Whenever an orchestra like the Chicago Symphony takes its act overseas, in this case moving upwards of 16 tons of equipment and nearly 180 musicians and support staff across thousands of miles of foreign territory, it’s no mere ego trip.
Since U.S. orchestras began venturing abroad during the 1950s, such tours have grown into huge mobile musical and trade fairs in which many individuals and groups — civic and corporate sponsors, tourism boards, symphony associations, patron groups — have a vested interest.
The CSO is now on British soil for its latest Continental fling — a three-week, $2.3 million tour that will take the 110 orchestra players and music director Daniel Barenboim to eight cities in six European countries. Beginning Thursday, the key musical centers of London and Vienna will be among the stops, along with Birmingham, Brussels, Munich, Baden-Baden, Lucerne and Bucharest.
The various interest groups the CSO is carrying on its shoulders can expect sold-out halls filled with cheering audiences, accolades from the press, stepped-up record sales and happy business clients. Business as usual, in other words.
Still, no orchestra that has paid its dues in the venerable citadels of European culture, as the CSO has done over a dozen previous tours since 1971, can pretend that building and sustaining an international reputation in this manner doesn’t have its stresses.
For one thing, competition among visiting orchestras for European attention has become much more a high-stakes game since the early postwar era, when only a very few leading U.S. orchestras such as the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York Philharmonic ventured across the Atlantic.
Nowadays virtually every second-tier U.S. ensemble, such as the St. Louis, Minneapolis, Detroit, Baltimore and Atlanta symphonies, follows the big boys of Chicago, New York, Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia on the international concert circuit. To be good is now not always enough; an orchestra must command a really distinctive profile to stand out from the pack.
Then, too, touring can be an expensive proposition, siphoning off funding that orchestras might more sensibly use to shore up their bottom lines back home at a time when audiences for classical music are said to be shrinking in some cities and graying just about everywhere.
Most U.S. orchestras would not be able to sustain such high touring costs were it not for the support of American corporations. These firms, in turn, welcome having their names linked overseas with some of America’s blue-chip cultural ambassadors. Underwriting individual concerts or even entire tours, executives report, is good for business and a tony way to entertain European clients and employees.
That’s why such multinational firms as banking’s Citicorp (associated with the New York Philharmonic’s overseas trips since 1980), the electronics giant NEC (exclusive tour patron of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) and the space-defense technology company TRW (a major sponsor of the Cleveland Orchestra when it plays abroad), each year commit millions of dollars to American orchestra touring.
The total contribution of Ameritech, Illinois Tool Works and the pharmaceuticals firm Searle to this year’s CSO tour comes to $300,000; an orchestra spokesman declined to say how much each firm is contributing.
“From our perspective, (underwriting the CSO in Europe) is a chance to show off Chicago’s culture, which is very important because we would like people to move their businesses here,” says Richard Notabaert, CEO of Ameritech, the Chicago-based telecommunications firm.
With more than $8 billion invested in its far-flung European operations, Ameritech has sponsored previous European tours by the Chicago and Cleveland orchestras. Sponsoring the CSO’s Sept. 8 concert in Brussels, headquarters of the European Union, he adds, “allows us to host a lot of our customers from 14 countries. There’s no downside to it. It’s a wonderful thing.”
“The Symphony is one of the Chicago institutions we are happy to support,” says James Farrell, CEO of Illinois Tool Works, which has been associated with several of the CSO’s trips overseas since the early 1990s. His firm expects to entertain 300 to 400 people, representing roughly 30 British businesses, at the CSO’s concert in Birmingham on Saturday. Keeping foreign clients happy is an important consideration for Illinois Tool Works, which derives up to 40 percent of its revenues from international operations, most of which are in Europe.
Tour sponsors do not require orchestra musicians to wear their corporate logos on stage like sports stars. Having their names prominently displayed in the program books, posters and tour publicity suffices.
The bottom line
Although the CSO does not visit Europe to make money, the orchestra is among the very few U.S. ensembles that cover their costs on tours. Typically, concert fees that the orchestra charges tour presenters — ranging from $100,000 to $160,000, depending on the city — account for the bulk of the CSO’s income on the road; corporate underwriting covers the rest.
That income covers the additional expenses a tour entails — transportation costs, hotels, players’ per diem allowances and so forth. Management also applies part of that income to the musicians’ salaries. According to CSO President Henry Fogel, 7 to 10 percent of player salaries will be covered by income from the tour.
The most basic reason orchestras go head to head in posh European arenas, symphony managers agree, is to validate the artistic product as well as the orchestra itself.
In fact, they suggest, the very act of touring can raise the quality of musical achievement. An orchestra is a living organism — a collective of highly trained professionals who share a dedication to music — and its interpretation of a piece of music evolves over time. Back home, where orchestra services are tightly scheduled, such time is scarce. But performing one or more programs in different European cities, concert halls and acoustical environments demands, and produces, an extra degree of involvement from the players and conductor; they can refine and deepen a musical interpretation to a greater degree than is usually possible at home.
As Barenboim sees it, touring helps to lift orchestra players from their day-to-day routine and focus their attention on the artistic side of making music. “Tours have either broken orchestras completely — which I’m sure won’t be the case with the Chicago Symphony — or brought them closer together,” the music director observes. “At home, each orchestra member has his or her life, of which the concert is one element. On tour, their entire life centers on the music.”
Conductors go head to head
Tours also help enhance the reputations of conductors, “To be candid,” Fogel says, “I felt the reviews we brought back from our first European tours under Barenboim (in 1992 and 1994) helped us in a period when he wasn’t always welcomed by the (Chicago) critics. That was useful to us.”
Tours by American orchestras also put them in direct comparison with the important orchestras of Europe. The late CSO music director laureate Georg Solti regarded almost every foreign tour as another opportunity to go mano a mano with archrival Herbert von Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic. And when the critics wrote that he and the Chicagoans were better than the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics, Sir Georg was ecstatic. “Now I dare to say it, that we are the best!” he exulted before his final tour of Western Europe with the CSO, in 1989.
Other music directors of American orchestras may not be as obsessive, but the sporting instinct remains a powerful incentive to tour, says Thomas Morris, executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra and another veteran of the European tour circuit. “When you appear in a hall where the Vienna Philharmonic just played the night before, and the Berlin Philharmonic is due to play there the night after, it becomes a very competitive environment that spurs an orchestra to do its best,” he observes. For that reason, tours represent “a very strategic element in the building of an orchestra’s reputation.” And reputation is marketable to any affiliated organizations at home involved in promoting tourism or fundraising. Some members of the Women’s Association of the CSO, for example, are also in Europe for the tour.
Says Barenboim: “Recordings give a fair impression of how an orchestra plays, but they cannot replace live concerts. The public in the international music centers needs to hear our orchestra live. And the orchestra needs to play for these audiences.”