The Portland symphony will attempt to re-weave its own net beginning on February 17 at 7:30 pm, when the PSO will welcome opera superstar Renee Fleming to Merrill Auditorium.
"She is the finest voice of our generation," says PSO music director Robert Moody. "She is to the voice what Yo-Yo Ma is to the cello, what Perlman is to the violin."
Tickets to this concert start at $65 and can range up to $150, which is approximately twice the price of a typical PSO concert. The hike in ticket prices is not simply because Fleming is a superstar — private donors paid her hefty fee — but because this concert is an endowment benefit, at which proceeds will go to shore up the long-term finances of the orchestra.
"The ticket prices at our Tuesday Classical concerts don't even come close to covering the cost of the concert to us," says Solotoff. "We've been operating and providing services at a level that exceeds our endowment level."
In the 2007-2008 fiscal year, ticket sales covered 51 percent of the symphony's $3.2 million budget. Of the rest, 41 percent was government and private donations, and the remainder was that income from the endowment.
Solotoff hopes that the symphony will be able to keep ticket prices for the regular performances low, but explains that patrons should know that ticket sales alone are not enough to sustain the budget, even lowered as it has been, to $2.8 million for the coming year.
The list of what has been cut from the symphony's budget reveals the challenges ahead for arts organizations across America.
The PSO has already cut the beloved Independence Pops concert series from its summer program. The traveling concert, complete with fireworks during the 1812 Overture, has become a mainstay for Fourth of July celebrations around southern Maine. But it loses $65,000 a year. As corporate funding dries up, community enrichment concerts like this will be the first to go.
The PSO's KinderKonzert series, which brings symphonic music to southern Maine school children, is also being slashed. With school budgets shrinking, schools are facing drastic cut-backs in educational programming and can no longer pay for "extras" like the KinderKonzerts.
When the arts start to die, they take many others down with them. Merrill Auditorium seats 1900 people. When those 1900 people don't come to town, Portland's restaurants and bars, coffee shops, and parking garages suffer the loss.
One of the largest arts organizations in the state, the PSO is not a canary in a coal mine, but rather the hard-working miner who can no longer afford to ignore the dismal smell of the air.
But in the hardest of times, Americans look to the arts for healing. During the Depression, the arts received support through the Works Progress Administration, which led to some of America's greatest artistic creations, including murals, transcriptions of folk songs, and some of the most poignant photography the world had ever seen. Even as recently as 9/11, America turned to its artists to express the myriad emotions of such a nationally traumatic event.
Out of great pain comes great art. What will heal our collective hurt, the devastation of our losses, will be the songs, words, and images that will rise up out of the dust. As we reevaluate our place in this world and recognize the fleeting nature of material things, art will find its way back into our hearts and minds just in time to save us from ourselves.
