<p>Yet another opera company closing......what a shame!
<a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-san-diego-opera-closing-20140319,0,1123067.story#axzz2wT6mEvLA">http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-san-diego-opera-closing-20140319,0,1123067.story#axzz2wT6mEvLA</a></p>
<p>Yes, I read that this morning. I was genuinely shocked, in the past they have always been able to stay within their budget. I guess “donor fatigue” has hit San Diego hard. They have not been effective in drawing in a younger upscale generous new crowd.
All that and even the Met is struggling mightily.
<a href=“The Met: what’s really wrong? « parterre box - "The most essential blog in opera!" – New York Times | Where opera is king and you, the readers, are queens.”>http://parterre.com/2014/03/18/the-met-whats-really-wrong/</a></p>
<p>Another one bites the dust. The Met plays to half-empty houses while thankfully, Chicago continues to thrive because they make it affordable to students and mix in new productions with recitals and classical musical theatre. When one can attend a performance in Vienna for 10 Euros (student tickets in the parterre) or standing room for 4 Euros, yet it is a minimum of $27 for a Met HD broadcast in a movie theatre here, we don’t have to look too far to understand why opera is considered “elitist” or “obsolete” in the US. Sad…</p>
<p>Vienna can afford to charge those prices since it is heavily subsidized by the government. That’s why European houses give full year contracts to artists, American houses ----not. With the exception of the Met and who knows how long that will last. LA Opera makes tickets affordable to students as well,and the performances are hardly half empty, but they are heavily dependent on large donations, just like most other American houses. I was shocked to read that the Met broadcasts are a “break even” proposition. Those numbers do not make sense.</p>
<p>The Met HD broadcasts cost a lot to produce, so it wouldn’t surprise me they are break even. The movie theater ticket price represents the theater’s cut as well, and if you ever go outside the Met when they are doing an HD broadcast, it is pretty amazing the amount of people involved…all very high paid people, not to mention the cut the stagehands and such get at the Met as extra for doing a broadcast (don’t get me going on that; while the met stagehands do a very difficult job, a lot of the people working places like Carnegie Hall are ridiculously overpaid, sorry, the stage manager at Carnegie Hall makes 500k a year…). …so it is expensive. Though with the Met opera broadcasts, they are underwritten so I am a bit surprised they break even, given that, but it is expensive.</p>
<p>What a lot of these places are facing is an aging audience, that in some ways is dying out, along with cutbacks that the big companies used to do…take a look at the met or carnegie Hall or NY Phil and you see a lot of the big financial companies and such, but the people responsible for that are aging, and the new people taking over are of a generation that doesn’t quite have the same attitude that arts patronage means business. Guys like Sandy Weil (Citigroup), Bruce Wasserstein, Henry Kravis, and the list goes on, were big patrons, but the people coming up? Not so much. I don’t know if those guys were particularly more cultured, or the younger guys running the firms are less, but it definitely is affecting things. In some ways the arts organizations can blame themselves, they really haven’t done that great a job creating new audiences, and they are paying a price for it I think. There is an article in today’s Times about how museums are doing everything they can to attract the attention of younger people who have the potential to be donors, and it kind of mirrors what arts organizations face across the board. No simple answers to this, one hope is that with age comes appreciation of the arts, but it isn’t automatic, and a lot of the arts groups don’t do much to dispel the notion that their stuff is snooty, elite and boring as dust, which is sad.</p>
<p>I saw the difference with the LA Phil, I went there last year when my S was auditioning in LA, and they had a very different audience, there were young people there on dates, I saw people in their 20’s and 30’s, young married couples, and people from usually underrepresented groups, like Hispanic folks and others, it was kind of heartening, and I suspect some of that is because of Dudamel and the excitement around him (interestingly, the program featured a lot of ‘new music’, that can turn off young audiences, but it also featured a fantastic piece by John Adams, who conducted it…). </p>
<p>Our symphony has tickets available at a price point which allows for dragging a kid there who may or may not really want to be there. They do develop an appreciation over time - that’s how it worked for sis and I as well. Our opera is priced such that I wouldn’t even go with my husband who really wouldn’t want to be there, let alone the kids. It’s tough to expose a new audience over time that way. When I go, I go with a friend who already loves it.</p>
<p>I may not get to the Met as much as I’d like but have been several times in the past 2-3 years and there is always a full house. Here and there there may be empty seats for some productions that may not attract much of an audience but the Met does have rush tickets and they have rush tickets for seniors so those tickets get snapped up at around $25 a seat.</p>
<p>The Cleveland Orchestra has dramatically increased attendance with it’s Student and Young Professionals programs and are rapidly building a new and much younger audience base. My D pays $20 for a student ticket to the Chicago Lyric Opera, sitting in a $200 seat- she has seen every production this season, some more than once- as well as special event recitals and Chicago Symphony concerts. The institutions make an active commitment to attract students- they can buy their tickets on line and go right into the facility without the hassle of lotteries or lines. So change has come to some cities and worked really well.</p>
<p>@bookmama22- Yes, there are some shows at the Met which do fill the house, or pretty near it but under Peter Gelbs’s management there have been far too many productions for which even papering the house doesn’t even come close to putting bodies in 3800 seats (Saturday matinees excepted). Only 50 of the up to 200 rush tickets are set aside for seniors- I wish they’d increase that number though, and while some students do take advantage of the rush program, I know far more who sit in the far regions of the Family Circle. It’s flat out too expensive for the average person and for those planning a trip to NYC for the purpose of the opera, it’s either shell out for very costly seats,queue for the weekday rush seats or enter the iffy lottery for the weekend tickets. HD tickets have gone up in price and the cost for the encore broadcast is now the same, whereas it used to be a few dollars less.
The increase isn’t coming from money paid to singers and musicians but something had to fund those new and very costly productions- ticket prices aren’t covering the nut for those and the administrative salaries so endowments are being tapped and prices keep going up.
As musica pointed out, government funding keeps European houses afloat and that also allows them to scrap a bad production and not have to keep the turkey in rotation for years. Despite our hopes, I doubt that will ever be the case in the US.</p>
<p>@saintfan, where are you located? Let’s go to the opera!</p>
<p>Seattle :-h </p>
<p>Yes Musicprnt. Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil have really grabbed the attention of the Los Angeles population. Fascinating, smart, local, and fun. Friday nights are “casual Fridays”. Even the orchestra goes casual and meets and greets the public after the performance. <a href=“http://www.laphil.com/tickets/series-detail/casual-fridays-1”>www.laphil.com/tickets/series-detail/casual-fridays-1</a> LA Opera has taken a few cues from them. Better food (hey it’s LA–that’s important among the younger hip crowd), special social events for young singles, and lots of local outreach from Maestro Conlon. The revitalization of downtown is a big part of this. And any arts organization who neglects to market to the well heeled under 30 crowd, does so at it’s own peril. I think this was San Diego Opera’s problem, they depended on the octogenarian big donors. They are disappearing fast.</p>
<p>musica-
Yeah, they are doing something right, and you are correct, some of it has to do with the revitalization of downtown LA. I did a lot of wandering down there, it was fun to still see buildings over in the jewelry and garment district that looked like scenes from a Noir movie, though I suspect give it 10 years and those will be gone…but it isn’t just that, the area around Lincoln Center, the whole upper west side, is now very high end and gentrified, and they don’t attract much of a younger crowd. I knew it was LA, I kid you not, when at one of the bars in the concert hall, there were two young women, dressed very stylishly, who were, well,obviously into each other, something not likely to see at the NY Phil… Someone I know was relating a story about the NY Phil, apparently either their son or nephew or something conducted the NY Phil not long ago, and the person said that when he was growing up, the kid used to conduct his stuffed animals, and my acquiantance’s thought was the animals were probably a lot more alive to conduct…</p>
<p>The groups have to realize that the old models are not working, that serialist music is not going to draw young audiences in droves, and that they have to figure out how to make it relevant to them. The vision of going to the symphony or opera as this stuffy, elitist place to go, has always been out there, but one of the reasons governments in europe support the arts is because culturally they are still relevant; while pop music and dance music and such are hugely popular, they can attract younger people to the programs. I saw a video of the Berlin Philharmonic at their summer home, and they had a crowd of 25,000, and a lot of them were young/younger, not all geriatric.What amazes me is they don’t get it, I saw a concert marketed to young people (meaning kids in their 20s, 30’s), and they had an organ piece that was atonal and difficult to listen to as the lead piece…</p>
<p>I remember reading about Walter Damrosch, who late 19th/early 20th century, was conductor of the Philharmonic society in NYC (predecessor of the NY Phil). The orchestra would travel all over the country, playing small towns, you name it, and they would do things like in the performance do popular songs like “the Arkansas Traveller” or Stephen Forster tunes, along with Bach and Beethoven. Maybe that is the kind of spirit needed…while nights like playing live to “Lord of the Rings” is fun, or having a concert with someone like Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, it might be better to have regular concerts that mix the heavy with the light…</p>
<p>From the Huff-post.</p>
<p>It’s not about bloated budgets, it’s about imagination and creativity: (and a little help from a director, J.Darrah out of UCLA – wooooot! )</p>
<p><a href=“Opera in America: Is it Circling the Toilet? | HuffPost Entertainment”>Opera in America: Is it Circling the Toilet? | HuffPost Entertainment;
<p>saintfan- my eldest son lives in Seattle, so maybe we CAN go to the opera next time I’m there!</p>
<p>News broke today of the inflated admin budget for the San Diego Opera: Ian Campbell attempted to justify his salary of $508,000 in 2012 by saying that he “had two jobs” with the organization- those of Artistic Director and General Director. A specious argument at best since those are often filled by the same person. His wife, Ann, was also on the SD Opera payroll, taking in $282,345 that same year. The Old Globe Theatre and the San Diego Symphony are thriving, attracting new audiences and donors while the Opera lost 3 million in just a couple of years. Campbell claims that he “saw (the closing) coming three years ago”, so why wasn’t an aggressive fund raising campaign mounted and cost-cutting measures (such as closing the big set shop the organization didn’t need) implemented? The unrelenting arrogance and head-in-the-sand attitude will lead to more closures unless the public in communities demand financial transparency each year- and the incompetency is across the board spreading into all areas of the performing arts; just look at past situations in Philly, Atlanta, Boston and NYC.</p>