A Bittersweet Evening at the Symphony

Like a doomed opera heroine who manages to sing a final aria before expiring, the San Diego Symphony Orchestra played what appeared to be its last concert Saturday evening at Copley Symphony Hall. The swan song was brought about by the orchestra board of directors’ announcement last Tuesday that it would file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Tuesday this week. For the last six months, the board has waged an unsuccessful campaign to retire its debt, initially described as $2 million, later as $3 million. A seven-hour meeting Thursday held by San Diego Mayor Susan Golding, orchestra board President Elsie Weston and potential donors produced no new funding, but the participants did devise a plan to forestall bankruptcy. It called for closing the orchestra until Sept. 15, continuing to try to raise money and, if successful, reopening the orchestra in a downsized format. This proposal, however, was rejected by the orchestra musicians in a meeting held after Friday’s Symphony Hall concert. Under the plan, the musicians would have waived the right to file grievances or claims for unpaid salary and benefits.

At Saturday’s performance, music director Yoav Talmi was clearly moved by the warm response of the capacity crowd, a rarity for the orchestra in its 2,250-seat house. “This is an emotional evening for all of us,” he said from the podium after intermission. “I’m not sure the decision-makers of this city grasp the magnitude of these happenings. . . . I have decided not to say farewell. We must believe that this orchestra will remain. You have to keep on fighting. Always know that it is you that we have played for.”

The audience at Saturday’s concert was ironically festive, although numerous patrons likened the mood to a wake. Talmi was given a standing ovation before he conducted a note, and standing ovations became standard for the evening.

The scaled-back musical program reflected the orchestra’s dire straits. Instead of hearing, as originally scheduled, Jeffery Kahane play Ravel’s G-major Piano Concerto and the San Diego Master Chorale join the orchestra and narrator David Ogden Stiers in Berlioz’s rarely performed oratorio “Lelio,” the audience was given a modest, orchestra-only program of Mozart’s Symphony No. 29, the Debussy “Petite Suite,” and Brahms’ Third Symphony. Instead of the usual program magazine, patrons received two pages stapled together.

Talmi conducted with unusual vigor and animation, showing off the instrument he has nurtured in his six years as music director. The Mozart proved sunny and clearly focused, while Debussy’s easy-listening suite provided a showcase of solos for the orchestra’s brilliant woodwind players.

Under Talmi’s prodding, the Brahms Third Symphony aspired to heroic dimensions and, at times, achieved a heartfelt lyricism. The strong emotions of the evening, however, precluded the work’s more refined sonorities.

Off stage, the musicians reacted with despair and anger to last week’s turn of events.

“I feel this . . . is a crime,” said musicians’ spokesman Richard Levine, a cellist with the symphony since 1972. “Putting to death a symphony that is supported by San Diegans is a failure that can be attributed to the board and the mayor.”

Some patrons also blamed city officials for ignoring the plight of the orchestra. “San Diego is getting what it deserves,” said longtime subscriber Burton Jay. “They’ll spend $60 million to improve the stadium, but nothing to save the symphony. Without the symphony, San Diego will remain a provincial city.”

In truth, the city of San Diego allocates about $400,000 a year to the orchestra through its hotel-motel tax fund, and the $66.6 million recently voted for San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium will come from the sales of bonds to be repaid through higher ticket prices and parking fees at Chargers football games.

From the private sector, symphony board members have found scant support in a city that boasts no major corporate headquarters. Last week, Weston explained to reporters that past donors had rallied, but that there were not enough of them. She noted that Helen K. Copley, publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune, had contributed $550,000, and Ellen Revelle Eckis, widow of UC San Diego co-founder Roger Revelle, had contributed $700,000.

A major San Diego arts leader, not involved in the symphony issue, suggested that the community was worn out by the symphony’s continued pleas for money.

“People give to successes,” he said. “They do not give to bailouts.”

Over the last two decades, the San Diego Symphony has regularly flirted with bankruptcy. In the late 1970s, the board spent a $1-million Ford Foundation grant, which should have begun the symphony’s endowment, to retire its debts. When former music director David Atherton arrived in 1981, a gala fund-raiser and a $250,000 loan from a local bank saved the symphony from bankruptcy.

In 1986, less than a year after moving into its newly acquired and renovated concert hall, the board threatened bankruptcy, even after some $2 million was raised in an emergency fund drive. A resultant labor dispute with the musicians kept the hall dark for the 1986-87 season, and Atherton resigned in February 1987. After four seasons of solvency, then-executive director Wesley Brustad announced in 1992 another deficit of $900,000. Unable to retire this debt, Brustad resigned in February 1993. His successor Michael Tiknis, whose marketing flair increased attendance, was unable to erase the growing debt; he left two years later. The organization has been without an executive director since May 1995.

The orchestra’s crisis has made other local arts organizations uneasy. “We all live in the fantasy that if we make great music, everything will come out right,” observed David Chase, director of the La Jolla Symphony Chorus. “But the situation with the symphony proves that none of us is safe.”

* Kenneth Herman is a free-lance critic and writer in San Diego; Tony Perry is a Times staff writer.