Music
The Beat Goes On
After decades of financial troubles and nagging questions about their relevance, the Dallas and Houston symphonies are both hitting high notes.
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Graf claimed to have no qualms about Houston’s ability to sustain and nurture a first-rate symphony. Was he aware of the financial problems the organization had recently faced? “Yes, of course,” he said, “but that was taken care of.” He has been doing his homework. “Houston will soon have a Latin majority,” he observed, adding that he intends to program Spanish masterpieces, such as Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, for that audience. True to his Austrian roots, he hopes to present more Haydn and Mozart but frets about how they will sound in Jones Hall. What else can Houstonians expect from Graf? “French music is close to my heart, especially Debussy,” he said. He mentioned his affection for Shostakovich, particularly such out-of-the-ordinary work as his orchestral settings of Michelangelo’s sonnets—“But you have to be careful not to lose the audience,” he said. Clearly, he has great plans, which include his hope that Houston will eventually build its orchestra an acoustically superior new home.
Meanwhile, although the symphony had not chosen an executive director to replace David Wax as of early February, its managers were maintaining that everything was running quite smoothly, thank you. International guest conductors, including Leipzig’s Claus Peter Flor and Alan Gilbert, the young American conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, were lined up, and this season’s offerings range from American John Adams’ 1996 piano concerto Century Rolls—played by Emanuel Ax, for whom the piece was created—to Dvorak’s warhorse “New World” symphony and pops concerts featuring the likes of Michael Feinstein and the Canadian Brass.
Nevertheless, the orchestra’s development director, Corrie Mason, is worried about keeping subscribers. “We have good news and challenging news,” Mason says. It seems that the symphony adds eight thousand new subscribers each year, but fewer than a third of those come back for a second season—despite such efforts to expand its audience as “Casual Classics,” a Friday evening pre-concert speaker series designed to help concertgoers appreciate the music, and “Classical Encounters,” a program that aims to engage the young singles audience with a party before the concert. No doubt with an eye to nurturing future subscribers, the symphony also has many outreach programs that try to involve and educate children in the pleasures of classical music, some of which have been in place since symphony co-founder Ima Hogg championed busing schoolchildren to the old downtown Music Hall to hear free concerts in the forties.
As Houston’s symphony began to emerge from the doldrums last fall, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (DSO) seemed the model of stability by comparison. After shutting down for a year in 1974, it faced an uphill battle as its board revived the orchestra and then turned its attention to building a concert hall of architectural and acoustical distinction. Now comfortably housed for the past eleven years in the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center—which is inevitably touted as a “world-class” concert hall—the DSO celebrated its one-hundredth birthday last year. Led by the dynamic, 41-year-old Andrew Litton, the symphony has an endowment of almost $70 million, bolstered by a recent campaign that raised $55 million; a considerably more ambitious drive to raise $100 million is in the planning stages. The fact that this season 82 percent of the DSO’s tickets were sold to subscribers was icing on the cake. So why was the symphony running humorous radio spots in December telling fashion-conscious Dallasites that they needn’t dress up to go to the symphony? (Deep-voiced announcer: “Someone in this city right now is facing a fear they can’t seem to overcome, fear of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Take Mrs. Sylvia H. of Frisco.” Worried young matron: “I don’t own a $500 strapless evening gown.” Deep-voiced announcer: “I do. But I don’t feel compelled to wear it, because formal attire is not required at the Dallas symphony. Wear whatever you feel comfortable in …”)
Turns out the DSO was trying to counter the same attitudes that were revealed in the Houston Press article about the Houston Symphony. “The difficulty is in disabusing people of the notion that classical music is elitist, esoteric, something that isn’t appropriate to their lives,” says Litton. “One way of doing that is to break down the mystique of coming to a concert. It’s not some scary thing like jury duty.” As in Houston, the DSO is trying to expand its audience through such efforts as its Symphony YES program, which offers pre-concert music-appreciation lectures. DSO general manager Douglas Adams, who helped develop the radio spots, points out that all symphonies have a common problem: “declining audiences, aging audiences.” Although some 3,600 new subscribers sign up each year, about the same number decide not to renew. Record sales are probably a good barometer of Americans’ interest in classical music, and sales of such recordings in the U.S. account for only 3.5 percent of the overall market today, with rock the leader among all types of music. As Litton puts it, “The biggest problem music makers face is that for two generations now, because of budget cutbacks, the schools haven’t been teaching music appreciation. Every orchestra across the country is trying to fill that gap. The DSO is no exception.”
Dallas symphony president Eugene Bonelli, who chaired the acoustics committee during the construction of the Meyerson, has a favorite war story about the political cost of the notion that symphonies are the playthings of the wealthy. When the Meyerson opened, in 1989, the DSO, which had paid two thirds of the hall’s cost, gave the building to the city of Dallas and contracted to rent it back at essentially no cost. When the city sought to force the symphony to pay more rent in 1994—under pressure from minority groups who called it an elitist organization—Bonelli and his staff made a presentation to the city council, complete with a map and colored pushpins showing where the symphony and its musicians had given free concerts and presented music programs in schools, parks, and other venues. After demonstrating how the symphony reached every sector of the community, says Bonelli, “We were able to work out an agreement to pay $1 in rent a year”—more or less the original amount.
No one was happier than Litton. “One of the things that keeps a symphony at the center of a community is having a great place to perform,” he says. “This place is definitely a showplace for Dallas.” Under Litton, the symphony has been able to tour and to embark on an ambitious series of live recordings featuring the works of Mahler and Shostakovich, all without detriment to the bottom line.
Meanwhile, those radio ads seem to be working. “We have a lot of young people in our audience,” says Litton. “It’s considered a cool thing for young people to come to a concert on a date.”
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