How musicians brought their orchestra back from bankruptcy
OrchestrasWhen Ontario’s Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony went bust in September 2023, that seemed to be it. Orchestras are not great believers in self-resurrection. But this one is.
When the players of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony were told in September, 2023, that their season would be cancelled and the organization would enter bankruptcy, they refused to let it go quietly.
It was devastating, both artistically and financially, says French horn player Kathy Robertson.
“Many of us have built our lives in the community around the assumption that we would be musicians in this symphony orchestra for a long time,” she says.
So the musicians took the symphony’s fate into their own hands. They got in touch with its foundation and creditors, and built a new board, tapping Bill Poole, a retired local lifelong arts administrator, to chair it. The newly-formed team of directors and musicians spent months trying to find a way to resuscitate the Southern Ontario symphony.
And in October, they pulled it off, getting the approval of both creditors and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. “If it weren’t for the musicians, we would not be here today,” Poole says.
Read on here, in the Globe and Mail.
Not out of the woods, then, but a sign of how much faith people have in them when they get those terms agreed. Very best of luck to them.
London Mozart Players did the same thing. The orchestra was on the point of folding, when the musicians took over and turned it around. It is still, and will continue to be a very challenging environment, but LMP puts on a superb series of concerts and community/education work.