vancouver orchestra in the mid-1970s received a significant percentage of its work from the city's opera company, which was a co-employer of the musicians, thus ensuring them full-time work. Much to the astonishment of Allerton, the head of the Vancouver Opera (then conductor Richard Bonynge, husband of super-diva Joan Sutherland) threw the symphony orchestra out of the opera pit without any warning, establishing an opera orchestra of local musicians. That meant the symphony had to come up with seven more weeks of orchestral concerts - and sell those concerts to an already-saturated public.

Conductor roulette: Buoyed by optimism and the belief that Vancouver deserved a world-class conductor, the orchestra management bagged its well-liked music director for the previous 12 years, Kazuyoshi Akiyama. They found Rudolf Barshai, a disciplined and rather authoritarian maestro who caused internal strife - and whose annual 12 weeks of conducting in Vancouver cost three times what Akiyama had been paid.

Interesting to Seattle audiences are the references to Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwarz (whose surname is misspelled in the book), a very frequent Vancouver guest conductor who is described by Becker as ``a first-rate musician, charming and charismatic.'' Becker tells of Schwarz's tactful heading-off of Vancouver's conductor-selection committee (``I know what you're going to ask me - don't ask me'') not long before Schwarz accepted the music directorship in Seattle.

``That's more or less what happened,'' Schwarz now says.

``I liked the Vancouver orchestra immensely,'' Schwarz adds, ``and I liked the city. There were a number of problems. I also saw some problems with the Seattle Symphony, but those were problems I felt could be solved - in a large part, they have been solved. Vancouver's were much deeper.''

Can Vancouver's history be duplicated in Seattle?

For a while it seemed as if the symphony here were headed down the same road. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was some heated discord between the musicians and their management, culminating in a 10-week orchestra strike in 1979. There was a lot of administrative turnover.

But a decade-long, in-the-red downturn was saved in the mid-1980s by some significant changes: City leadership, in the form of a citizens panel appointed by former mayor Charles Royer, brought the orchestra's problems before the public and suggested solutions. New board leadership, with two highly visible and enthusiastic men - chairman Samuel Stroum and president Richard Cooley - gave the symphony a much-improved visibility in the community.

New leadership (including savvy administrator Ed Birdwell) contributed to many of the improvements. These included a drastic turnaround in relations with the musicians, whose opinions and involvement were, and are, sought and honored. In Gerard Schwarz, both the musicians and the community found a conductor they could like and respect. His contacts and energy helped bring about new recording and touring dates for the symphony. It now has August performance dates at the Hollywood Bowl and two compact discs on the Billboard charts.)

Birdwell and Schwarz, both former orchestral musicians, share a community of experience with the symphony players that heightens the ``one big family'' ambience. The symphony board invites musicians to give boardroom mini-sessions on a succession of instruments.

``That's certainly a chilling tale,'' says Birdwell of ``Discord,'' which he says he and many industry insiders ``devoured'' as soon as it was available (it's published in paperback by Brighouse Press of Vancouver).

``But the chances of all those factors happening in Seattle - knock on wood - is very remote. And I think a lot of orchestra managers will learn from the mistakes Vancouver made.''

In the meantime, the Vancouver orchestra is still in business, after a history of what Becker calls ``resurrections'' - in 1930, 1938, 1963 and 1988. Becker is not especially sanguine about the future: ``At various times it has been saved from extinction by a dedicated and farseeing board, by a loyal and committed public, by virtue of its own tenacity, and by governments trying to protect the quality of life in the community. But the options may soon be exhausted. How many times can an organization be saved?''