Symphony strives to sustain fresh momentum under its new music director
by Mike Gibson
At the end of the 2000-2001 concert season, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra seemed to be composing its own dirge.
Short years after hitting an organizational high-water mark in the late 1990s, KSO was struggling in the mire of a $350,000 debt. Its primary concert venue, downtown's aging Tennessee Theatre, was growing ever less structurally and acoustically viable, and some people in the organization intimated that long-time conductor Kirk Trevor had stayed well past the epoch of his directorship.
Perhaps most tellingly, subscription ticket sales for the orchestra's annual Masterworks concerts series had dropped from a high of 2,700 in 1998 to fewer than 1,900. The dirge was climbing in adagio toward its climactic moment.
That moment never came. Two years later, the KSO has eliminated most of its debt. The organization looks toward having both a new musical director and a newly renovated concert hall in a little more than a year's time. And though Masterworks subscriptions are still down, overall subscription revenues (including pops and chamber orchestra performances) have risen by more than 10 percent in the last year.
"What you're seeing in Knoxville now is an orchestra bucking the national trend," says Jack McAuliffe, vice-president and chief operating officer of the American Symphony Orchestra League, an institution that is part service organization, part professional association for orchestra-folk across the country.
"A number of things are looking up for KSO now," McCauliffe continues. "You've got elements in place that portend an exciting time in Knoxville."
Understanding both KSO's plight and its ensuing resurgence requires an understanding of what's happening to arts organizations and particularly symphony orchestras nationwide.
The 1990s were a fertile time for symphony orchestras, with the audience for orchestral music as a whole reaching an all-time high. But at the turn of the millenium, the sudden drought of a flagging national economy brought an end to years of fecundity.
"Since the economy has been bad, orchestras have had problems," McAuliffe says simply. "It's not so much an orchestra problem as an economy problem."
"There is a national cyclical pattern to audience support of the arts," observes Dr. Frank Gray, president of the KSO board of directors. "It flows and sinks all around the country, particularly according to economic and socio-economic factors."
Gray points to the founderings and even outright collapse of a number of symphony orchestras in recent years, including symphonies in Tulsa, St. Louis, Kansas City, San Jose, San Diego, and Denver. Even the venerable Chicago Symphony is currently operating under the pall of a $6 million deficit.
"If the Chicago Symphony is in trouble, that's indicative [of] what's going on elsewhere," Gray says.
Compounding the problem is the proliferation of cultural options, the ever-expanding competition for the entertainment dollar as well as a generation of Americans perhaps less acquainted with symphonic music and the so-called fine arts.
"A new generation has grown up without exposure to classical music in school," McAuliffe says. "We also have a couple of generations who grew up with the visual stimulation of television. Given a population of prospective audience members who think of entertainment as something with a highly visual content and who may not have the exposure to classical music, orchestras have to work harder at communicating the special benefits of a live orchestral performance."
Providing effective redress for those varying cultural and economic problems requires a varied approach, McAuliffe says. At KSO, board members acting in concert with executive director Mark Hanson (a boy wonder of sorts who came here, green but highly-regarded, at age 27 from the directorship of the symphony in Rockford, Illinois, in April of 2001) began by stemming the financial hemmorhage and embarking on an ambitious debt-reduction campaign. That campaign included a drive that raised an additional $250,000 in one-time special donations from regular orchestra patrons last year.
"Performing arts have had difficulty raising contributions in a declining stock market," Hanson says. "Some of the larger orchestras have lost 30 percent of their endowment fund.
"In Knoxville we've fortunately seen something quite different, with our major donors significantly increasing their contributions in the last two years."
In the meantime, Hanson says, KSO has cut costs, yet increased its public performances to 272 last season, with most of the added shows coming in the form of outreach programming such as in-school performances and free public shows. Those are the kinds of performances that are key to reinvigorating public interest, he adds.
"We set out to make ourselves more significant to the community by bringing musicians into the community," Hanson says. "We're making a concerted effort to take ourselves outside the downtown performance halls and into unexpected venues."
Programming is another aspect of KSO strategy; careful attention to Pops programming has brought about a substantial increase in series subscriptions (the Pops series is now roughly equal to the Masterworks programming in subscription sales, with each generating about $390,000 in subscription revenues last season).
Hanson hopes the inclusion of a few more high-profile guest artists on the Masterworks roster—popular classical violinist Midori was a featured guest soloist last year, for instance—will provide a similar shot in the arm to Masterworks ticket sales.
"Our reputation has been for bringing in high-quality but perhaps less well-known guest artists," Hanson says. "Now we're moving in the direction of having some slightly higher-profile guest artists, better-known and more expensive, for a couple of concerts each season."
Swan Song
When conductor Kirk Trevor announced in 2002 that this, his 18th season as musical director of KSO, would be his last, some symphony folk believed it was high time to bring to an end what had been on balance a successful musical partnership.
"There were issues in that we suffered somewhat from Kirk Trevor Fatigue," says long-time KSO violinist Norris Dryer. "Probably for his career and for ours, he was here several years too long. He did an awful lot for us, but there comes a time."
"There's a reason why most orchestra conductors move on every few years," Gray says. "I didn't feel this way myself, but some may have felt it was 'same-old-same-old' with Kirk. Some times change for change's sake can be a catalyst."
What followed was a nationwide search for a new musical director that saw a list of 200 candidates whittled down to five, each of whom was given the opportunity to meet with the board, rehearse with the symphony and conduct at least one public performance.
According to Dryer, the finalists were well-chosen. "We all agreed that any one of the five would have made an excellent choice, and each one had their 'following' among the orchestra members," he says.
"There wouldn't have been unanimity if they had brought Toscanini himself out of the grave. But even for those who favored someone else, there was still a consensus that Lucas was a good choice."
Presently the resident conductor for the highly-regarded Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, 39-year-old Lucas Richman is a multi-talented conductor, composer, violinist and muscial entrepreneur. Hailing from Los Angeles, he comes from a family steeped in both fine and popular arts; his parents are both stage and screen actors, with his father, Peter Mark Richman, having earned distinction through recurring roles on 1980s night-time soap Dynasty and '70s sitcom Three's Company (where he played TV father to Suzanne Sommers' daffy blonde Chrissy.)
Richman earned music degrees at UCLA (violin) and USC (conducting) before moving into a richly varied career that has seen him compose and conduct film scores (he conducted the scores for high-profile films such as Seven, Face/Off, and As Good As It Gets), write commissioned orchestral music, and even tour as an associate conductor with his idol, the late maestro Leonard Bernstein.
"When I came to Knoxville, I was very impressed with the degree of involvement, and with the artistic quality," Richman says. "The artistic output is similar to that of a symphony budgeted at a much higher level. There are some dilemmas to work through, but there's an opportunity here to take the organization to another level.
Richman's vision is artistically broad, yet very specific financially and organizationally. He believes KSO must strive to increase its musicians' salaries in order to keep stride with other, perhaps better-heeled sympony orchestras.
"We need the funds to attract top players coming out of music school," Richman says. "The grass is always going to be greener somewhere else, and a musician won't go to a city where there's a chance he won't make a living wage. Here, I think we can definitely strive to do a little better than what we're doing now."
A long-time proponent of music education—he's composed a number of children's works, and conducted an ongoing series of young people's concerts in Pittsburgh—Richman looks to increase the number of formats as well as the number of concerts through which KSO presents itself. His Pittsburgh endeavors also include a number of 'wellness' performances in hospitals and other health-care facilities.
"Sometimes listening to a Mozart trio is much healthier than taking a pill," he says with a chuckle.
Richman says he's less concerned with propounding a specific artistic agenda than he is with presenting music that is both deeply felt by its performers and resonant with the audience.
"The Knoxville Symphony is in Knoxville; it's not in Pittsburgh, and it's not in New York," Richman says, alluding to the various programming issues—pops versus classical, 20th century vs. romantic-era composers, avant-garde vs. traditional—all symphonies must face.
"A symphony must speak to the city in which it is based. One of my goals is to figure out what makes Knoxville tick. It's not so important to me to make a distinction between meat-and-potatoes classics and more modern composers. What's important is to present music that conveys emotions, stories, a sense of the theatrical.
"I enjoy whatever music I do in the moment. It's not my intention to bore the audience. The idea is to pick music that excites and entices them."
Watering the Roots
But even if KSO has the necessary elements in place—a plan, a new conductor, and a venue overhaul—to continue its rejuvenation, the organization still faces gaping uncertainties. Not the least of those is the transitional year of 2003-2004 during which the Tennessee Theatre will be undergoing renovations, relegating Masterworks performances to the acoustically-challenged Civic Auditorium.
The season will also see the orchestra operate without its new conductor for about half its performances. Richman's current contract in Pittsburgh will not permit him to commit to KSO full-time until '04-'05, necessitating a series of guest conductors next season.
Perhaps most concerning to KSO officials is the hard necessity of increasing Masterworks subscription sales, the bread and butter of any vital symphony orchestra.
According to Hanson, the symphony is now renewing season subscriptions at a yearly rate of about 80 percent, a figure well above the national average.
"There were high rates of attrition in the late 1990s," Hanson says. "We've stabilized subscriptions now, in that we're now renewing the large majority of them. At this point, our focus needs to be on attracting a higher number of first-time subscribers."
"There has to be a positive momentum now; the status quo won't get it," Gray says, more urgently. "Without public support, we will not continue to go on. We need to reach a critical mass where people are unwilling to give up that season pass.
"This is a critical time for KSO. Whatever happens, I think the orchestra will either blossom or wither. I don't think it's going to stay the same."
February 27, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 9
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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Orchestrating Change