Symphony Cuts Musician, Staff Pay : Deficit: Three weeks will also be trimmed from season as players and management reach accord to deal with a $900,000 shortfall.

Deciding to solve their financial problems internally, San Diego Symphony management and musicians agreed Thursday to delete three weeks from the 1992-93 season and to cut the players’ wages by 7.1% for the contract year that began Oct. 1. Administrative salaries were also reduced by 4% to 20%, and 4.5 administrative staff positions were eliminated.

“We are not going to have any ‘save our symphony’ campaigns,” Executive Director Wesley Brustad said Thursday after the vote by the orchestra musicians to ratify the accord worked out the previous night. Brustad was careful to distance his position from the crisis campaigns the symphony undertook in the community in 1986, when the organization was facing bankruptcy and ceased performing for an entire season.

“We are taking care of our problems internally. Additionally, members of the board of directors are committed to give more and get more money,” he said.

The symphony’s most recent cash crisis, a $900,000 deficit for fiscal 1992 announced on Sept. 30, caused management to pay orchestra musicians only one-third of their semimonthly paychecks on Oct. 15. For the last three weeks, players, management, and board members have been meeting to resolve the problem. The overall reductions in expenditures will bring the fiscal 1993 budget down to $6.67 million, compared to expenditures of $7.74 million last year.

“Although the impact of these cuts on our small income is severe--a bitter pill--the musicians agreed to them in exchange for commitments from the board of directors to be responsive to musicians’ needs and ideas,” violist Lachlan McBane said in a press release issued jointly by musicians and management Thursday evening. McBane, the musicians’ spokesman and a member of the orchestra’s negotiating team, was not available for comment.

The new accord brings the weekly base wage of a symphony musician to $750 per week for 33 weeks, or $24,750 annually. Last year, the musicians’ contract gave them $740 per week for 36 weeks, or $26,640. According to Joe Pallazola, president of American Federation of Musicians, Local 325, the three-year contract signed in 1991 guaranteed the players for the 1992-93 season 36 weeks of work at $780 per week, or $28,080 annually. With the shorter season, the actual reduction in the players’ income is 11%.

The three weeks excised from the current season included one Young People’s Concert, scheduled for Nov. 18-22, and two WinterPops programs, scheduled for Feb. 5-6 and April 1-3.

“We did not touch the core of what we do, our (classical) Encore and Ovation series,” Brustad explained.

Thursday’s accord also adds three players to the symphony board of directors. Principal bassoonist Dennis Michel, who has served as the sole orchestra representative on the board since 1987, was the first player to join the symphony’s board of directors. Each of the four musicians will serve on one of board’s four standing committees: executive, development, finance and marketing-public relations.

Brustad characterized the negotiations, which ended at 1:30 a.m. Thursday, as cordial and gentlemanly. But he noted that the symphony was not “out of the woods” with the accord and would need continued community support to reach its budget.