Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
The 1/24/2017 edition of the Wall Street journal published an article by Charles Passy that examines the decision by New York Philharmonic president Matthew VanBesien to depart his position in favor of taking a position as president of the University of Michigan’s University Musical Society. VanBesien is the latest orchestra CEO to exit for an academic post. Recent examples include Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s Trey Devey leaving for a position at the Interlochen …
Currently, two of the top eight orchestras with the highest base musician annual salary are negotiating new collective bargaining agreements: National Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra. Interestingly enough, both of these ensembles are in positions where the outcome of those negotiations will likely have a larger impact on their future competitiveness than some of the upcoming negotiations for their peers. In order to visualize these distinctions, here’s a chart illustrating the current …
Now that Cleveland has settled, we can begin to get a sense for how base musician compensation compares across the highest tier of big budget orchestras, which we’ll call The Big Eight (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, LA, National, New York, Philly, and San Francisco). Granted, we’ll be updating this chart with Cleveland’s figures once that data is available and when it is, it will be interesting to see how they compare with Philly, …
While away on vacation, I’ve been following the news about Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov is joining the New York Philharmonic’s board of directors. I don’t know Trifonov but have heard his recordings and think he’s certainly superb musician and based on insight from sources I trust, he’s a good person but I simply can’t figure out why this is news or what the NYPhil’s board expects Trifonov’s presence to actually contribute …
As a follow-up to the earlier post about the viral success of the Bugs Bunny At The Symphony II show video posted on the New York Philharmonic’s wall on 1/16/2015, all four shows scheduled for the end of the month have official sold out. Originally, the show was scheduled for three performances but the strong initial sales combined with the viral video success produced an additional performance and nearly two weeks before the …