Has the Met lost a third of its orchestra?
NewsThe claim is made by the obsessive Met watcher Conrad L. Osborne in his weekly blog:
Somewhere up to one-third of the orchestra’s personnel departed, with no little rancor over the Metropolitan’s shut-down salary policies. (This is an upper-limit educated guess. The company acknowledges the loss of eleven players, but I haven’t found anyone with close knowledge of the situation who does not estimate a much higher number, and according to the best available information, only a handful have returned.) While there is no shortage of highly skilled instrumentalists to replace them, some of whom may have worked at the Met as alternates or acquired other operatic pit experience, the loss of such a contingent of players familiar with the company’s repertory, conductors, and routines cannot have been helpful. Perhaps the figure of eleven represents the net loss, after the new hires have been counted. There has been some reduction in the chorus as well, through departures and company-terminated contracts.
Conrad also reports the emptiest houses in memory:
For those of us out front, there has been the deflating impression created by the sparsest houses within even the longest of memories, and by the unmistakeable presence among those who did show up of an increasing proportion of the unpromising uninitiated, of butts in seats for a one-night stand. (I am referring here to standard repertory audiences, and not to the ethnographics of the one for Fire, which was the closest to a full house of any I saw.) And finally, the season has gone forward in a reduced city, an increasingly disorderly one deprived of some of its services and amenities, coming out from its long partial closure with an attitude and energy that are an uneasy mix of the timorous and the frenetic. So the atmospherics have not been good.
Read on here.
Market reality: there is an endless supply of (young and eager) extraordinarily high caliber players in NY ready and willing to work for the Met at 1/2 of its current salary, enough to form a whole new orchestra every season.
There is no loyalty, just economics.
They call it freelancing in Britain, and it keeps players on the ball not complacent in the same old job for 40 years, and yet another Boheme. A freelancer or temporary contract player or singer is only as good as their last concert! Economics is paramount in this day and age. Three concerts over two nights at the London Proms where the hall was only barely a sixth full of its 5,500 capacity, hardly any prommers, and everyone upgraded to the Stalls – which still wasn’t full after people moved. But that could be to do with meltdown on the Underground, and two days of being over 38C!
The big difference is that UK pay is much less than in the US, so maybe US musicians can still afford this new reality, but if it happened in the UK, musicians would be reduced to near poverty levels
The big difference is that without their full time job, many of those US-based musicians will entirely lack for health insurance… in the middle of a pandemic.
“But that could be to do with meltdown on the Underground, and two days of being over 38C!”
A factor, certainly. People told to stay at home to avoid risk of hair spontaneously combusting.
Had to venture out to the supermarket yesterday. Roads and carpark very quiet, air conditioned supermarket probably more comfortable than the RAH. Pizza Express deserted.
Which means you can’t make anything resembling a middle class living as a musician in the UK, and many, perhaps most fine musicians choose to do something else to support their families. Being a musician in the London scene is utterly brutal; most burn out in their 20s.
I always wonder how it is people who presumably are reasonably decent in their day to day dealings can be so sanguine about seeing their fellow human beings struggle in poverty.
” most burn out in their 20,s” what a ridiculous unsubstantiated statement for an American to make to make about professional life in the UK!
With due respect, there are tons of freelance musicians in the UK in their 30 s, 40s,50s,and 60s. John Wilson’s super orchestra Sinfonia of London is a case in point.
Not just in NY, in the whole country.
This is not actually true. There is a vast difference between the average musician at the Met and the most talented Juilliard students, and the ones that are able to win a professional audition are not willing to work at 1/2 salary in New York, especially when there are other cities where the cost of living can go much farther.
Agreed. I’m a little sick of this tired trope that there are all of these highly qualified players waiting in the wings. It may be true that there are good conservatory level players that might do a pretty decent job, but a Met level player or even a top 10 orchestra player is in a whole other league. Comparing a Met player to a good Juilliard student is like comparing someone in the NBA to a good college player. To follow that analogy along, the worst player in the NBA could make most college players look like they are standing still on the court. The worst Met trumpet player (as if there is a ‘worst’ one) would make college trumpet players and freelancers look like they are amateurs in comparison. And that’s not a slight to those other players, that’s just how good you have to be to play in the Met or any of these top orchestras, especially in the winds, brass, and percussion. The difference between a pro player and a good student is night and day.
People who don’t agree with that are people who don’t really know what they are talking about.
Met contracts with Local 802 prevent anyone from working for half-price. There is no “freelance” situation at the Met. No one plays there without an audition either for the rostered musicians or for the regular subs.
It was a combination of the pandemic, a generous pension, and a lot of players at retirement age/reaching the magic formula that the Met calculates to be eligible for the pension.
The other huge issue is the Met has a very small window every year to conduct auditions; the Met Opera House is also used by the American Ballet theater and the Met’s own schedule mean there is very little time available when a committee plus Yannick are available to have an audition in either the main hall or the small recital hall for auditions.
So I think the bottom line of Conrad Osbourne’s inspired analysis is, we’re still in a pandemic, yes?
If you think we are not, stick around.
Yes, in an ‘end of the age of education’ pandemic.
So the Met. orchestra has been gelbed.
Every bad thing that happens to the Met is well earned. I share Osborne’s disdain for Gelb, for a variety of reasons, but perhaps Osborne has been missing Rudolph Bing, lo these last 50 of the Met’s years he has deemed The Spiraling Decline. No doubt, the damage inflicted by all the unforced errors in over-reaction to a pandemic that essentially has played out to be just a fancy flu, aggravated by a new vaccine– er, now they’re calling it a therapeutic, of a not well-tested new technology, effectively turning most of the world into the beta group, and the bizarre decisions being made by all the Western leaders vis-a-vis Russia/Ukraine, the shunning of Russian artists Netrebko and Gergiev merely for being Russian!, are all contributing factors. But I feel nothing but glee upon hearing it. May the Met suffer long and hard for its cowardice, perfidy, narcissism, and pathetic capitulation to the juveniles and vigilantes apparently clogging its hallways.
If you are stupid enough to believe, like that self proclaimed orange haired political fool, then please, get COVID, get the new strain. IT IS NOT THE FLU; IT IS POTENTIALLY FATAL. Please, when there are no hospital beds or respirators for enjoy, maybe she will hear Sutherland sing the end of RIGOLETTO (Bonynge recording) and know your time on earth is finished. Rest in hell, you snide a**hole.
You are talking endless bollocks.
I had this virus. So what? Big deal.
It wasn’t fun, but again so what.
In previous decades there wasn’t a population more than 50% obese with co-morbities or a large population of 80-90yr olds living on borrowed time with reduced zinc levels, poor immune system responses & diabetes, from eating crap OVER REFINED food with crazy levels of sugar and other E numbers most of their working lives (YES AMERICANS it’s you!)
It was nothing even close as nasty as the 1968 (I was there) or 1957 flu or shall we remember the 1918-1919 “spanish” outbreak which killed more than the 1914-18 war.
You probably weren’t born in 1968, so shut the f..ck up about stuff you know zilch about.
Hardly surprising as NYC has been the Western hemisphere’s leading epicentre of Covid fanaticism, neurosis and extreme hygiene fetishism. Where double masking toddlers and irrational vaccine mandating have become political and cultural creeds. Agoraphobia has become a point of virtue for the worried witless well – in particular the Democrat voting elderly.
Indeed. And the Democrat voting young. It’s the easily buffaloed who end up suffering far more than necessary. The young who’ve never faced a pandemic have way over-reacted and the elderly who rely on a single source for news. Our matching down vote ratio is giving me a chuckle. Ciao.
I dare you to say that kind of binkerd crap to the faces of the millions around the world who have lost loved ones to this disease. You have no shame.
Totally this… “Agoraphobia has become a point of virtue for the worried witless well – in particular the Democrat voting elderly.”
Yeah, total overreaction, we only lost 55,000 in three months in 2020………….drop in the ocean.
The Met currently has Apple AirTags sewn into the viola music folders for obvious reasons. We live in interesting times.
Not just the Met, of course. Large labor-intensive musical and theatrical institutions are going to continue to have a lot of trouble if they can’t count on a reasonable audience to help offset costs. I’m afraid if things doesn’t settle down with regard to the pandemic, many of them won’t survive.
“Leave the folder, take the sheet music?”
[Recall the famous line from “The Godfather”:
“Leave the gun, take the cannoli!” uttered by
Peter Clemenza (Richard Castellano)]
Musical life in NYC has sustained a traumatic event. Similar to HIV in the 1980s.