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For a night at the symphony, there was a lot of tension in the air.<\/p>\n
As concertgoers filed in to Davies Symphony Hall earlier this month, they were greeted by players from the San Francisco Symphony passing out bright yellow fliers accusing management of having \u201cno clear artistic vision.\u201d Then, shortly before the performance began, a shout echoed from one of the balconies, exhorting people to \u201cAct!\u201d<\/p>\n
It was the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen\u2019s first concert in the hall since March, when he stunned the classical music world<\/a> by announcing that he would step down as the orchestra\u2019s music director amid a dispute with management over budget cuts. The evening\u2019s program was just the sort of thing he had promised when he was hired with a mandate to rethink the concert experience: Ravel\u2019s charming \u201cMother Goose\u201d brought to life by dancers from Alonzo King\u2019s LINES Ballet, and then Schoenberg\u2019s nightmarish \u201cErwartung\u201d staged by the director Peter Sellars.<\/p>\n His decision to leave once his contract is up next year has upset fans \u2014 \u201cWho he is and what he brings can\u2019t be replicated,\u201d Mark Malaspina, an audience member, lamented as he entered the hall \u2014 and left some concerned about the future of the 113-year-old San Francisco Symphony.<\/p>\n \u201cAn orchestra that was in very good shape is now in crisis,\u201d said Peter Pastreich, a longtime arts administrator who managed the San Francisco Symphony from 1978 to 1999. \u201cIt is heartbreaking to watch.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Salonen\u2019s unexpectedly short tenure in San Francisco is in some ways a very local story, but it also says something about the challenges facing classical music in 21st century America. Even before the pandemic, many orchestras around the country were struggling. Audiences were aging and shrinking. Costs were rising. Old business models were withering. And philanthropy, which has replaced ticket sales as the main source of income for most orchestras<\/a>, was becoming increasingly hard to come by.<\/p>\n When San Francisco landed Salonen<\/a>, it was hailed as a coup.<\/p>\n The orchestra enjoyed a reputation for musicianship and innovation and had a relatively large endowment. But it also had been running deficits, losing subscribers and seeing its donor base diminish. Salonen \u2014 a pathbreaking, charismatic conductor and composer from Finland who had previously led the Los Angeles Philharmonic \u2014 was seen as someone who could capture the imaginations of new audiences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Salonen, 65, was also considered someone who could make inroads with the Bay Area\u2019s vibrant, wealthy tech community, which has been seen as reluctant to support the arts. (He was, after all, the rare conductor cool enough to have appeared in an Apple ad<\/a>.) Salonen arrived in San Francisco with ambitious plans to champion new music and tap into the creative energy of Silicon Valley, bringing in experts in robotics and, several years before the rise of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence to reimagine the concert experience.<\/p>\n \u201cThe worst thing we could do to our art form,\u201d he told The San Francisco Chronicle<\/a> when his appointment was announced in 2018, \u201cis to assume that everything is going to be like this forever, and therefore we don\u2019t have to do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His vision was not cheap. As one of the world\u2019s most in-demand conductors, he received about $2.1 million in compensation from the San Francisco Symphony during the 2021-22 season, the most recent year for which records are available. He recruited eight artistic partners<\/a>, including the composer Nico Muhly and the computer scientist Carol Reiley. And he made plans to commission a steady stream of new music.<\/p>\n Then the pandemic struck before he began, derailing hopes for a splashy rollout. His debut as music director in the fall of 2020 was a muted affair that took place online, with the virtual premiere<\/a> of Muhly\u2019s digital work \u201cThroughline.\u201d As the virus spread, the orchestra canceled hundreds of performances and lost millions of dollars.<\/p>\n The team that lured Salonen to San Francisco was gone soon after his arrival. Sakurako Fisher stepped down as president of the board in 2020, as planned.<\/a> Mark C. Hanson, the orchestra\u2019s chief executive, abruptly departed in 2021 after clashing with the musicians and the board on issues including programming, labor talks and the pace of diversity initiatives, according to musicians, board members and people who have spoken with Hanson. (Hanson, who now leads the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, declined to comment.)<\/p>\n A new team took over, and became concerned about finances.<\/p>\n The orchestra had struggled for years with deficits, a shrinking donor base that executives said had decreased by about 20 percent over the last decade and the decline of the old subscription model<\/a> in which patrons buy a season\u2019s worth of tickets each year. Less than a third of the orchestra\u2019s expenses are covered by ticket sales.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been living beyond our means, frankly, since well before the pandemic,\u201d Matthew Spivey, the San Francisco Symphony\u2019s new chief executive officer, said in a recent interview.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The orchestra, which has an annual budget of about $80 million, said in March that it had incurred a cumulative deficit of $116 million over the past decade, which it had been able to fill only through extraordinary measures and nonrecurring sources including federal pandemic relief and drawing down reserves. The orchestra\u2019s audited financial report<\/a> showed a surplus of about $6 million last year. But orchestra officials said that their internal accounting, which excludes investment gains and extraordinary one-time contributions, showed an $11 million deficit, with operating expenses of $78.6 million and operating revenues of $67.4 million.<\/p>\n Absent cuts or new funding, the administration said, it was on track to run $80 million in deficits over the next five years.<\/p>\n Spivey said that the organization came to realize that to survive, it had to focus on reducing the deficit and building revenue.<\/p>\n \u201cWe cannot build a sustainable business model that relies on unpredictable, extraordinary, one-time sources of revenue,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Earlier this year the orchestra\u2019s leaders began imposing cuts<\/a>. They canceled a planned Europe tour, limited commissions of new music to no more than five a year and moved to scale back semi-staged productions, like the Ravel and Schoenberg program Salonen recently conducted. They also discussed shifting programming to attract more audiences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n