Crisis deepens: Orchestra suspends sales for next season
mainThe Orchestre national des Pays de la Loire, based in Nantes, France, today suspended ticket sales for the 2020/21 season, citing uncertainties arising on when music will be performed again after the Corona crisis.
Suite aux annonces gouvernementales, tous nos concerts de la fin de saison 2019/2020 sont annulés.
De plus, devant les incertitudes qui pèsent sur la date et les modalités de la reprise des activités de l’ONPL, nous avons décidé de suspendre toute commercialisation des concerts de la saison prochaine jusqu’à nouvel ordre. Il ne sera donc pas possible de s’abonner sur notre site internet à partir du 4 mai comme nous l’avions annoncé. Les abonnements reçus par courrier sont mis en attente. Nous vous remercions de votre fidélité et de votre compréhension et espérons vous revoir très bientôt dans nos salles.
The announcement has sent shudders through other orchestras who are saying privately they don’t expect to be back in performance before the New Year.
At least they’re clear eyed about this.
The 20/21 season is going to be a wash.
It will likely be the “2021” season, minus the slash. It will also be reworked, full of exceedingly safe and crowd pleasing repertoire and feature soloists either pulled from the orchestra principals or who are guaranteed to be worth their cost in ticket sales (and that list is shorter than you think.)
A vaccine could take 18 months to complete and begin to distribute (and then months to vaccinate enough people for heard immunity) — that’s fall 2021.
We may well have “herd immunity” by around August or September this year. We don’t need to wait for a vaccine.
We don’t know. It is also possible that managements are prepared to rethink their repertoire policy and the role and meaning of the orchestra within society – in a different way from the community-service thing of old. Repeating the war horses would not be very interesting for postcorona audiences who have the best possible performance at home in their CD collection, why would they take an infection risk for a less good experience? And given travel restrictions and costly arrangements with top soloists, planners may begin to get to the point where they think that the music itself could be centre stage and not all the hollabaloo around it. If it were the end of the star system, there would be much to be won, because music is not about stardom.