Two players leave BBC Symphony. Will they ever be replaced?
OrchestrasThe BBC Symphony Orchestra has announced the departure of cellist Gus Harris and horn player Andy Antcliff after 20 and 30 years respectively. There are generous retirement terms on offer.
Under Simon Webb’s recent proposals, there will be no rush to fill the empty seats.
The trend right now, at least in the US, is to leave positions unfilled after players retire. After all, why hire someone and have to pay them benefits on top of their salary when you can just hire freelance players when needed, at a cheaper rate and no benefits or, even better, hire no one at all? Many section/tutti positions will thus never be replaced, unless of course the orchestra roster becomes ridiculously thin. With all that money saved, arts organizations can instead hire more administrators, often creating absolutely useless, unnecessary positions with dubious titles. It’s the latest trend in our current Zeitgeist: administrators — essentially, people who spend most of their time in an office and who have zero actual musical knowledge, though great people skills — actually think they matter more to the arts than the actual people audiences come to listen to, who are now viewed as dispensable. It’s truly a world turned upside down, given that most administrators would be incapable of producing a single acceptable note during an orchestra audition, assuming they even had enough talent to bring learning an instrument.
At least yours “have great people skills”.
no…. you forgot about the long running disputes/strikes with American orchestras
If some of the cuts in the less visible departments are to be believed, these positions at the BBC orchestras may well be closed.
The individual driving this process is a former cellist from the LPO. The ability to “produce a single acceptable note during an orchestral audition” is not the issue here. Orchestral management is a complex and skilled profession and the current catastrophic mess at the BBC orchestras stems in part from this arrogant delusion that a musician with no management skill and little experience beyond the concert platform is capable of handling complex HR, budgetary and strategic decisions – despite repeated evidence to the contrary.
Actually you might need to look up Simon Webbs cv………he gave up playing many years ago and has been in Orchestral Management for a long time.
Yes. With consistently disastrous results. Believe me, I am extremely familiar with Mr Webb’s CV. He is fundamentally a musician promoted far beyond his competence. Why he keeps getting promoted is a question for the senior people at the BBC, though one theory among his former colleagues is that he’s too dim and/or ambitious to realise that he’s essentially being stitched up. But you can’t frame this one as “heroic musicians versus ignorant administrators”, I’m afraid, however flattering to your self-image. He’s a musician trying to fake it without training or experience in a complex profession. The lunatic is running the asylum and we can all see the consequences.
Isn’t the danger here that orchestras will lose their individual character and cohesion if they start to rely on a wider pool of freelancers? I would be interested to hear from any orchestra members on this …
Yes, it absolutely is the case. But none of that matters anymore. The prevailing thinking is that it’s good enough for audiences, who aren’t sophisticated enough to notice the difference. It is, in some ways, the arrival of the Uber economy mindset into classical music: players are now interchangeable and reducible to a mere function as merely filling an orchestra seat, and thus lacking any specific character.
Depressing, but absolutely my experience of the profession in the UK right now
To be clear. Andy and Gus handed in their resignations at the end of January 2023, well before the BBC announced redundancy plans on March 7th.