Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's crisis matters for orchestras everywhere

What’s going on at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra? The short answer is “Nothing”. No concerts, no rehearsals, not a hint of music. Instead of preparing for the opening concert of their season, scheduled for 25 September, the 88 players of the orchestra, one of the finest and most famous in the US, are picketing outside their headquarters at the Woodruff Arts Centre in a protest against a lockout by their own management, with their pay withdrawn and their health insurance about to disappear. The story, like the recent problems at the Metropolitan Opera, ought to be solved with an outbreak of good old-fashioned common sense, or at least the intervention of a federal mediator.

But neither looks likely in Atlanta, and its unique story of compromise, cuts and cock-ups is creating shockwaves across the American orchestral world, and could have wider repercussions elsewhere.

Here are some of the specific circumstances. This isn’t the first lockout that the ASO has suffered. A couple of years ago, after the last round of negotiations to seal their collective bargaining agreement (the contract that ties players and managements together in all American orchestras), the orchestra were forced to make large cuts: in their salaries; in the amount they played, with 10 weeks cut from their schedule; and in their orchestral dimensions, cut from 95 players to 88. According to cellist Danny Laufer and viola player Paul Murphy, who were in charge of the team of musicians who negotiated with management this and last time around, they were given assurances by the orchestra’s president and CEO, Stanley Romanstein, that this would be a one-off deal to provide a stable future for the orchestra, and a guarantee against further cuts. After a month of being locked out, the players were forced to agree to the deal to return to their jobs, and (somewhat smaller-scale) business was resumed.

But as Atlanta’s principal guest conductor, Donald Runnicles, told me, events a couple of years ago proved merely “a dress rehearsal for an opening night that none of us want to be present at. It just breaks my heart.” During negotations, Runnicles, who is also in charge of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Deutsche Oper Berlin, took the unprecedented step, with Atlanta’s music director, Robert Spano, of writing a public letter to the orchestra’s management, making clear the destruction their pay and conditions would wreak on Atlanta’s musicians. That was a few weeks ago, and he speaks now with even greater desperation, passion, and sadness about what is happening to an orchestra he loves.

The lockout is essentially the board and management punishing the orchestra: it means they have no access to the place where they work, where they make music; it means their health costs are not going to be paid. And what on earth has that punishment got to do with two invested parties in a discussion-finding consensus? It’s a one-sided attempt to force the orchestra to its collective knees. It also paints the orchestra as this intransigent group of musicians. But in fact they have shown extraordinary willingness to come to a common agreement, as what happened two years ago proves. The fact that it should have come to a lockout again is simply devastating.”

The most disturbing feature of Romanstein’s proposals to the players is that he should have control over the size of the ensemble. With retirements, deaths and absences, the true complement of the orchestra is already as low as 78, much smaller than other top US orchestras such as Cleveland (104 players) or Chicago (106). The question is how many more players the management wants to lose, and at what point the ASO ceases to function as a “world-class” ensemble, as Runnicles puts it. That’s why Spano and Runnicles’s futures with the orchestra that they both joined at the same time – they enjoy a creative symbiosis that’s rare anywhere in the world between a chief conductor and a principal guest – could be in doubt as a result of this bitter and damaging lockout. Their interest is in maintaining the ASO as a top-level ensemble. It has one of the world’s most famous choirs in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus, whose history was defined by its relationship with Robert Shaw from the late 1960s, and it should be celebrating its 70th birthday this season – but that all now looks uncertain.

The blame seems to land squarely at the feet of Romanstein, who hasn’t said what size he wants the orchestra to be, but wants every vacancy in the orchestra to be up for discussion as to whether each player is replaced or not. According to Murphy and Laufer, even if management agree to this single condition, replenishing the orchestra over the next few years to their pre-2012 dimensions of 95 players would be a start, potentially make it more likely for players to accept a reduced compensation and healthcare package. (The players have not, so far, approved the appointment of a federal mediator. As Murphy and Laufer say: “We’re not sure that bringing another layer in, somebody who wouldn’t have direct decision-making power, would help the situation. We’re not saying we’re against it, but it depends on who the mediator involved would be.”)

But there is yet another complicating factor, which is that the Atlanta Symphony is not an independent outfit, but part of a bigger organisation, the Woodruff Arts Centre, whose CEO Virginia Hepner has said that the ASO’s deficit is unsustainable (proof, surely, that Romanstein has failed to raise enough money for the orchestra’s coffers, despite the previous negotiations). She also offered the observation, when asked whether the city could afford the ASO: “It’s up to anyone to decide what is world-class and what an orchestra should be.” Well no it’s not, actually; the players and conductors probably have a better idea of that than Hepner seems to …

So why does all this matter? Aside from the fact that Atlanta could be on the road to the orchestral hell that the Minnesota Orchestra endured during a 16-month lockout, there is the fact that the ASO’s special performing traditions are threatened (listen to their latest release of Vaughan Williams to see what I mean), that two of the strongest and most artistically profitable conductor-orchestra relationships could dissolve, and that an international audience will miss what the ASO and its chorus have achieved together – to say nothing of what Atlantans will feel about the loss of what is arguably the cultural jewel in their crown. The betrayal of Shaw’s legacy must not be allowed to continue: Atlanta’s lockout is just as serious – if not more so – than Minnesota’s for classical music in the US and beyond.