Symphony’s Local Talent Finds Itself Out of Tune

After playing his violin for the Ventura County Symphony Orchestra for three years, Camarillo electrical engineer Doug Widney realized last year that he was out of his league and resolved to rectify the situation. He quit.

“It’s not that I was that bad,” the 27-year-old second violinist good naturedly explained. “It’s just that the symphony was getting so much better.”

“Suddenly,” he said, “I was playing with people who did nothing but play music all day while I was tinkering with a computer.”

Other acknowledged amateurs in the symphony have found themselves in the same boat. A bulwark of local culture since it was founded 26 years ago on a $500 budget, the symphony is increasingly becoming a professional operation--an upsetting trend to many of the musicians who have been loyal to it since its leaner days.

Reward of Hostility

They complain that their loyalty has been rewarded with hostility from a management that wants to replace them with more polished musicians from outside the county.

Symphony administrators counter that they simply want to provide county residents with the most sophisticated classical music they can, and that where players come from does not matter as much as how well they play.

Signs of the orchestra’s increased seriousness abound. Last July, the orchestra hired its first professional manager, Karine Beesley, an arts management specialist with two years’ experience at the Ventura Arts Council. It also was recognized by the American Symphony Orchestra League as “a metropolitan orchestra”--a ranking reserved for groups that have raised more than $250,000. And, bit by bit, local musicians are being replaced by out-of-town talent.

In the past two years, the orchestra, which draws on a pool of about 200 musicians, has hired 17 players and only one of them, Camarillo flutist Ann Erwin, was local. By contrast, five of the 10 musicians hired during the 1985-86 season hailed from Ventura County.

When the symphony offers its second concert of the season this weekend, only 31 of the 78 musicians performing will be Ventura County residents. When the Ventura symphony wrapped up its first year under conductor Frank Salazar in June of 1963, 68 of the orchestra’s 71 members were Ventura County residents, a program from that era shows.

For such acknowledged amateurs as Widney, the dwindling presence of Sunday musicians has been a small price to pay for an improved orchestra. Most have gracefully bowed out of the symphony, perhaps finding an outlet for musical interests in the orchestra’s amateur wing, the Ventura County Civic Youth Orchestra, or the Ventura County Concert Band, another amateur group.

But, for local professional musicians, the transition has not been as easy. Some complain that they are being drummed out of the orchestra to make way for Southland musicians who have nothing on them but the “Los Angeles mystique.” They charge that Salazar, who also is the symphony’s music director, has given up on recruiting local talent, instead favoring musicians from Los Angeles universities and hiring them through rigged auditions.

This season, three of the symphony’s remaining six charter members--timpanist LaVonne Theriault, and trumpet players Larry Weiss and Orbie Ingersoll--resigned after being abruptly demoted in favor of Los Angeles musicians.

Last month, they complained of harassment to the symphony’s board of directors, and Weiss claimed he was “subjected to humiliation, criticism, insult and embarrassment at the hands of the music director.”

‘Tympani, You’re Wrong’

“I feel really used,” said Theriault, who along with the two other musicians had played for the symphony since 1962. She told of struggling with the particularly difficult entrance to a piece the whole symphony was finding difficult.

“Tympani, you’re wrong,” she remembers Salazar repeating. “When he made the corrections with the others, he would say, ‘Second violins, you have to be careful here and listen for thus and so.’ But, with me, he just kept saying, ‘Tympani, you’re wrong.’

“It sounds so petty,” she acknowledges, “but these things go on and on and it breaks your spirit. Instead of being all joyful because it was Monday,” when the symphony rehearses, “I would say, ‘I wonder what he’s going to say to me tonight.’ ”

Weiss, former principal trumpeter and an occasional substitute conductor, told of being asked to help judge auditions that pitted domestic against imported talent without then being asked by Salazar for his opinions.

“I had the feeling that I was being used to merely add validity to a situation in which a candidate had already been cast for appointment prior to the tryout, and the audition process was merely a pretense,” he said.

Ingersoll, Weiss’ fellow trumpeter, told of Salazar’s persuading Santa Barbara musician Bob Karon to play with the symphony by telling him that Weiss had asked for help with a piece. When Karon learned that Weiss had not asked for help and that Salazar was only seeking to replace the principal trumpet, the Santa Barbara musician left midway through a rehearsal.

“It was a hornet’s nest,” Karon said.

Other local musicians fear for their jobs but will not speak up about similar abuses at Salazar’s hands because they are “so afraid that they would rather be pushed and intimidated than stand up to him,” said Ingersoll, who also ia a music professor at Moorpark College. “Positions in an orchestra are so few and far between that, once a musician acquires one, he’ll do anything to keep it.”

Salazar insists that he is not pushing anyone out of the orchestra. He points to the Erwin hiring as evidence that he considers qualified local players. And Ventura resident Mark Hatchard points out that his own recent promotion to second violist demonstrates that a local musician can still get ahead in the Ventura County Symphony.

Attrition Aids Conductor

“Rather than firing local players,” Salazar explains, “what I’ve chosen to do is to let attrition take care of it.” And, indeed, of the eight Ventura County musicians who left the symphony in the five years before the 1987-88 season, four died, symphony figures show.

As for the musicians’ complaints, he says they can be chalked up to the artistic temperament: “Sometimes you have ego problems among artists and they tend to be sensitive,” he said.

Publicly, the board’s position is not to interfere in disputes between the musicians and the director in an effort to protect Salazar’s artistic integrity, board president Marshall C. Milligan says.

But privately, symphony officials acknowledge that the domestic vs. imports controversy has been brewing for a while.

“There are some local musicians who have been caught between where the symphony was . . . and where it’s going,” said Beesley, the symphony’s executive director.

Although the orchestra has always been ambitious, its pursuit of excellence accelerated with the approach of its 25th anniversary last year, observers say. In preparation for the event, symphony officials demoted longtime concertmaster Ann Tischer, replacing her with virtuoso Nina Bodnar, who became the first American in 46 years to win the prestigious Jacques Thibault-Marguerite Long Prize in Paris in the mid-1970s and has appeared with more than 30 orchestras.

Some musicians who played for the orchestra on a concert-by-concert basis found that their contracts were not being renewed. Community players of long standing, meanwhile, began to perceive themselves as the butt of increasingly hostile criticism.

“As a musician, you invest so much emotionally in your work that you face utter psychological destruction if you’re harshly criticized,” said a former player who asked not to be named. “Even an intermittent stream of nasty glances during a rehearsal is enough to make you lose sleep.”

The musicians, who earn about $25 for a rehearsal and $40 for a performance, stress that artistic fulfillment, not income, is the issue.

But both are threatened, they say, by the large pool of musicians attracted to the Los Angeles area by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a thriving network of smaller symphonies throughout the Southland. These musicians commute from one orchestra to another, sometimes playing with a different orchestra every night.

Sandra Sonderling, a member of the musician’s employee relations committee, attributes the Ventura County Symphony’s turmoil to “growing pains.”

“In going from a community group to a metropolitan orchestra, the interests are at loggerheads,” the Los Angeles cellist says. “The focus of an organization in its first years has to be different than when it starts maturing. You have to appeal to a broader base of the community by doing a wider range of pieces.”

Indeed, the symphony has become increasingly ambitious in the past five years, tackling such challenging works as Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.”

In fact, the orchestra’s season opened at the beginning of the month with what is widely acknowledged as one of Beethoven’s more difficult pieces, his Third Symphony, known as the “Eroica.”

Attendance Rises

Attendance, meanwhile, has continued to climb. Ten years ago, the symphony had only 600 season ticket-holders for its regular concerts in the 1,600-seat Oxnard Civic Auditorium, personnel manager Ila Winterbourne said. Today, the symphony has 1,200 season ticket-holders and sells out 94% of its concerts.

And growth will almost certainly continue. In light of the expected boom in the county’s population, symphony funding, about $400,000 annually, is expected to reach the $500,000 mark in two years. Within 10 years, symphony officials foresee a $1-million budget, a benchmark that would qualify the symphony for the higher ranking of regional symphony.

Symphony officials are optimistic that personnel policies passed last week by the board and being considered this week by the employee-relations committee would stem complaints. The policies, which are expected to be approved, call for a series of warnings and reviews. They also would set up a committee of orchestra members to evaluate, though not select, musicians being auditioned. The final word on hiring would continue to be Salazar’s.

The conflict, meanwhile, between the use of local and imported talent remains unresolved. The board has passed no policy to protect the interests of local musicians, but neither has it resolved to do away with them in favor of musicians outside the area.

“We decided to improve our orchestra, but we never articulated whether we would change our base,” Beesley says.

Typically, as an orchestra branches from its amateur roots, its board decides how it will be handling the sensitive issue of how to treat local musicians, says Joe Truskot, an official with the American Symphony Orchestra League, a Washington-based association for 800 of the nation’s 1,500 symphonies. “It’s a period,” he says, “when you’re seeking an identity.”

Facing the same pressures, the Nassau Symphony Orchestra on Long Island decided to hire only local musicians, he said. In the Tampa, Fla., area, several mid-sized symphonies that were sharing musicians decided to consolidate. In Santa Barbara, the musicians union has forced the local symphony to advertise and hire locally before looking for talent outside the area.

Ventura County’s other symphony, the small Conejo Symphony Orchestra, operates on a budget of $160,000. Local musicians, who account for about half of its 81 players, receive no pay and musicians from elsewhere receive only a nominal fee, office administrator Shirley Garrett said.

Looking Out for Its Own

The Ventura County Symphony musicians believe that the symphony has a responsibility to look out for its own.

“There isn’t anything wrong with having outsiders coming into play, provided that you can’t find local musicians,” Weiss says. “But there are local musicians who are competent--highly competent--with excellent backgrounds who are being overlooked.”

He believes a small orchestra like the Ventura symphony has “a dual function. One is to provide competent and qualified area musicians with the opportunity to share their talents and perform. The other is to provide quality musical entertainment to area residents.”

Without the blending of the two, the name of the Ventura County Symphony is “a misnomer,” says Theriault, the disgruntled timpanist. “It’s the Los Angeles orchestra.”

But Salazar disagrees: “Just because it’s the Cleveland Orchestra doesn’t mean that only people from Cleveland play in it. They try to get the best musician for the job. What we’re doing here is no different from what’s being done elsewhere.”

Salazar does note, however, that he is pleased when a hire happens to live in Ventura County, because it cuts commuting bills the orchestra must pay. He also acknowledges that local musicians tend to be more loyal and committed to the orchestra. But Salazar says he will not go out of his way to hire them.

“We do not raise $400,000 for the recreation of local musicians,” Salazar said. That money “is supposed to bring beautiful music to our audience.”

At the very least, the musicians say they regret that the symphony is no longer available to the gifted amateurs who used to make up the orchestra’s backbone. “Very few of the people moving here now will find their way into the symphony,” Weiss said. “They just don’t have a chance.”

This pains Widney, who remembers rehearsals when the orchestra successfully completed an especially tricky contemporary piece and then, at Salazar’s bidding, turned around and repeated the work “for the sheer joy of playing it.” He speaks of the “pregnant silence” that followed the rehearsal of a particularly moving work, when the musicians quietly packed up their instruments without speaking to each other because “we all knew we were feeling the same thing.”

Mahler ‘a Blast’

And he longs to tackle anew a certain lengthy and difficult Mahler symphony: “Each time we played that, it was such a blast that I always wished we could play it again, even though it was an hour long.”

“I miss it sometimes,” he said.

Ironically, the same forces that Salazar has set in motion as a music director now threaten him as a conductor, observers say. They claim that the orchestra is outgrowing Salazar, a clarinet player who set out for Ventura in the 1950s after completing a master’s degree in conducting. A professor, he says, had told him that, if he wanted to conduct a symphony, he had better build his own.

“He gets lost in the music score, loses beats, cues people at the wrong time and virtually has to follow the orchestra,” Weiss said.

Beesley acknowledges that “there will come a point when we need to make a change in musical directors. But that will be very traumatic for the orchestra and the audience.”

But Salazar dismisses the notion altogether: “I’m so much more than just a clarinet player. That’s like saying to an artist that you understand he paints with a No. 3 brush, and sometimes paints with the color blue.”