Music Institutions Forced to Pay Piper for Expansion in Early 1980s

“Sadder but wiser” might be the appropriate epitaph for classical music in San Diego during the 1980s. For the city’s two major music institutions, the San Diego Symphony and San Diego Opera, the 1980s began with a growth binge for which everyone paid dearly in the decade’s second half. Under the leadership of Ian Campbell, who became San Diego Opera’s general director in August, 1983, the company dealt with its debt problems quietly, without a crisis atmosphere. Campbell, who succeeded the visionary but free-spending Tito Capobianco, almost immediately trimmed back the number of operas the company presented each season and eliminated expensive superstars from its productions.

The San Diego Symphony, on the other hand, played out its financial and labor crises in full public view. In May, 1980, the local orchestra achieved the status of “major orchestra,” a designation bestowed by the American Symphony Orchestra League, although the symphony board bought this rating by depleting the symphony’s endowment and consistently living beyonds its means. By the early ‘80s, the orchestra’s chronic fiscal troubles won it the unenviable sobriquet, “the financially troubled San Diego Symphony,” which was the organization’s most frequent description in print.

In spite of living with the specter of insolvency throughout the first half of the decade, the San Diego Symphony pushed forward on an unprecedented expansion program. Under the leadership of music director David Atherton, a young, upcoming British conductor who joined the orchestra in October, 1981, the size of the orchestra grew from 77 to 89 contract players, and its season grew to an unprecedented 45 weeks. Atherton’s success in improving the orchestra’s musical level was almost universally acknowledged, and he added the typical accouterments of a first-rank orchestra. UC San Diego music professor Bernard Rands was appointed composer in residence, and Atherton’s fellow Briton Richard Hickox was named associate conductor.

Having acquired the downtown San Diego’s rococo Fox Theatre in 1984, the symphony moved into its completely renovated new home in November, 1985. The lavish inaugural celebrations belied the organization’s true financial condition, however, and, after a mere four months in what was now called Symphony Hall, the orchestra again stared bankruptcy in the face.

M.B. “Det” Merryman, the symphony’s board president at the time, announced that unless the symphony could raise $2 million in March, 1986, it would go under. The surprise to the community was not that $2.4 million was raised in an heroic 10-day marathon, but that even after such a successful campaign, symphony management still projected an $800,000 deficit for the 1985-86 season. The orchestra’s first season in Symphony Hall was almost its last. There was no 1986-87 season for the San Diego Symphony.

“Fiscally, everybody had wonderful dreams and ambitions,” said Wesley Brustad, the symphony’s current executive director, who was hired in the summer of 1986. “But these were far beyond the community’s capability--and by that I don’t mean the capacity, because the capacity of the community was there to fund them. So there were these tremendous ambitions on the part of everybody--the board, the musicians, the music director, the staff. It all collapsed.”

The symphony collapsed at the feet of the newly arrived Brustad, whose administrative track record included restoring the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra to firm financial footing. Negotiations in the fall of 1986 for a new contract with the symphony musicians never came close to mutually agreeable terms, so Brustad and board president Herbert Solomon canceled the entire 1986-87 season. The musicians called this action a lockout, and struggled for the remainder of the season to present their own modest series of concerts in Civic Theatre and in El Cajon’s East County Performing Arts Center. While these programs boosted the morale of many orchestra musicians, they did not begin to fill the musical void of a darkened Symphony Hall.

Atherton resigned as music director in February, 1987. He had lost the confidence of many symphony players, and he could not persuade the board to get the orchestra playing again. When a contract between the symphony board and the musicians was finally announced on June 1, 1987, the terms called for a significantly diminished orchestra. The players would begin their 1987-88 season with a mere 32-week contract and an annual base salary some $2,000 less than they had received in 1985-86. The size of the orchestra was reduced to 81 players, and they were without a music director and concert master. A total of 17 chairs were vacant when the orchestra opened its 1987-88 season in November, 1987.

Since the orchestra’s return, it has functioned without a music director and has learned to live within its annual budget. Audiences have slowly returned to Symphony Hall, but a house of 70% paid admission is still a “good” night for the symphony.

“Now we are looking at history and being careful,” said Brustad, who has been the symphony’s chief architect of recovery. “That’s a major change for this institution; we are rooted in reality. But we are not yet at a point where the community has taken hold of this symphony.”

Atherton, who now is music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, looks at that same history with a different interpretation. He does not believe that his ambitions and goals for the symphony were too large for the city’s capabilities.

“In fact, when you look beyond the week-to-week events and see the symphony in its broadest parameters, it is one of the few--I believe there are about eight in America--that owns its own hall,” he said. “Buying the hall was heavily criticized at the time, but it may be one of its greatest strengths.”

The hall and its restoration, however, account for the symphony’s $4-million debt, a problem it will have to resolve in the next decade, according to Brustad.

“That’s the only debt we’ve got,” he said, “and debt retirement is on hold in terms of a public campaign. We have to continue to balance annual budget and run in the black, or our ability to get capital funds will be diminished even more.”

The appointment last April of 46-year-old Israeli conductor Yoav Talmi as the symphony’s music director designate, and the peaceful settlement of another two-year contract between the symphony board and the musicians this fall, are hopeful signs for the 1990s at Symphony Hall. Talmi, a serious, mild-mannered but resolute musician, was the one candidate for the post upon whom all the parties--players, board and management--could readily agree.

In October, just before the 1989-90 symphony season opened, Brustad announced the appointment of Robert Shaw as the orchestra’s principal guest conductor. The eminent music director emeritus of the Atlanta Symphony and noted authority on choral music had been the San Diego Symphony’s music director from 1953-57. An energetic conductor, even at a venerable 73, Shaw has also proved to be a solid box office attraction in recent appearances as guest conductor with the San Diego Symphony.

San Diego Opera entered the 1980s believing that the sky was the limit. Under the charismatic Capobianco, the company produced eight major operas at Civic Theatre each season. In 1980, three of opera’s reigning superstars--Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills--graced local opera productions. Typical of Capobianco’s penchant for spectacle, he coaxed Sills and Sutherland to appear on stage together--for the first time, as the publicity shouted--in Strauss’ operetta “Die Fledermaus” in October, 1980.

Two of Capobianco’s favored projects were his Opera Center, a seasonal training center for budding opera singers operated in conjunction with San Diego State University, and his summer Verdi Festival. Started in 1978, the festival presented a pair of Verdi operas, usually the revival of an obscure early opus with a familiar opera from the composer’s pen. While this artistically laudable endeavor brought music critics from afar, it did not lure patrons in numbers sufficient to support the festival. The resultant friction between Capobianco and the opera board of directors over continuing the Verdi Festival caused the general director to resign in March, 1983.

Marianne Flettner, the opera’s artistic administrator, recounts an anecdote that captures the Verdi Festival’s plight.

“One night I ushered Sherrill Milnes’ wife into Civic Theatre when he was singing ‘Simone Boccanegra’ for the Verdi Festival. She was shocked to see only 1,000 people in the house (which seats 3000). The next morning she was even more dismayed to learn that at the same hour some 40,000 San Diegans attended the KGB Chicken’s birthday at a Padres game in San Diego Stadium.”

Campbell, an Australian impresario who had come from the staff of the Metropolitan Opera, confronted San Diego Opera’s debt problem head on, realizing that the Verdi Festival and the Opera Center would have to cease if he was to balance the company books. The final installment of the Verdi Festival was presented in the summer of 1984, less than a year after Campbell’s arrival in San Diego as the new general director. Sutherland was featured in “I Masnadieri,” and her appearance marked the end of the superstar era for the local company.

Although Campbell did not publicly announce his company’s debt--which he later admitted had risen to $750,000--he brought his staff into his confidence, something Capobianco had not done, according to Flettner. The 1985-86 season was further curtailed to a mere four productions of major operas--half the number of Capobianco’s heyday--a formula that prevailed until the current 1989-90 season, which will present five operas. Such economies paid off for Campbell and the opera board, however, when all of the opera debt was unceremoniously retired in June, 1987.

Earlier this year, Campbell was able to confidently state: “In the top 15 American opera companies, we are the one with the largest cash surplus. That makes me happy in terms of stability, but, of course, the whole purpose of an opera company is to create interesting art.”

One of Campbell’s experiments of high artistic merit, a series of contemporary chamber operas staged at the Old Globe Theatre, met the same fate as Capobianco’s Verdi Festival when it did not pan out at the box office. Peter Maxwell Davies’ “The Lighthouse,” directed by Jack O’Brien and conducted by the company’s associate conductor, Karen Keltner, launched the critically praised Old Globe effort in 1986, and a pair of more familiar Gian Carlo Menotti one-acts closed it the following summer.

San Diego Opera faces the 1990s more confidently than any other San Diego music institution. Its expanding season boasts two new productions and a relatively recent 20th-Century work, Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites.” The company’s education program for the schools and the community is a model both for its variety of approaches and quality of offerings. In spite of some unexciting seasons, the company has maintained the loyalty of its supporters. Each season, 85% of its subscribers renew, and attendance at Civic Theatre for the company’s performances averages 93%.

Fortunately, not all of San Diego music’s past decade can be contained in red-ink horror stories. UC San Diego’s music department, long known for its leadership in the area of contemporary music, captured the spotlight on several occasions. In 1984, resident composer Bernard Rands won the Pulitzer Prize in music for his composition “Canti del Sole” for tenor and orchestra. Last March, Pulitzer lightning again struck UCSD when Roger Reynolds won the coveted music prize for his “Whispers Out of Time,” an extended work for string orchestra.

In 1975, Rands founded SONOR, an ensemble of faculty and graduate students devoted to contemporary music performance, and its stature grew through the early 1980s. Although Rands left UCSD in 1985, SONOR recorded his “Canti del Sole” for CRI records the following year. In August, 1988, SONOR was the first American ensemble to be sponsored for a week’s residency at West Germany’s Darmstadt International Festival for New Music.

Summer festivals suddenly became fashionable in the 1980s. The La Jolla Chamber Music Society imported a scaled-down version of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival from 1982-84. Having discovered a late-summer market for this product, in 1986 the society began its own series, SummerFest. Under the artistic direction of Heiichiro Ohyama, principal violist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the two-week festival at La Jolla’s Sherwood Auditorium continues to attract high-caliber chamber musicians who have eagerly returned to this well-administered and popular summer festival.

A few local musicians continue to participate in SummerFest, a reminder that the La Jolla society began its existence as the La Jolla Chamber Orchestra, a local instrumental ensemble. The society gradually phased out its chamber orchestra in the early 1980s in favor of importing smaller touring chamber ensembles with instant name recognition, such as the Beaux Arts Trio and the Tokyo String Quartet. With a pair of downtown San Diego series added in the late 1980s, an international orchestra series and a series of solo performers, the society has become the area’s premiere importer of classical music.

David Atherton reentered the local music scene in 1989 with his Mainly Mozart Festival held at the Old Globe in June. With the accent on music for chamber orchestra, conducted by the British maestro, the festival carved its own niche on the local summer schedule. Designed along the lines of established Mozart festivals in New York and San Francisco, the festival had no trouble finding a local audience and will announce its 1990 programming next month.

No summary of the 1980s would be complete without a list of casualties. Three chamber orchestras did not make the grade: the Nautilus Chamber Orchestra, the Pacific Chamber Ensemble and the Monteverdi Chamber Orchestra. Pacific Chamber Opera, a troupe devoted to operetta and semiprofessional opera stagings, also drowned in a sea of red ink in 1988. Perhaps the least lamented casualty is the 1988 Batiquitos Festival, a summer-long festival of performing and educational pretensions centered on a site south of Carlsbad. Under the bizarre direction of Del Mar violinist Michael Tseitlin, the mismanaged festival was not repeated.

Even David Atherton attributed some of San Diego’s musical malaise in the 1980s to climate.

“Commitment to the arts tends to be rather superficial in Southern climates. Look at south Florida, for example. For all of its wealth, there’s not a major symphony there. And in the south of Europe, the arts flourish in a rather haphazard way. Where the climate is cold, Pittsburgh or Minneapolis, for example, people tend to look to the arts for a kind of spiritual warmth.”

Perhaps San Diego should pray for another ice age to warm up its cultural climate.