Chicago Lyric signs growth deal with unions
OperaNo details but plenty of intent. Here’s what they say:
Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Chicago Federation of Musicians Local #10-208 (CFM) are pleased to jointly announce that a five year contractual labor agreement has been reached, prior to the expiration of the existing agreement that runs through June 30, 2023. Lyric’s General Director, President & CEO Anthony Freud offers, “We all entered into these discussions with a very similar mindset — to work collaboratively to reach a mutually beneficial agreement that takes care of our company’s great artists and ensures that Lyric can continue to offer world-class performances, for years to come.”
Amy Hess, Chair of the Orchestra Committee, shares, “We are encouraged by Lyric’s plan for growth of the orchestra and opera company as a whole. This vision makes Lyric an attractive destination both for arts lovers seeking world-class opera performances and for in-demand musicians looking for an orchestra in which to devote their careers.”
Chicago Lyric heroically struggles forward in spite of a massive lack of funding. It only has a half-year season even though Chicago is one of the worlds largest and richest cities. It can only maintain its short season by offering musicals as part of its program. When organizations like Chicago Lyric try to grow, it often ends in disaster because the funding does not appear.
There are about 30 or 40 European cities far smaller than Chicago, many you’ve never even heard of, that have longer seasons and more performances per year. This should be noted each these reports appear so that Americans begin to face what our system of arts funding does to our society.
Lyric has been re-trenching for years. No growth is possible. They don’t seem to have any clue who their audience is. Also, Chicago is losing affluent residents by the hundreds as the policies of its leaders drive people away. Who wants the crime? No one. I no longer give Lyric a penny because what the produce is mostly garbage.
To William Osborne, Scottish opera– public and European and with a total population about the same as Chicago– has only 3 productions a year. See story in this website. Please account for this.
It’s not difficult to explain. Reagan and Thatcher were the politicians who instituted the form of supply-side economic policies known as neoliberalism. A hallmark of neoliberalism is the massive reduction of government spending. That is why over the last 40 years, public arts funding in the UK has been systematically constrained, and why the UK has one of the lowest per capita ratios of public arts funding in Europe.
That is, if they can get audience members to go downtown with all the car jackings, violent assaults, robberies and teenage youth bashing car windows and a new mayor who says don’t blame the youth because they are from underfunded communities. BS. Plenty of people came from poverty stricken backgrounds but did not feel a need to put a gun to someone’s head. Unless the city can stop the crime wave, the Lyric, CSO, museums, Chicago Theater are all doomed and it won’t matter what the agreements with the unions are.
You really had to stretch like a world-class gymnast to work every one of your pet political buzzwords in there, I’ll give you that.
But who am I? Just someone who actually lives here…
I guess we can’t all be the perfect, gilded metropolis that is, say, Jacksonville or Birmingham.
As I wrote in an article about public arts funding 20 years ago:
“Europeans view the city itself as the greatest and most complete expression of the human mind and spirit. Venice, Florence, Rome, Prague, Amsterdam, Dresden, Barcelona and Paris, just to name a few, are all embued with this ideal. Americans, by contrast, behave almost as if they have lost hope in their cities, as if they were dangerous and inhuman urban wastelands to be abandoned for the suburbs. This tacit assumption has had a profound but largely unrecognized effect on American political and cultural discourse. Classical music is one of the most urban of art forms. Its status will always be measured by the health and vibrancy of our cities. Ultimately, questions of arts funding will only be fully resolved when we recognize that the well-being of our cultural and urban environments are deeply interdependent.”
The publicly funded, European Scottish opera has only 3 shows a year.
See my comment above. That is because the UK is closer to the US concept of arts funding than any other European country.
“To work collaboratively to reach a mutually beneficial agreement that takes care of our company’s great artists.”
“This vision makes Lyric an attractive destination…for in-demand musicians looking for an orchestra in which to devote their careers.”
Houston, we have a problem.
Translation: the company gave the union whatever they wanted to avoid a strike.
“If workers want to be paid more, they need to demand it!”
“Wait, not like that…”
In the modern era, managements will often reopen long contracts like these if the economy goes south.
A five year time horizon makes no sense if the economy has issues that prove to be a challenge for fund raising.