Soft impasse at the symphony

The Richmond Symphony’s musicians say they cannot afford to accept a new contract that sharply reduces pay and benefits. The board and management say the symphony cannot afford to make a better offer, and will implement the new terms despite their rejection by the players.

The orchestra has no plans to lock out the musicians by canceling rehearsals and performances, and the musicians have no plans to strike. The rhetorical tone has been measured, almost courtly, on both sides.

This soft impasse could continue for months, maybe through the 2012-13 season.

Richmond is one among a number of U.S. cities whose symphony orchestras are weathering an Indian summer of discontent. Musicians’ contracts have reached or passed expiration dates, and negotiations between players and management have stalled in many places. Chicago Symphony players staged a brief strike before accepting a new three-year pact. The Atlanta Symphony locked out its musicians until the players accepted a concessionary contract. A lockout continues at the Indianapolis Symphony, and another has begun at the Minnesota Orchestra. Other ensembles are reducing the length of their seasons and demanding substantial concessions from musicians.

After its contract with musicians expired at the end of August, the Richmond Symphony’s board made a final offer that “reduces a [full-time] section musician’s annual wage from $32,785 to $28,886, including a two-week reduction in season length [from 38 to 36 weeks], and slashes nearly every benefit the musicians receive,” according to a statement from George Tuckwiller, president of Local 123 of the American Federation of Musicians, the union representing the symphony players. The offer also reduces pay for part-time (“per-service”) musicians.

The symphony has 36 full-time and 32 part-time players on its regular roster.

The management proposal effectively cuts pay by 12 percent for full-timers and 14 percent for part-timers, says Molly Sharp, the symphony’s principal violist and one of the musicians’ lead negotiators in contract talks. Orchestra players entered this year’s contract talks after “years of [pay] freezes” during the recession, she notes.

The current wage offer “would enable a married musician with two children to be eligible for SNAP,” the federal Supplemental Nutrition Allowance Program long known as food stamps, Tuckwiller observes. “We are not interested in handouts. We want to be able to afford our own food and put it on the table for our family.”

Management has implemented the new contract provisions despite the musicians’ rejection of the offer on Sept. 30. “We asked the union to agree to a significant number of financial belt-tightening measures that are necessary for us to achieve a balanced budget in fiscal year 2012-13,” the orchestra’s board chair, John W. Braymer, and executive director, David Fisk, write in a letter to symphony patrons. “We are asking this of our musicians only after first taking all other reasonable measures to reduce expenses.”

The symphony’s public accounting of its finances can be found on its website, www.richmondsymphony.com Click on “About Us;” from the drop-down menu select “Leadership,” then go to “Richmond Symphony’s Organizational Profile” at the bottom of the page. There you’ll find links to the orchestra’s audited financial statement for the 2010-11 season, and a copy of its Form 990, the accounting of revenues and expenses that nonprofit groups are required to file with the Internal Revenue Service. The most recent 990 covers the 2009-10 season.

According to the 2010-11 statement, the most recent that the symphony has released, the orchestra’s operating revenue was $4,412,335. Total expenses were $4,760,951, resulting in a shortfall of $348,616. The orchestra’s accumulated debt is more than $1,289,000. Just over half of 2010-11 expenses, $2,462,880, were for artistic personnel, which includes conductors and guest soloists as well as the orchestra’s musicians. The symphony says the “vast majority” of artistic personnel costs are for orchestra players’ pay and benefits, but has not disclosed the exact percentage.

The orchestra’s board feels impelled to “balance the budget over the next few years,” says José Luis Murillo, past chair of the board and one its lead contract negotiators. The symphony has initiated “extraordinary fund-raising to eliminate the debt,” and is engaged in “very significant belt-tightening in every respect,” Murillo says.

Perhaps the most visible sign of that economizing is reduction of the orchestra’s performance schedule. Its mainstage classical concert series, Masterworks, went from eight programs last season to seven this season, three of them without Sunday repeats – the first time in nearly 30 years that Masterworks programs have been staged for only one concert. The Metro Collection chamber-orchestra series already had eliminated Friday night performances, leaving only four Sunday matinees in Ashland. A new Rush-Hour Concerts series at Richmond CenterStage will launch this week, but with just two concerts this season. The four Symphony Pops and three LolliPops programs (all single concerts, except for a pair of “Let It Snow!” holiday pops concerts) and the annual Christmas-season “Messiah” remain unchanged from past seasons.

Performance revenue – primarily ticket sales – in the 2010-11 season was $1,270,709. With the elimination of five mainstage concerts, ticket revenue could decline this season.

Other dampeners on revenues:

– A decline in the annual “draw” (payout) from the symphony’s endowment fund. That fund has grown by $5.6 million, following a five-year campaign the concluded last July, and is expected to total about $12 million this year. But, as anyone with a 401(k) or IRA can testify, returns on investments are not what they used to be.

– Funding from state and local governments has been waning, partly because of recessionary drops in tax revenues, partly because government arts subsidies have been targeted by conservative interest groups and cut by politicians responsive to those interests.

– Fewer bookings in recent years for “runout” concerts, mostly staged outside the Richmond area.

The other principal source of symphony revenue, donated funds (“contributions and grants”), amounted to $2,237,028 in 2010-11, a slight decline from the $2,270,130 raised in 2009-10.

The primary source of donations has been shifting from corporations and foundations to individual donors.

Corporate giving to the arts has fallen since the 2007-08 economic crash. (A notable local casualty of the crash was the Arts Fund, a United Way-like venture for corporate matches of employee giving.) Over the past 15 years, a number of Richmond-based companies prominent in corporate philanthropy have gone out of business or have been absorbed by larger firms based elsewhere. Those losses were only partially offset by the relocation of Altria to Richmond and its emergence as a major local corporate donor to the arts.

For 10 years, the Richmond Symphony received six-figure budgetary boosts each year via grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Program for Symphony Orchestras; but that ended in 2009. Major fund-raising campaigns for the development of Richmond CenterStage and the expansion of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, as well as the symphony’s endowment-fund campaign, quite likely cut into year-to-year giving for operations of the orchestra and other arts groups.

Overall “giving over the last few years has been pretty strong,” Murillo says, but much of it has come from “a fairly limited group” of donors. Growth in gifts from individuals and family foundations has not made up for drops in corporate donations and government grants.

All this has left the symphony more healthily endowed but “cash-poor on operations,” Sharp says. “We have a revenue problem that needs to be addressed, and we hope to work together [with management] to solve it.”

“As many public offerings as possible” – i.e., more concerts – could not only boost revenue but also reinforce the perception that “the community has a stake in the symphony,” she suggests.

Murillo says the board and management have “the greatest admiration for [the musicians’] dedication and professionalism” and want to maintain a stable roster of resident musicians. Turning the symphony into a “pickup” orchestra of per-service players is, he says, “something we would like not to do.”

This season the orchestra is giving players longer notice of the dates on which they will be needed, potentially making it easier for them to find work outside the symphony.

“We will do our best to raise as much money and [increase] audience attendance as much as possible,” Murillo says. “As soon as we can secure our financial stituation, we’ll be only too happy to put money back into musicians’ salaries. We hope that by the end of the season we will have a contract that everybody can accept.”