$50,000 Grant Revives Glendale Orchestra Season

Thanks to an eleventh-hour grant of $50,000, the Glendale Orchestra will be able to finish its 1995-96 season with a fifth and final concert.

The money from the Los Angeles-based Ralph M. Parsons Foundation came as welcome news to supporters, who feared that the symphony, once the cultural heart of Glendale, might not survive the year. The donation will underwrite an April 27 program featuring the Brahms Violin Concerto with soloist Robert Chen, and Brahms’ Symphony No. 2.

“I was ecstatic, I was beside myself,” said Glendale City Councilman Larry Zarian. “This was the shot in the arm that we needed.”

Plagued by rising costs, dwindling public support and changes in the musical tastes of the community, the orchestra had to cancel its concert last Sunday. It was unable to raise the $55,000 necessary to pay the musicians and other costs, even with a $25,000 advance on next season’s funding from the Glendale City Council.

“It’s the most wonderful news I’ve had in a long time,” Paul Kinney, president of the orchestra’s board of directors, said of the Parsons Foundation gift, announced Tuesday.

The grant means the orchestra will have the satisfaction of completing the season. “You take your goals in priority,” Kinney said. “Right after not dying next week is delivering the season.”

Kinney said the gift was especially welcome, given its source. Kinney characterized the Parsons Foundation as a prestigious local benefactor of civic and cultural causes.

“Coming from them, it’s a very profound vote of confidence and very heartening ‘Attaboy!’ to those of us on the board who have been fighting this uphill battle for a number of years.”

Today’s orchestra faces a different economic and cultural climate from the symphony’s salad days, as Kinney called the period from 1975 to 1985. The number of orchestra subscribers has slipped from a high of 2,500 in the mid-1980s to 700 this year. Between 1980 and 1996, the cost of putting on a season rose from $200,000 to $480,000. During that time, funding for the orchestra from the city of Glendale and other public sources fell from 25% in 1980 to less than 8%.

In 1993, Kinney said, the orchestra had an operating loss of $200,000 but broke even last season. The organization has been trying to raise money and build audiences in new ways, including establishing a Glendale Symphony home page on the World Wide Web.

Parsons Foundation board member Joseph Hurley said the group was alerted to the orchestra’s problem through newspaper accounts.

“This is a 70-year-old orchestra, Glendale is a wonderful community, and, if anybody ought to have a great symphony orchestra, it’s Glendale,” he said.

Hurley added that he believes the orchestra provides important common ground for the community. “We think if you let this [cultural institution] slip away,” it would be very hard to rebuild, he said.

According to Kinney, the gift is a reprieve, not a solution to long-term problems, such as the elimination of classical music education in most public schools. The grant, he said, gives the organization “time to regroup and refocus.”

As soon as the last concert is over, the board is planning a retreat. There, Kinney said, “We’ll do some hard soul-searching,” assessing where the orchestra now stands and where it might go.

Asked if the orchestra will have a season next year, Kinney paused before answering. “Will there be music out there that’s the results of our efforts? Yes,” he said. “Will it be a carbon copy of this last season or the season before? I don’t think we can say that.”

The fight to save the orchestra is far from over, Kinney said. “All these problems we’ve been facing, we’re still facing.”

But, for one more night at least, Glendale’s Alex Theatre will fill with the sound of Brahms.