How American orchestras are coping---a report by a British
   observer.  [Petroc Trelawney in The Spectator (London, 29
   November)] slightly condensed.

   The Los Angelese Times is more interested in cinema than high
   culture.  Yet it devoted two-thirds of its front page to the
   opening of the new Walt Disney Hall, home of the Los Angeles
   Philharmonic.  The inaugural concerts, featuring works by
   Lutoslawski, Ligeti, Ives and Adams, made a clear statement
   about the future direction ofthe orchestra.  Its eternally
   young-looking conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen has already announced
   he's going to move his contemporary music series into the new
   hall.  Two thousand three hundred seats are a lot to shift
   for a programme of modern works, but he is confident of selling
   out.  Meanwhile his outreach work in Hispanic areas of LA is
   already bearing fruit, bringing new audiences to the orchestra's
   mainstream programmes.

   In San Francisco, Michael Tilson Thomas is also highly regarded
   for his radical programming.  People have been queuing up to
   buy tickets for his hugely successful "Mavericks" seasons,
   examining American and now European musical pioneers.  His
   orchestra has led the way in America by launching its own
   in-house record label, as the London Symphony Orchestra and
   Halle have done in the UK.

   ...It is remarkable that the LA Philharmonic and the San
   Francisco Symphony have managed to reinvent themselves so
   successfully.  Change is difficult to bring about in the
   top-rank American orchestras---vast, inflexible organizations
   that dwarf their British counterparts.  On the platform, the
   New York Philharmonic fields the same number of players as
   the London Sympony Orchestra, but behind the scenes it has
   more than twice as many administrative staff.  Senior arts
   figures here accept that they have a problem---lavish pay
   deals and high staffing levels agreed during theboom years
   of the 1980s and 1990s are now strangling the big US orchestras.
   A rank-and-file violinist will earn a starting salary 60,000,
   compared with 30,000 at a leading British orchestra.  Musicians'
   contracts are thicker than the score of Mahler's Eight Symphony,
   and run to the most minute detail.

   Government funding is almost non-existent in the USA.  Though
   the National Endowment for the Arts is run by a former classical
   music critic, he has just 72 million to spend across all arts
   forms.  The Arts Council of England's annual budget is 335
   million.  When money is short, American orchestras have to
   turn to their corporate and private donors, and their own
   endowment funds.  In Pittsburgh, players recently donated
   $1000 each in order to shame local businesses into giving
   financial support.  At the New York Philharmonic, the falling
   stock market has cut the value of its endowments by 30%.  A
   downturn in ticket sales since 9/11 means its finances are
   pretty tight.  Yet the orchestra seems to be doing little to
   address its current malaise.

   ....American orchestras have always been very clever at
   engendering civic pride.  Citizens of LA, San Francisco,
   Cleveland and Boston feel they own a stake in their orchestra,
   even if they don't regularly attend its concerts.  In the old
   days, under conductors like Leonard Bernstein, New Yorkers
   were fully behind their orchestra.  Now it provokes little
   more than a shrug of the shoulders.  The NYPO seems to have
   become remote from all but its regular patrons.

Jon Gallant                and                    Dr. Phage