As the omicron variant surged, Lyric Opera general director Anthony Freud and his team spent the holidays staring down the possibility of losing yet another production to COVID-19: the company’s January run of the contemporary chamber opera “Proving Up.”
They assessed the schedule (rehearsals beginning the first week of January) and space constraints (cozy). The prognosis was already grim when Joffrey Ballet canceled its last five December performances of “The Nutcracker” due to COVID-19 cases in the company.
“The whole idea of going through the rehearsal and performance period wondering when we were going to have to stop felt unconstructive and unhelpful,” Freud says. “We thought, let us cut our losses, and — with fingers and toes crossed — let’s focus on the rehearsals for ‘Tosca’ and ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ in mid-February.”
Lyric Opera announced the postponement of “Proving Up” on Jan. 5 along with a vaccine booster requirement for eligible audiences, citing guidance from Emily Landon of the University of Chicago Medicine, the company’s longtime health consultant. Freud told the Tribune the booster mandate also applies to all Lyric staff and artists, both roster and guests.
Landon, who herself is a choral singer, says the risks involved with ensemble singing made “Proving Up” a nonstarter, as would any lack of vaccine mandate for singers.
“Singing is almost the highest-risk thing that you can do during COVID. Plus, singers really don’t want to get sick — this I know from personal experience,” Landon says.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra had its own response to the rise in COVID-19 cases. The CSO also regularly consults with Landon, ultimately setting protocol through return-to-work committees comprised of orchestra and chorus members and management. But since the new year, the CSO has continued with performances as planned, albeit with stricter policies for audiences: Negative COVID-19 tests are no longer accepted as an alternative to vaccine cards, except for medical or religious exemptions. Per the mayor’s public health order, a vaccine mandate opens the door to reinstating concessions at Symphony Center at a yet-to-be-determined date, as Lyric has done since its season opening.
“Honestly, for an audience, I don’t think you need a vaccine mandate, unless people are going to take off their masks,” Landon says. “(The CSO’s) plan was to serve concessions and require vaccines to go into that area. Now, the city requires that.”
For musicians, vaccine protocols may vary
Despite a new vaccine mandate for audiences, orchestra musicians and staff are not required to be vaccinated — though a vaccine mandate is in place for guest artists, new hires, substitute musicians and members of the CSO Chorus and Civic Orchestra, a training ensemble whose early-career musicians participate in community and educational programs on behalf of the CSO.
The CSO reports that a vast majority of its musicians are fully immunized — a statement from CSO management placed the orchestra’s vaccination rate at about 95%. Since the omicron surge, it has also implemented more stringent safety protocols. Now, all string and percussion players must perform with KN95 or N95 masks, regardless of vaccination status, and take a rapid antigen test before each concert cycle. Winds and brass are tested each day of service.
“I think vaccine mandates are a quicker — and in some ways, easier — way of getting people to understand that they just need to (get vaccinated). But in some circumstances, that’s not going to be the easiest way to get to what you want, which is the vast majority of your people vaccinated,” Landon says. “(The CSO has) an extremely high vaccination rate. … But if you don’t have that, and you’ve tried everything else, then that you do need to have a mandate.”
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The decision to forego a vaccine mandate for performers makes the CSO a relative outlier among local classical music organizations, with Lyric, Chicago Opera Theater, Chicago Fringe Opera, the Chicago Philharmonic and the Chicago Sinfonietta all reporting mandates. It is also an outlier among peer orchestras: The Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic have made their vaccine requirements for musicians public, and representatives from the New York Philharmonic and Detroit Symphony confirmed that a vaccine mandate is in place for artists.
However, the CSO may not be an outlier nationwide. According to data collected by the League of American Orchestras before the fall season, 65% of responding orchestras anticipated implementing a vaccine mandate in the fall, with 26% expecting to implement one for audiences. One responding orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony, affirmed that it accepted weekly negative tests from musicians in lieu of vaccine certification.
CSO hornist James Smelser, who serves as chair of the CSO members’ committee and on the orchestra’s return-to-work committee, added that, in the CSO’s case, the who’s who of unvaccinated musicians in the orchestra didn’t force their hand into a mandate. All of the CSO winds and brass artists, who must perform unmasked and spread the most aerosols while playing, are vaccinated. A 2020 study by researchers at the University of Minnesota — which used musicians in the Minnesota Orchestra as subjects — quantified this spread, finding that the instruments that generate the most aerosols are straight-bell brass instruments such as trumpets and trombones. The study suggests that oboes emit aerosols at a similar rate and volume as bass trombones, while tubas present the least risk.
“If our winds were unvaccinated, that would be a different situation. We wouldn’t be able to really function,” Smelser says.
When asked why the organization implemented a vaccine mandate for new hires, substitute musicians, and other ensembles, CSO representatives pointed to metrics of risk mitigation. For example, Smelser says, a lack of vaccine mandate for new hires and subs could ostensibly change the percentage of unvaccinated players to an “unworkable” degree, or compel different mandates for unmasked and masked instrumentalists.
Because of the risks inherent to ensemble singing, the CSO Chorus’ mandate was more nonnegotiable. A CSO representative said the chorus negotiates protocols with its own return-to-work committee.
The American Guild of Musical Artists — the union representing the CSO Chorus and other chorus and opera company vocal artists, as well as dancers and performance personnel — has similarly encouraged vaccination for artists as long as inoculation has been widely available, and more recently suggested testing performers as often as three times a week during the omicron surge.
When asked whether the CSO considered implementing a vaccine policy for orchestra musicians, Smelser said that call was “strictly a management decision,” noting that such a move would require negotiations with labor attorneys and the musicians’ union — in this case, the Chicago local of the American Federation of Musicians, the union representing instrumentalists, which has not issued a standard recommendation for vaccinations.
In an emailed statement, the CSO maintains that “protocols for musicians have been developed with the return to work committee made up of musicians and administrative staff, and in consultation with Dr. Emily Landon.”
Planning for the unknown
In other cases, timing restraints accelerated the final say on safety protocols. Grant Park Music Festival general manager Chris Collins says that although the festival mandated distancing and masks for those who could wear them at Pritzker Pavilion last summer, including chorus members, it did not mandate vaccines for artists or seated audiences because those decisions were finalized as early as March and April, when the general populace was only just becoming vaccine eligible.
“Clearly, a lot has changed since then. The industry’s standard now is to have a vaccine mandate in place, unless local laws prohibit that,” Collins says. “I think we’re going to have a different conversation with the union later this year.”
Collins disclosed that all choristers who sang in the 2021 season were voluntarily vaccinated, and that Grant Park instituted a vaccine mandate for new musicians auditioning into its ensembles.
Though Grant Park will take the precautions of its indoor peers into account while determining protocols for musicians and audiences for 2022, Collins says the festival’s risk assessment looks much different, as an outdoor season with a lower risk of airborne transmission.
“It remains to be seen what the safety protocols will be for this summer, but if we have any indication as to what indoor orchestras are doing, it will probably be a lot less restrictive this summer than in the past,” he says.
When COVID comes for the orchestra
Precedents for COVID-related cancellations or program changes, when they occur, are varied.
The Cleveland Orchestra canceled concerts in November and December due to breakthrough cases detected in the winds and brass sections. The Pittsburgh Symphony swiftly reprogrammed two concert cycles earlier this month after management concluded that a positive case in the orchestra likely affected the majority of the winds and brass sections. Both orchestras have vaccine mandates for musicians and audiences.
In contrast, the same week Pittsburgh reprogrammed its concerts, the San Francisco Symphony — another organization with a vaccine mandate for audiences and musicians — continued a concert cycle with subs after detecting multiple COVID-19 cases in the orchestra before a matinee concert, including in the winds section.The matinee was canceled a half-hour before start time, with pianist Jan Lisiecki playing an impromptu solo recital.
Anonymous musicians in both the San Francisco and Pittsburgh symphonies have aired grievances over vaccine mandates. In a high-profile dispute last August, San Francisco Symphony choral director Ragnar Bohlin resigned over the organization’s vaccine mandate, and the San Francisco Examiner reported that a few musicians had not yet complied with the mandate at that time. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in October that the Pittsburgh Symphony would place its unvaccinated musicians on paid leave through the end of 2021, at which point they would be placed on unpaid leave. Both the Pittsburgh and San Francisco symphonies declined to comment on personnel issues.
With crowds on both sides of the proscenium, symphony orchestras and opera companies are perhaps uniquely set up for plurality on the question of safety protocols. Smelser experiences it firsthand almost every day.
“We really hear the gamut. I had a member today come to me and say, ‘I wonder if we could bring up adding more PCR testing to the wind players at the next meeting.’ And I said, yes, we will, because we always bring members’ concerns to meetings,” he says.
“But imagine pairing that with an email saying, ‘This is ludicrous; this is not necessary,’ in reaction to the increase of protocols. So you can see, those are completely different ideas right there.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
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