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Symphony

With the ever-popular Mata and plans for a shiny new hall, the only flat note at the DSO is the prospect of three more years at Fair Park.
By CHRIS THOMAS |

there’s nothing Americans like better than a classic underdog story, and in Dallas, there is perhaps none more inspiring than the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s brush with death and its return to vibrant good health.

Only a decade ago, in March 1974, the DSO abruptly cancelled its 75th season, acknowledging debts of $850,000 and claiming it could not meet its payroll.

Angry editorials blasted the Dallas business community’s apparent unwillingness to support cultural organizations. “This symphony is yours and mine,” Mayor Wes Wise told a record crowd at an Easter concert that the musicians agreed to play without pay in Lee Park. “We support it with our own dollars and cents.” Waving a copy of a New York Times report headlined “What Sank the Dallas Symphony?” Wise said, “I’m afraid I have to agree with this article. We’ve gotten too used to Dallas brags, and not enough Dallas action.”

Within a month, the city had rallied to raise $145,000-one-quarter of it small donations from sympathetic individuals-in a Dallas Advertising League campaign called “Save Our Symphony.” “S.O.S.” featured a photograph of a conductor up to his chest in water.

Subsequent fund drives, including a telethon, brought in another half-million dollars, and, after a nine-month reorganization period, the Dallas Symphony was back in business.

Today, it hardly seems possible that the same institution thrives on an annual budget of more than $9 million and doesn’t flinch at the fund-raising challenge of a new $75-million home.

In September, ground was broken for construction of the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. It was named for a long-time symphony supporter, the president of the Dallas-based Electronic Data Systems Corp., a stipulation of EDS founder H. Ross Perot when he donated $10 million to the effort.

But the symphony’s biggest “donors” are Dallas voters, who approved $28.6 million to be spent on the project in a bond election in 1982. A similar bond issue was voted down four years earlier.

In the latest DSO sales brochures, the Meyerson Center is featured more prominently than the guest soloists! But the massive undertaking has been delayed by legal battles over the land and blueprint changes in the two proposed underground parking lots. Costs have spiraled from $50 million to $75 million. The symphony says the difference will be covered by private donations, but the completion date for the building has been pushed back two years, to fall 1988.



how important is a new home for the symphony? “Maybe some would argue with this,” says Doug Kinzey, DSO marketing director, “but 50 percent of an orchestra’s sound is the hall. The hall is an instrument in itself. When it’s too wide, too high and too deep, the sound becomes brittle and the musicians try to force it; they can’t hear each other.”

“Of course, the new hall is a gamble,” says John Ardoin, classical music critic of The Dallas Morning News, “but we have particularly high hopes for this one, because of the combination of architect I.M. Pei and acoustics expert Russell Johnson. Often a hall is built and an acoustician isn’t brought in until the end of the process, and this is Pei’s first hall, but he and Johnson have been working together from the beginning.”

While construction continues, the prospect of performing for another three years in the oversized Fair Park Music Hall is discouraging for the symphony and for its most ardent listeners-the music critics.

“The Music Hall is just a barn of a place,” says Olin Chism of the Dallas Times Herald. “I know that acoustics aren’t the most popular topic of conversation for most people, but I went with the symphony on its European tour and heard them in about 13 different halls. In a good setting, the differences are really dramatic.”

The three-week European tour, in May 1985, was an important milestone and morale booster for the Dallas Symphony, and its first foray into the international music scene was a success. Tour plans began with an invitation to London to take part in a festival of American music played by American orchestras.

Fifteen concerts, from Berlin to Barcelona, London to Lyon, were met with critical enthusiasm. Covering the tour for The Dallas Morning News, John Ardoin wrote, “The orchestra is still in search of itself… (but) the tour brought home, more forcibly than ever, its chances for importance.”

Touring, says Ardoin, is tops on the unwritten list of steps to increase a symphony’s credibility in the music world. “Today, in a way, orchestras are divided into the ’haves’ and the ’have-nots,’” he explains. “There are the ones that record -and Dallas now records on RCA Victor-there are the ones whose performances are televised, which Dallas has yet to do, and the symphonies with radio broadcasts of their concerts. Ours are broadcast locally, but not nationally. And of course, a European tour is another status symbol; nobody makes any bones about that.”

While the Dallas Symphony does not yet rank among the top six “A-Class” orchestras (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia) it is among the brightest stars of the so-called “B-Class,” a category of smaller symphonies which includes Atlanta, Cincinnati, St. Louis and the Utah Symphony of Salt Lake City.

Preliminary negotiations are already under way for another European tour, but the concert hall plans have temporarily eclipsed almost every other aspect of the DSO’s 10-year financial and artistic plan. At present, the organization has an endowment, or savings fund, of $9.2 million. “We would feel more comfortable,” says Doug Kinzey, “with roughly $15 million in the bank.”

To help meet its goal, the Dallas Symphony applied for a federal grant of $1.5 million from the National Endowment for the Arts. A grant that large is rare, so it was still gratifying to receive $600,000 from the NEA in September, one of only six symphonies chosen as recipients. Of course, there are strings attached to the money: The DSO must match the gift three-to-one with donations within the next three years.



but making money must never interfere with making music. Eventually, the orchestra will need to increase its size, from 91 musicians to 100 or more, with specific attention to the string section. Among the latest additions to the symphony roster is a new concertmaster. The man playing first violin is 41-year-old Emmanuel Borok, formerly of the masterful Boston Symphony and the fourth Soviet-born musician to join the DSO’s string section.

In Borok’s estimation, 70 percent of the quality of a performance rests with the conductor, and DSO’s Eduardo Mata gets high marks in that arena. As music director, Mata also serves as a regular guest conductor of many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras-the London Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic and the top-rated Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Cleveland Symphonies-to name only a few.

A native of Mexico, Mata lives with his wife Carmen near Mexico City. The long commute to Dallas is not unusual-music directors traditionally spend less than half their time conducting their “home orchestras’-and the rest, gaining international acclaim that is shared by their home organizations.

In his ninth season with the DSO, Mata pledges he “would never allow this place to become a museum,” but some listeners fear he already has, and yearn for a more musically adventurous group.

“I don’t think a concert should be like administering medicine,” says critic Olin Chism. “I agree with the symphony that it should be a pleasurable experience. But I think they could venture out of their very constricted boundaries occasionally. The pieces they choose are technically challenging, but they’re safe.”

This year’s season openers included Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, and Also Sprach Zarathustra, the rousing Richard Strauss piece commonly known as the theme from the movie 2007: A Space Odyssey. The audience reception was warm, but hundreds of empty seats dotted the house, pointing to perhaps the biggest and most immediate challenge of the DSO: People are paying their money and reserving their places without attending the performances. Special events are almost immediate sellouts, but for the basic concert series, supporting the symphony has apparently become a social, not a cultural cause in some circles. But Kinzey can hardly complain, as ticket sales are better than ever.

The DSO is confident that once the new Meyerson Center is finished, it will prompt those no-shows to flock to the Arts District to see and be seen. There will be 1,200 fewer seats in Meyerson than in the Music Hall, and priority is already being given to longtime subscribers. No seats have been assigned yet, but the 1988 Classical Season is already a virtual sellout.

The less formal symphony-sponsored events traditionally attract large audiences. Every summer, “Starfest” teams the orchestra with popular performers like Kenny Log-gins and Kool and the Gang in an outdoor setting in North Dallas. Five of the “Starfest” concerts this past summer set new attendance and income records.

In addition, the DSO performs free outdoor concerts in Dallas City Parks, including a couple of noon dates on downtown streets to bring out the lunch crowd. In its Regional Series, the orchestra plays in Duncanville, Piano and Greenville, and splits into smaller ensembles to play at area schools.

The public image of the symphony is anything but lofty. Still, earlier this year, the Dallas Parks Board criticized the symphony and other city arts organizations for their alleged failure to become more involved with minority audiences and staff development. The DSO counters that it offers a wide range of ticket prices, loans its musicians to the Junior Black Academy every year and strives to book guest artists like soprano Leontyne Price and pianist Andre Watts-black performers whom smaller organizations could not afford to bring to Dallas.

“We’re here for everybody,” Doug Kinzey insists. “But we are up against three more incredibly difficult years because the new hall is late. We don’t have the expansion or the flexibility that our 10-year plan calls for, and it’s going to be hard, financially. But think about it,” he smiles. “We have one of the brightest futures of any symphony in the country, at this point.”

And who could have made that claim 10short years ago?

HOT

TICKET



● THE ANNUAL DSO HOLIDAY SPECIAL, MCFARLIN AUDITORIUM ON THE SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY CAMPUS, DEC. 19, 21, 22, (692-0203). This popular concert series has been expanded to accommodate sell-out crowds. Tickets go on sale Nov. 4.

● CLASSICAL SERIES, FAIR PARK MUSIC HALL, JAN. 9,11, (692-0203). Eduardo Mala conducts music by Richard Strauss, Franz Liszt and Ottorino Respigbi. Soloists are pianist Earl Wild and French bornist Greg Hustis

● CLASSICAL SERIES, FAIR PARK MUSIC HALL, JAN. 30, FEB. 1, (692-0203). Eduardo Mala conducts music by Ludwig Van Beethoven, Charles Tbmlinson Griffes and Aaron Copland. Guest pianist is the 83-year-old legendary Claudia Arrau.

● THE CANADIAN BRASS WITH THEDALLAS POP ORCHESTRA, POPSCONCERTS, FAIR PARK MUSICHALL, FEB. 14,(692-0203). The popular brass quintet puts on agreat and fun show featuringmusic from Bach to ragtime. (Gettickets early for any of the 10Pops Concerts because they areexpected to sell out.)

● CLASSICAL SERIES, FAIR PARK MUSIC HALL, APRIL 3,5, (692-0203). Guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas featuring music by Gustav Mabler, Anton Webern, Béla Bartók and Robert Schumann.

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