San Diego Symphony Receives Record Donation

San Diego Symphony officials on Monday will announce the largest single gift ever to an American orchestra, a donation from Qualcomm Chief Executive Irwin M. Jacobs and his wife, Joan K. Jacobs, that sources say will be “significantly larger” than $40 million.

Symphony officials, who plan to reveal the gift and launch an endowment campaign in a ceremony at Copley Symphony Hall, said they were delaying release of further details in deference to the Jacobses, who are returning this weekend from a business trip to Asia.

The San Diego Union-Tribune, citing unnamed sources, hinted Wednesday that the gift could be as much as $100 million. A publicist close to Qualcomm and the symphony, Emile Barrios, vice president of the Townsend Agency, labeled the $100-million figure “speculation.” But he said the gift definitely would top $40 million, a prediction symphony officials did not challenge.

That figure is significant, said Jack McAuliffe, vice president of the New York-based American Symphony Orchestra League, because it is the benchmark in single gifts to orchestras.

In November 1996, the family of Carnival Cruise Lines founder Ted Arison gave that amount in stock to the Miami Beach-based New World Symphony. In December 2000, the family of Enterprise Rent-A-Car founder Jack Taylor donated the same sum to the St. Louis Symphony.

If the Jacobs gift “is what it’s rumored to be, it’s a very nice day for San Diego,” McAuliffe said.

The money is earmarked for the symphony’s endowment fund. For the orchestra, which reorganized under bankruptcy protection in 1996, the announcement accelerates a striking recovery after decades of tenuous finances.

“It certainly is a new world for us,” said Douglas Gerhard, the orchestra’s chief executive since 2000.

The symphony’s current $8.8-million annual budget, generated from donations, grants and ticket sales, puts it among the nation’s 40 largest orchestras. Its endowment is only about $1 million, a figure dwarfed by the $200-million nest eggs enjoyed by such established orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony. (The Los Angeles Philharmonic, on the brink of launching an endowment drive, has about $54.4 million.) Endowments are invested and viewed as indicators of financial stability; their earnings go toward operating expenses.

The San Diego orchestra’s already improving finances allowed it to sign a five-year contract in October that gradually extends the musicians’ season from 26 to 41 weeks and boosts base salaries from $27,000 to $45,750.

Gerhard, who declined to comment on the size of the gift, said, “We’re going through a long-range planning process even as we speak.”

Atop his list is a musical director to succeed Jung-Ho Pak, who is due to step down in May at the end of the 2001-02 season. Gerhard said he and his colleagues are considering about 20 candidates and expect Monday’s disclosures to help San Diego “put its best foot forward” in courting candidates.

Overall, he said, he expects to see “a much more active symphony, performing more concerts, particularly more classical concerts” as opposed to pops concerts. Pops concerts, which tend to draw larger crowds with more familiar, less adventurous repertory, now amount to about 45% of the orchestra’s performances.

Because the organization would only be able to spend the gift’s annual earnings, not the principal, McAuliffe said, “they can’t waste it.

“It is going to provide some fiscal security, and that allows you to take a few artistic risks, without fear of having to turn out the lights afterward.”

For the Jacobs family, the gift is the largest gesture so far in an already expansive philanthropic career. Irwin M. Jacobs, a 68-year-old former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and one of the earliest faculty members recruited to the University of California’s new San Diego campus in 1966, went on to co-found Qualcomm in 1985 and has steered the wireless communications company to global prominence and $2.7 billion in annual revenue.

In 1997, San Diego’s city-owned stadium, home to the Padres and Chargers, took on the name Qualcomm Stadium (at least through 2017) after Jacobs’ company agreed to pay $18 million to complete an expansion project.

In 1998, the Jacobses donated $15 million to UC San Diego’s engineering school, which was renamed in their honor.

Their involvement with the symphony goes back many years. In 1993, the couple contributed $500,000 for improvements to Copley Hall. And this November they offered the orchestra a matching grant of $300,000 in a bid to spur donations from other backers.

“Given the times that we live in, they wanted to be sure that the San Diego community continued to be responsive to the symphony’s needs,” said Gerhard, who noted that the $300,000 was matched in about two weeks.