Orchestra’s Outlook Is Sunny but Hazy

As Deborah Borda, newly appointed managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, moved into her office this week, she inherited an orchestra regarded as musically expert, fiscally troubled and psychologically fragile, according to a sample of insiders and outside observers interviewed by The Times.

The orchestra has been without a full-time leader since June when Willem Wijnbergen, Borda’s predecessor, resigned, citing serious issues dividing him and the organization. Music director Esa-Pekka Salonen has just begun a long-planned sabbatical that will take him off the podium for the next calendar year. And for the 1998-99 fiscal year, the Philharmonic expects to post its biggest deficit ever.

The good news is primarily on the aesthetic side of the ledger. Salonen, and his orchestra, are considered bright lights on the classical scene, drawing excellent reviews at home and on tour.

“The Los Angeles Philharmonic has the most adventurous and coherent programming of any major orchestra,” said Joe Horowitz, an orchestra consultant and scholar who’s written five books on classical music. “And they’ve never sounded better.”

Salonen himself is cautiously upbeat: “This has been one of the most difficult years in the history of the Philharmonic--certainly the most complicated during my tenure,” he said. “But considering the fact that people were so stressed out, things came together remarkably fast.”

If the conductor’s sabbatical is inconvenient from a managerial and box-office perspective, Borda can rest easy on a couple of other counts. First, Salonen’s continued leadership is a given. Signed up through the fall of 2002, he has pledged to remain at work strategizing and planning at the Philharmonic during his time off. Additionally, a six-year contract between the Philharmonic and the Musicians Union, finalized in September 1999, ensures the continued quality and loyalty of the orchestra. Management-musician relations at the Philharmonic have long been cordial--absent the fractious labor disputes that marked Borda’s tenure at the New York Philharmonic.

She can also take comfort in the fact that the Philharmonic’s longest-running soap opera, the building of Disney Hall, is approaching a happy conclusion. The orchestra’s home-to-be in the 2002-2003 season is, at long last, underway.

More worrisome is the financial end. The orchestra’s current operating budget is $47 million, the third largest in the U.S. (behind Boston and Chicago). And the 1998-99 deficit, says board President Robert Weingarten, is “projected to be worse than in years past”--larger than the previous high ($1.9 million in 1991) and up from $518,000 the previous year.

He and others lay much of the blame on nonrecurring costs: money paid out to settle two contractual problems--one involving a change of food concessions at the Hollywood Bowl and the other related to Wijnbergen’s departure. The extent of the shortfall won’t be known until an audit is finished later this month, but some support staff was cut last November.

Stopping the Decline in Total Ticket Sales

A more deep-seated problem is a lagging box-office take. The Hollywood Bowl, which the Philharmonic programs each summer, accounts for two-thirds of the organization’s total ticket sales. In the last few years, revenues have risen as the number of events and ticket prices increased. Since 1991, however, attendance had fallen.

Last season stopped the decline--but barely. Total ticket sales were up by 125 for the summer season. The turnout for classical music increased, and world music drew well. Upping the number of jazz concerts from five to eight increased revenues for that genre, but diluted the audience for each.

For the 1999-2000 season, subscriptions at the 3,082-seat Dorothy Chandler Pavilion are up from roughly 19,000 to 21,000. Still, 1998-99 was a mixed bag. Single-ticket sales increased but subscriptions declined, and average attendance dropped to 1,800 from 2,000 the year before.

“We used to be above 2,500 in average attendance at the Pavilion,” said Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn. Board Chairman Barry Sanders, “and we hope to crawl back up.”

Why the difficulty in drawing crowds? Some point to the size of the multipurpose Chandler Pavilion, well above the 2,500-seat capacity experts consider the outer limit for solvency, good acoustics and intimacy. Others claim that Salonen programs too much new music, always a tougher sell. Wijnbergen’s policy of offering subscribers series with varying amounts of contemporary fare was a positive step, they say.

Programming, in general, has been insufficiently promoted, most of those interviewed agreed. Salonen and others point to a lack of continuity, as marketing executives came and went. “Marketing has been our Achilles’ heel,” says principal oboe David Weiss. “It’s Borda’s biggest challenge.”

Another focus for Borda will be the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall, which, with its reduced capacity (2,290 seats), specially designed acoustics and potential drawing power for artists and audiences, should be a major asset for the orchestra. Pulling the project off--making sure it gets built on time and programmed effectively--is anxiety-producing, Salonen concedes, since the world--and, more important, Los Angeles--will be watching.

“Disney Hall could do for us what Gehry’s Guggenheim did for Bilbao [Spain],” said board member Robert Bookman.

An Endowment of Only $50 Million

Another challenge is the orchestra’s measly $50-million endowment--barely more than the operating budget. “The common wisdom is that we should have three to four times our yearly expenditures as New York, San Francisco and Pittsburgh do,” said former Managing Director Ernest Fleischmann.

Weingarten maintains that arts organizations are different from other businesses. “Revenues and expenses will never be in balance so donations are always essential,” he said.

Fund-raising is complicated by the fact that Los Angeles lacks the tradition of giving common to New York, Boston and Chicago. The money here is newer. Networks and studios, sources point out, have tunnel vision. And few other corporations, often active in philanthropy, call Los Angeles home.

“We don’t even have the major corporate headquarters San Francisco has--Wells Fargo, B of A, TransAmerica, Chevron, Pacific Gas & Electric, just for starters,” said Richard Colburn, an honorary life director of the Philharmonic, whose money financed the Colburn School of Performing Arts.

Borda’s biggest hurdle, everyone agrees, will be audience development, a problem for classical music organizations nationwide but complicated here by the Angeleno lifestyle. “Creating ‘Casual Saturday’ concerts, one of Borda’s attempts to broaden audience back East, would never work here,” said arts patron Betty Freeman. “On weekends, people go to the beach or just relax. No one wants to get on the freeways.”

Geographic sprawl and a mosaic of ethnic groups make outreach that much harder, suggests Philharmonic director of development Emily Laskin. “There’s little identification with the whole, as we learned on New Year’s Eve,” she says. “Pasadena residents give to Pasadena entities; people in the Valley give to the Valley YMCA. If we were the Sherman Oaks Symphony we’d be in better shape. And burgeoning [ethnic] communities feel they have to support their own.”

With Disney Hall in the works, and the regular season and Hollywood Bowl to contend with, Borda has said her Los Angeles assignment is like managing the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall and Tanglewood at once.

“Its three-pronged nature makes this job one of the biggest in classical music,” said Charles Olton, president and chief executive of the American Symphony Orchestra League. “Still, it’s a great opportunity. Momentum is a factor in music--and the Los Angeles Philharmonic is on the fast track.”