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WOODWINDY CITY: Card has cut
costs in Chicago and signed a new labor contract
with musicians.
Wayne Cable |
As
a student in the Stanford in Vienna
program in 1976, Deborah R. Card remembers being awestruck
by the Musikverein, the golden palace that serves nominally
as the home to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and emotionally
as one of the world’s centers of classical music. “It
was overpowering.”
Although Card, ’78, had studied violin and piano since
early childhood, she had no illusions of performing at the
Musikverein. (“To be great, you have to practice a
lot,” and she wasn’t one to lock herself in a
room eight hours a day.) Yet in April, Card returned to the
Musikverein in a role that could turn the head of any musician
there: she is president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Association. And if she’s no longer the wowed California
undergrad, she’s still impressed. “I feel really
blessed to be doing this.”
To look at the headlines—the ones that read something
like “[Insert City Name Here] Symphony Faces Crisis”—“blessed” might
not be the adjective that comes to mind for an orchestra
executive. Since arriving at CSO three years ago, Card
has had to negotiate a new contract with musicians
and whittle away at a $6 million budget deficit. She
has needed to court new donors because old standbys—human
and corporate—have been dying off. Chicago has been
hit especially hard as corporate headquarters move
away from the city; CSO most recently mourned the departure
of Bank One.
Card also has to find a replacement for music director
Daniel Barenboim, who will step down when his contract ends
in 2006. Barenboim, an Israeli pianist who was Georg Solti’s
hand-picked successor, took up Chicago’s baton in 1991.
He’s a legendary figure—known for his superstar
conducting, his political activism in the Middle East
and his marriage to tragic cellist Jacqueline du Pré.
His departure stems from a reluctance to assume more
off-podium duties—the fund raising and audience outreach
that are increasingly important to an orchestra’s fiscal
health.
So while Card, 48, may be thrilled to work in music’s
most hallowed halls, she’s not naive about the challenges
she faces.
Deborah Rutter grew up in Encino, Calif., playing violin
while her brother played the clarinet. Her parents loved
music, and her mother took symphony-management classes—to
be a better volunteer manager of the youth orchestra in which
her children played.
Deborah knew early she wasn’t cut out for a violin
career, but she began college as a music major “to
take advantage of the cheaper individual lessons.” She
went to Vienna with the intention of staying a few
months, but instead stayed for a year, earning credits for
what became a major in German studies, playing with a community
orchestra (“a bunch of old men and me”), and
traveling to hear the great orchestras and opera companies
of Europe. “There was nothing like it. Man, was I lucky,” Card
says.
One summer in college she worked filing documents for
a defense contractor. She remembers a family friend
asked her, “Why are you working for Litton instead
of the Hollywood Bowl?” It was a good question—one
she answered by finding work in the education department
of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 1986, Card, newly
armed with an MBA from the University of Southern California,
got her first chief executive’s job with the Los Angeles
Chamber Orchestra.
Six years later, she was hired in Seattle, where the
orchestra had accumulated a deficit of $2.5 million on only
$9 million in revenue. It played only 95 dates a year—in
part because it didn’t have its own hall.
To illustrate the point that orchestras should be seen
and heard as often as possible, Card holds up a pamphlet-sized
book that contains the work rules for musicians. “In
a musicians’ contract, there are a number of services—rehearsals,
concerts, educational services,” she explains. “If
you have four rehearsals and four concerts, that’s
eight services per week. In Chicago, we have 7 1/2. In Seattle,
we had five. If you only have five services, you’re
paying players to stay home.”
Card attacked Seattle’s financial problems not
only by increasing services and cutting the budget, but also
by cultivating the city’s new technology millionaires.
As for the music, more emphasis was put on nontraditional
works: Asian-themed pieces, for example, and appearances
with popular artists like David Byrne, Frank Zappa and James
Taylor.
Seattle’s endowment increased significantly, and
its annual budget, by the time Card left, was $24.1 million.
The number of annual subscribers increased from 17,000 to
40,000. And the orchestra got its own home, Benaroya Hall,
which opened in 1998 and allowed the number of concerts to
increase to 220 a year. The seed money came from Jack Benaroya,
an early investor in the Starbucks coffee chain. To this
day, Card makes a point of drinking Starbucks.
Chicago—one of America’s Big Five symphonies,
along with New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and
Boston—recruited Card to succeed executive director
Henry Fogel. He was leaving, after 16 years, to lead the
American Symphony Orchestra League—the organization
whose classes had trained Card’s mother. Card and her
daughter, Gillian, now 7 and a student of violin and piano,
moved to the Windy City in 2002.
At the time, the CSO reported a $6.1 million deficit
on a $60 million budget, with $4 million of that deficit
a one-time write-off on pension costs. The symphony
had not lost its cultural cachet in the Windy City,
but its audience was beginning to decline. The Chicago
board wanted a high-energy person with experience in building
audiences while staunching deficits. “In a field where
jealousies and rivalries abound, it’s rare to find
an orchestra manager as admired as the savvy, experienced” Card,
Chicago Tribune classical music critic John von Rhein
wrote of her hiring.
Indeed, Card can cut costs without chopping operations
to the bone. When she got to Chicago, Card studied
all operations to determine personnel needs. Sometimes
eyeballing helped—seeing
employees mill around in the gift store helped her
decide the number needed there was only three. The
CSO’s
administrative staff numbers 105 today, reduced through
attrition, from 126 at Card’s arrival.
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"We
have to remember that every dollar we spend
is a dollar that someone gives to us in the belief
we’re going to do something good with it."
- Deborah Card |
Cuts had to be made on the musical side as well, particularly
in what Card describes as “out of control” pension
costs. A contract that ended in September 2004 was
extended while labor negotiations continued through a mediator.
At one point, the musicians were told to clean out their
lockers in anticipation of a strike. But in November, the
two sides signed a new three-year deal.
The musicians won limitations on how many consecutive
days they must perform, but Card and the orchestra board
got much of what they wanted. After a one-year freeze, the
musicians will get raises, but they will have to start contributing
to their own health insurance premiums, and their pensions
will be capped at $63,000 per year. The number of musicians
would be reduced by attrition from 114 to 106. Work rules
were changed so that musicians would interact more with
the community, specifically in more shows at schools. Card
expects a balanced budget by the 2006-07 season.
The question for Card is not, is there an audience
for classical music, but rather, how can the audience
be energized? She has pushed for progressive programming,
increasing after-work concerts and performances matched with
food, wine and conversation with a local rock deejay.
Card says that even in the few years she’s been in
Chicago, the average age of attendees has dropped from
the low 60s to the high 50s.
She believes orchestras—even those as storied as Chicago’s—must
increasingly cultivate individual supporters. “We have
to remember that every dollar we spend is a dollar that someone
gives to us in the belief we’re going to do something
good with it,” she says. “I have to be very resourceful,
and be very efficient with it.”
The fan-friendly approach isn’t without controversy—as
is seen in Barenboim’s decision to leave. There
has been no public hint of animus between Barenboim and Card;
but Barenboim, paid a reported $2.14 million a year,
has made it clear that he didn’t like “nonartistic
demands.”
A notably prickly maestro, Barenboim lives in Berlin,
where he is music director of the Berlin State Opera Orchestra,
and spends time playing recitals in the Palestinian West
Bank and organizing a youth orchestra of children from across
the Middle East. Barenboim told Chicago
Sun-Times reporter
Wynne Delcoma, “There are expectations for music directors
to do a lot of things concerned with fund raising,
with social activities. I really have no interest in these
things. . . . Those expectations require more time here and
not less.”
Observers are watching closely to see if the CSO can
find an extraordinary music director who also embraces
a role in Chicago’s community life. It’s likely
guest conductors will fill several seasons; CSO might
not have a permanent music director until 2008. “It’s
not like finding a new president of a university,
where you have search firms and a population in place,” Card
says. “Every time we talk to a conductor, we have to
think, ‘What are the implications of this individual
leading the orchestra?’” |
