Mozart Orchestra Tightens Belt and Schedule

Facing what music director Lucinda Carver calls “financial challenges,” the 25-year-old Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra has canceled the last concerts of its 2000-01 season. The group’s annual August appearance at the John Anson Ford Theatre has also been cut.

The move, Carver said, is part of a far-reaching belt-tightening and fund-raising effort to ensure the longevity of the orchestra. Programming for next season, which begins in October, will be announced shortly.

“We weren’t sure we had the $30,000 needed to pay the musicians,” said Carver, 40, a conductor and concert pianist who assumed her L.A. Mozart post in 1992. “Even if we did, we didn’t want to start out next year at zero, hoping for the best. For the past two to three years, we’ve had a cash flow problem--and none of us wants to see the orchestra make the endangered species list.”

The decision to cancel performances May 9 and 11 was made at an April 11 board meeting. After incoming board President C. Richard Neu, a senior economist at the Rand Corp., laid out the “hard truth,” Carver recalls, the group decided to take the “responsible” route. Musicians were notified the next day. Ticket-holders and subscribers are being informed of the change by phone and by mail.

The decision should come as no surprise to those attending the March 16 concert, after which Carver informed the audience that the orchestra was in a precarious state. As a result of her plea for help and a follow-up mail campaign, about $16,000 has been raised.

“It’s always delicate to announce that you’re having trouble--people don’t want to give money to an organization they think won’t make it,” Carver said. “The irony is that we’ve received our most glowing reviews this year. In a town full of entertainment options, our challenge is raising awareness.”

Though the orchestra’s $480,000 annual budget is relatively small, she said, a number of factors have turned up the heat. Under new IRS regulations the group had to pay its 27 to 35 musicians as employees, not freelancers--footing the bill for payroll taxes, which upped the artistic budget by 15%. The orchestra also initiated a series of pay increases to maintain parity with other organizations. Meanwhile, foundation moneys have been dwindling--or distributed over longer funding cycles.

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This year, the critically acclaimed ensemble also moved from the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, its longtime home, to the acoustically superior Zipper Hall, at the Colburn School of Performing Arts downtown. That led to the loss of sponsors based closer to the original site. And increasing the number of concerts didn’t help.

“Hoping to lure in people working downtown, we bit off more than we could chew,” said board President Virginia Van Osdel. “We scheduled Wednesday and Friday night performances of our four orchestral concerts--and the Wednesday nights didn’t sell. We didn’t realize the implications of our move: Though subscription sales have increased, single-ticket and nonsubscriber sales have gone down.”

To provide a buffer, the group hopes to build an endowment, mount an aggressive fund-raising campaign and add board members with strong corporate connections. The number of performances will also be cut in half--totaling five instead of 10. In addition to two chamber concerts, there will be three orchestral events--down from four--with only one performance of each.

“I’ve learned an awful lot about that awkward marriage of music and money--an ongoing fact of life,” Carver said. “We’ll probably end the year in the black now that we’ve canceled the concert. Still, this was a painful decision--and a frightening wake-up call.”