HIDEBOUND

posted by James Reel

    In the August 15 New York Times, Allan Kozinn asks why American orchestras aren’t jumping to program exciting new high-profile compositions:

Pieces with … energy and appeal turn up all the time, as do works that find their way into the news. … The issue is whether orchestras can find the will and the flexibility to tap into hot works when they turn up, or whether their idea of exciting programming is simply to group repertory favorites under facile thematic banners, with the occasional premiere thrown in dutifully and the word "exciting" splashed across the brochure.

    The Tucson Symphony is as guilty of this as any other orchestra. For all of music director George Hanson’s talk of giving concertgoers something new, or at least unfamiliar, alongside comfy old favorites, the TSO’s programming is extremely cautious even under the best of circumstances.
    Two seasons ago, to celebrate its 75th anniversary, the orchestra commissioned a new work for almost every one of its main classical concerts and at least one of its chamber-orchestra concerts. This was laudable support for living composers and was an honest attempt to connect the orchestra (and its audience) to what’s happening today, rather than what was happening at the orchestra’s birth 75 years before (and, more usually, what was happening 75 years before that). But what we wound up with was a string of five-minute pieces that, for the most part, failed to develop into any sort of memorable statement. Since composers tend to charge by the minute these days, it would have been better if the orchestra had totaled the money it spent on all those little, innocuous items and divided it among three or four 20-minute works. This would have allowed each composer, and the TSO, to make a far more substantial contribution to the repertory. But five-minute curtain-raisers are safe, because the most conservative audience members can just sit there and grit their teeth (or come late) knowing that some lovely Tchaikovsky effusion will soon relieve their pain. (All the TSO commissions, by the way, were highly accessible.)
    This season, the TSO is crying poor, and so it has replaced almost every piece of music that involves royalties or rental fees with something “free” from its library. This is a huge mistake. It’s the cheap way out and, in the minds of the orchestra managers, the safe way out, because, they suppose, hundreds more people are going to come to a concert featuring both Beethoven and Tchaikovsky rather than one that includes Orbón’s Tres Versiones Sinfónicas, right? Don’t count on it. We can sit at home and listen to fabulous recordings of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Why spend the money and go to the trouble and inconvenience of attending a concert of such material? With no disrespect to Hanson or his musicians, there’s no guarantee that the TSO performance will be somehow better or more interesting than what we can get from a CD, so why bother? There must be something more to draw us to the concert hall—either a truly unusual point of view from the performers, a compelling new context for familiar music, or compositions we haven’t heard much before but might enjoy.
    Very, very few American orchestras are doing this, and that’s the main artistic reason they’re hemorrhaging audience and income. (There are non-artistic reasons, too, relating to the bad management that’s rampant in the arts world, but that’s another story.)