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