Time to Pay the Piper
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The casualties so far include Echo, the CSO’s three-year-old, $3.7 million learning center, which shut down for the summer and will not reopen. (A “noble effort,” but not cost-efficient, said Fogel of the Edwin Schlossberg-designed, bell-and-whistle-heavy project.) CSO ensemble visits to high schools have been cut from 186 to 100, and there will be one high school concert at Orchestra Hall, not two. A dozen staff jobs have been eliminated, with more cuts to come. Even the staging and lighting costs for an upcoming performance of Tristan and Isolde have been shaved. Most startling, the orchestra’s weekly national radio broadcasts–a 25-year tradition–will end this fall: no sponsor has been willing to come up with a paltry million dollars a year. To add insult to injury, for the first time anyone can remember, the orchestra will soon be without a recording contract. As for fiscal 2002, the $2 million deficit projected before September 11 now looks too rosy. The CSO is far from broke: it has net assets of $262 million. But “we’re doing a financial analysis of the entire organization,” Fogel said. Decisions on further cuts will come next month.
According to Fogel, union rates are a major reason neither the CSO nor any other American orchestra will be making commercial recordings. “American rates are much higher than European rates and they’re also inflexible.” For example, he says, a good (not great) CD can be made with an eastern European orchestra at a cost of $5,000, “whereas it would take $125,000 to compensate an American orchestra.” With classical CD sales diminishing–in part because CDs don’t wear out like LPs–and with the large backlog of existing recordings, fewer new records are being made anyway.
Festival president Eileen Mackevich says that after September 11, and after reading articles about Ayers in the Tribune and New York Times, she called him to ask what he thought. “He wrote the book [Fugitive Days] to promote discussion,” she says. “He was the first person to say to me over the telephone, ‘That may not be possible now.’ He was referring to the fact that people have closed themselves off. He said, ‘Eileen, I can understand the difficulty. I will offer to withdraw if you wish.’ I said I want to think about it for 24 hours. I tried to reach him the next day. I decided it was appropriate that we do it at another time. I couldn’t reach him because he was out of town. So I took him at his word, which was, he offered to withdraw.” Ayers and Dohrn participated in a previous festival, Mackevich says. But now, “It’s as if 30 years of political history have been forgotten. I felt this was not a moment to try to recapture discussion. And so I agreed with him. It’s a hard time to be talking about these things.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Robert Drea.
