Chamber group removes sale sign

THE Beethoven Academie isn’t for sale after all. The beleaguered Belgian chamber orchestra recently put itself up for auction on British EBay after the government of Belgium unexpectedly announced it was cutting off the group’s subsidy for the next three years. But the Antwerp-based ensemble took itself off the block last Sunday, two days before the bidding was scheduled to end.

“We stopped the auction for moral and legal reasons,” Stephanie Adriaansen, the ensemble’s communications officer, said in an e-mail. “As you know, EBay forces the buyer to pay his highest bid and the seller to actually sell his goods. Problem is that in the end, we had nothing to sell, apart from people and this is of course illegal.”

The highest bid before the bidding was stopped was about $127,000.

“We are still hoping for a miracle,” Adriaansen said, but she added that the most important challenge facing the group was “how to provide a human job-ending for our musicians and staff.”

-- Chris Pasles