Orchestras in Trouble

The latest news about happenings in the music industry includes plenty of articles regarding the financial troubles the Minnesota Orchestra, the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, the San Antonio Symphony, and the Indianapolis Symphony (among others) are experiencing.  This comes on the heels of bankruptcy declarations by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Syracuse Philharmonic, the Louisville Orchestra, the New Mexico Symphony, and the Honolulu Symphony in 2011.  The Detroit Symphony musicians’ strike last year was also well-publicized.  It’s like an epidemic.  The situation is so dire that orchestra musicians are not even being given the option to strike – the management is simply locking them out of their working venues before any threats of strikes are uttered by the musicians union – the American Federation of Musicians.  That is truly unfair to the musicians.  I won’t go into where you can find the various sites where you can read detailed reports – they are in all the major news journals.  Just google orchestras in trouble and you’ll find as many as you have time for.  Many professional experts (and other people “in the know”) have opinions as to what might be to blame for the mess although, logically, there is really only one culprit: the Board of Directors.  The union shares a little blame, but not much.  Among other things, the Board is responsible for fiscal oversight – their function is not all that different from the function of any other business board.  Whatever else they do, fiscal soundness is their most important responsibility.  It is serious business, but it’s as simple as running a household – you either live within your means or you don’t.  It’s as simple as balancing an equation: X (expenses) must equal Y (income.)  X cannot be greater than Y.  Reading a financial report is not rocket science.  Even I can do it.  In any case, Boards typically hire CPAs who take care of analyzing budgets for them.  If an important and culturally significant enterprise like a world-class orchestra goes under, the blame can only be laid at the feet of the Board which has been appointed (or, in many cases, volunteered) to make certain that these problems don’t suddenly catch up to them.  We are not talking about an ENRON situation, where bankruptcy might be largely due to malfeasance, to put it politely.  We are talking about numbers on a sheet of paper which send clear distress signals (warning bells, if you will) far in advance of any peril.  If an orchestra suddenly finds itself in precarious circumstances, that can only mean that the Board ignored the warnings which were visible to them.  They failed to act.  It cannot mean anything else.  Commentators who are looking for other answers – failures in planning, failures in marketing, failures in programing, in audience building, in communications, in education outreach, in personnel policies - are dancing around the real problem. 

Arts organizations are not expected to turn a profit.  Since time immemorial, artists – composers and performers alike - have turned to the Church or to wealthy and generous patrons for assistance – Bach, Vivaldi, Wagner, Prokofiev, etc.  This is especially true of orchestras because they are so expensive to maintain.  There have been very few exceptions to the need for subsidies (at some point) in any artist’s career, but only in the case of individual artists.  Today especially, for instance, top violinists depend on benefactors to provide fine instruments for them to use.  If that’s not a sudsidy, I don’t know what is.  I have never known any orchestra to subsist entirely on ticket sales.  It could be done, but every ticket would have to be priced in the stratosphere where, in fact, nobody could afford one. Not only that, but every seat would have to be sold for every concert.  If you look at it another way, the arts patron – private or public – is really subsidizing the average concert goer, by as much as 60% of the cost of attending any given concert.  Without the benefactors, there would be no art, except for the wealthy, as in days gone by.  This formula however, does not absolve the Board from its responsibility of looking after the fiscal health of the orchestra.  When funds are lacking, it must sound the alarm, but never after the building has gone down in flames.  If the union – having received due notice of impending doom - balks at renegotiating a contract which by its weight may soon kill the whole enterprise, the union should be shut down because at that point, it is getting in the way of sound fiscal planning.  Nevertheless, it seems like that’s already a moot point in the cases cited above. 

Management is frequently asked to enter into iron-clad contracts (containing salary guarantees, etc.) which are unrealistic in income projections; they do so hoping for best-case scenarios which usually don’t materialize.  They also do so to avoid nasty confrontations with the union.  When these contracts result in deficits, the Board then goes begging for extra funds to make up the shortfall.  Even wealthy Foundations and patrons get tired of the same old routine and sometimes close their purse strings; when that happens, a crisis results, especially in hard economic times.  Then, the finger pointing begins, after which a seriously adversarial relationship between Management and musicians develops.  Usually, the enterprise collapses and then is almost inevitably re-started under a cloud of bad feelings.  Contingency funds should therefore always be in place to help during hard times and contracts should be written with plenty of contigency clauses to cover unintended emergencies, regardless of what the union demands.  It beats having to shut the doors.  Will things ever change?  I doubt it.  Ask the New York Philharmonic if it has a surplus – or ask the Boston Symphony or the Chicago Symphony or the Cleveland Orchestra.  I hope so.  

Elias Breeskin

Elias Breeskin was a Russian (Ukrainian) violinist, composer, arranger, teacher, and conductor born in 1896 – the exact date is unknown.  One source gives his year of birth as 1897, but that source (Cozio) is usually messy and unreliable.  He was a notorious gambler and con man who was a very successful musician in spite of his addiction to gambling.  He began violin lessons very early in life and, according to one source, by age 7 was studying formally at a conservatory in Poland.  He played in public at age 8 and was acclaimed.  It has been said that he studied with Leopold Auer in Russia.  Whether that is true is quite debatable.  At age 10 (1906), he played for Franz Joseph, the Austrian Emperor.  After this performance, the Emperor supposedly gave him a priceless ring right off his finger.  That, too, is highly questionable.  Soon after, the family came to the U.S. and settled in Washington D.C., a very odd place for a European musical family to settle – then and even now.  Sponsored by a Washington benefactor, he may have first gone to Baltimore to study at the Peabody Conservatory.  However, Breeskin himself stated that after securing financing from (among a few others) Frank Damrosch (brother of conductor Walter Damrosch and, at the time, Director of the Institute of Musical Arts which later became Juilliard), he began his American musical education at Juilliard (New York) in the spring of 1908.  He studied with Franz Kneisel for about seven years.  A magazine from that era (The Violinist) and the New York Times reported that Breeskin attended Columbia University after hours, studying languages and other subjects.  Possibly upon graduation from Juilliard – in 1915 - he shared the Loeb Memorial Prize with Sascha Jacobsen.  He was 19 years old.  Afterward, as part of the Loeb Prize awarded him, he made his debut in Carnegie Hall and was very well received.  In February or March of 1917, he received (on loan) a Stradivarius violin (the 1703 Rougemont Strad) and a Tourte bow from a benefactor – Edward Schafer – which he used for about ten years.  In 1929, for understandable reasons, the violin was returned to the benefactor to help him with payment of debts after the stock market crash.  The Rougemont was later played for two years by Jacques Gordon, concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony.  I do not know where it is now.  Breeskin joined the New York Symphony in 1917.  At that time, this orchestra was being conducted by Walter Damrosch.  Though it was organized many years after the New York Philharmonic, it was the first American orchestra to tour Europe - it merged with the Philharmonic in 1928.  Among the New York Symphony’s members were Mischa Elman and Pablo Casals.  In early February, 1917, Breeskin appeared in recital at the Aeolian Hall in New York City.  A little over a year later (February 28, 1918), he played there again.  One of the works he played at this second recital was Bruch’s second concerto with Lawrence Goodman at the piano.  On April 1, 1919, he finally made his Carnegie Hall debut, a debut which for unknown reasons, had been postponed several times.  Among the works he played was Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnol.  This time, he was accompanied by pianist Josef Adler.  He was very favorably received at each of his recitals.  In June of 1920, he married into a very wealthy American family.  Anyone else would have used these newly-acquired resources to become a very major and influential figure in music, but not Breeskin.  He was about 24 years old.  At about the same time, it became known that he was a serious gambler.  Around this time, he also became concertmaster of the Capitol Theatre Orchestra in New York.  He was named conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony in 1925.  Because of his gambling habit and the consequent accumulation of gambling debts, that job did not last long.  Having left Minneapolis within the year, he went to Pittsburgh where he helped re-organize the Pittsburgh Symphony.  There, he was concertmaster and associate conductor.  The gambling continued.  His last year in Pittsburgh (1929-1930), he was named Principal Conductor.  He left Pittsburgh after his divorce from his wealthy wife.  I am guessing that up to this time, his wife’s family may have been taking care of his huge gambling debts.  Then, he returned to New York.  He worked as an orchestral musician and arranger for a few years.  He did some recording as conductor of a pickup orchestra for the KBS (Keystone Broadcasting System) label.  Those recordings may still be available though they mostly feature light classical or salon music.  He also recorded several violin pieces with pianist Theodore Saidenberg for KBS, one of which can be found on YouTube.  Breeskin may have also recorded for the RCA and Brunswick labels.  Many years later (1937), he found himself in Hollywood.  There, he wrote and arranged music and he helped form the Hollywood Bowl Symphony.  Nevertheless, having at one point in 1940 stolen the orchestra’s payroll, he exited to Mexico City, where he worked as musical director for radio stations XEW, XEX, and XEB, gave lessons, and composed movie soundtracks.  His second family later joined him.  If it’s true that he studied languages at Columbia, those studies now came in handy.  One source has it that he lived like a king, surrounded by servants.  As far as I know, he never set foot in the U.S. again.  In any case, his great success in Mexico lasted about five years.  The gambling had continued and he was finally imprisoned for supposedly being on the wrong side of the political agenda – he may have been a Communist - and, presumably, for his gambling debts as well.  He was pardoned in 1958.  He was 62 years old.  While in prison, he wrote a piece entitled the City of the Dead.  It got good reviews when he premiered it later on.  Whether it is still performed is anyone’s guess – I’m guessing it is not.  He married for a third and final time after leaving prison.  Breeskin died May 9, 1969, at about age 73.  He left three wives (Adelyn, Anna, and Lena) and seven children.