Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
In the wake of what seems like an ironic number of Charlie Brown football gag style attempts over the past 20 years, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra (MSO) appears to be on a strong path toward finally kicking that ball in the form of obtaining their own concert hall. According to a report by Ben Jordan in the 1/10/2017 edition of tmj4.com (Milwaukee NBC affiliate), the MSO is more than halfway to …
Most professional orchestra collective bargaining agreements expire during the summer months and since the economic downturn, it is increasingly common to see groups continue negotiating past the current agreement’s expiration date. A decade ago, that used be cause for alarm but in today’s environment, it is practically standard operating procedure assuming groups don’t manage to wrap things up months in advance. Last season witnessed nearly a dozen middle to large budget …
We have two new entries in our list of mid to large budget orchestras with expired agreements that managed to ratify a new contract without resorting to a work stoppage: The Florida Orchestra and Milwaukee Symphony. Florida Orchestra A new three-year agreement begins reversing several rounds of concessionary agreements with annual improvements in base musician wages and number of weeks per season. 2015/16 26-week season (four half weeks at 75% scale) …
News is aflutter now about the Minnesota Orchestra heading to Cuba to be the first US orchestra to perform there since President Obama took steps to normalize relations between the countries in December 2014. That last part is emphasized because the more this news makes the rounds, the more that point gets glossed over; so much so that in some cases it is even getting left out (although most of those …
The Annual Orchestra Website Review examines more than 80 professional orchestras in the United States and Canada and rank them by a detailed series of quantitative criteria but due to Orchestra Crisis 2012/13 (details here) we had to postpone and scale back the reviews. As it turns out, the delay was fortuitous in that it set the stage for ideal timing to focus the review efforts exclusively on what is easily one of …