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Why the show may, in fact, go on – Globe and Mail
By kanei | August 9, 2008
CANON FIRE: RADIO WARS
Why the show may, in fact, go on
In the last of a three-part series, critic Robert-Everett Green talks to the Montreal venture capitalist determined to save the CBC Radio Orchestra – and explains why it may not be the only CBC venture to survive a death foretold
By Robert Everett-Green
*All three articles can be accessed here.
The drama’s end seems to be in sight, and the chorus has gathered for the tragic finale. But while classical-music fans lament the CBC’s decision to disband the CBC Radio Orchestra, Alain Trudel, the orchestra’s principal conductor, is quietly preparing for the next act.
In theory, the CBCRO will be finished after its final scheduled concert in November. But Trudel is already discussing a future for the orchestra with a Montreal businessman who is calling for a national effort to find a new way of financing the Vancouver-based ensemble.
Philippe Labelle is a 39-year-old venture capitalist and founding CEO of ZeFridge, an online software platform. He was shocked to hear about the CBC’s decision, while returning home from a family ski trip, and decided to work on a creative response.
“Even though I’m in Quebec, this orchestra is part of our national heritage,” Labelle said in a phone interview. “I’ve already talked with business people around the country. The idea is at least to provide the orchestra with the funds to keep going for an interim period.” The longer-term goal, he said, would be to reconstitute the orchestra as “some kind of a joint venture with the CBC, or a total spinoff” that would be supported by private and public funds. “We don’t want to confront the CBC,” he says. “They have pretty strong management, they’re in a changing environment, and they have made their decision. But that doesn’t mean the orchestra has to stop living.”
Labelle and Trudel aren’t yet ready to make a proposal to the CBC. But they speak in perfect unison about the CBCRO’s distinctive role (or “mission,” as they prefer to say) as a broadcast showcase for emerging talent in Canadian classical music. “It’s a national platform for Canadian talent and Canadian art,” Trudel says, referring to the relatively high proportion of young Canadian soloists, and new Canadian compositions, on the orchestra’s programs. The current crisis may actually bring that mission into sharper focus, he says, as the key reason for keeping the orchestra alive.
“This may be the time for us to think about how a real 21st-century orchestra should develop,” he says. “To quote Barack Obama, we are and have been an agent of change.”
The CBCRO was founded in 1938, one year after NBC created a radio orchestra for Arturo Toscanini. It’s now a chamber orchestra of about 40 regular players, and is the last surviving radio orchestra in North America.
During most of its seven decades, the orchestra was a true broadcast ensemble that worked mainly in CBC studios. Most recent performances have been public, including a five-concert series at the Chan Centre in Vancouver.
The CBCRO has commissioned hundreds of new Canadian classical works, and began to reflect Radio 2′s inclusion of more popular material well before the recent wave of programming changes was announced. During the past two seasons, its Great Canadian Songbook project brought prominent Canadian pop singers together with composers such as Glenn Buhr and Phil Dwyer, who arranged classic Canadian songs by Leonard Cohen and others, for performance with orchestra.
“We were happy with what they were doing,” says Mark Steinmetz, the head of CBC Radio music. “It was a very difficult decision [to end the CBCRO]. I hired Alain Trudel. I know what he is capable of.” But the CBC concluded that the money spent sustaining the orchestra (which manager Denise Ball estimates at around $600,000 a year) would go further when used to record performers and orchestras that don’t require the CBC to cover all their costs.
Making up for the CBC’s contribution is just part of what’s required if the CBCRO is to continue. The orchestra lacks many of the structural supports that other orchestras take for granted, such as a board of directors, a staff capable of raising funds and promoting the orchestra, and an organized cadre of volunteers. They would also have to forge links with government-funding agencies.
“You’d really have to start an infrastructure from the ground up,” says David Brown, the orchestra’s principal double bassist, “but there’s probably a lot of people who might be willing to join in if someone were willing to spearhead it.”
Labelle could be that person, though he would have to be a quick study. He’s a life-long fan of classical music, and has served on the board of a shelter in Montreal, but has never been involved in running a symphony orchestra. That might not be a problem, especially if his entrepreneurial instincts uncover innovative ways of financing the orchestra. He told me he sees no reason why the CBCRO couldn’t extend its base of operations across the border into the northwest United States, or why part of the orchestra’s earned revenue couldn’t come from creative exploitation of its many existing recordings.
There may also be something instructive in the example of the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, another group that has a strong recent record with Canadian music (14 pieces last year, including three commissions) and young artists, and a close relationship with the CBC. General manager Vicki Young says the MCO’s nine-concert series played to a 90-per-cent-capacity audience last year, in a city that (like Vancouver) also supports a full-size orchestra. The MCO is also developing a national presence, through the CBC and through recent travels to Ontario and B.C. But the MCO’s core is only about half the size of the Radio Orchestra’s, while its current annual budget is about $800,000.
Another party that could have a role in the orchestra’s future is the City of Surrey, B.C., whose council voted in April to consider the idea of installing the CBCRO as the civic orchestra for the Vancouver-area municipality of 500,000. But in an interview, councillor Linda Hepner, who proposed the move, seemed uncertain as to whether the orchestra’s existing mission might continue there, and said that no further action would be taken till it’s clear that the CBC will not change its mind.
The CBCRO isn’t the only CBC venture that could survive even after its end had been foretold. CBC Records is still putting out classical CDs, the Competition for Young Composers is poised for a comeback, and a new series of broadcasts could make up for the suspension of the Competition for Young Performers.
Radio 2 announced last year that it had no plans to continue producing CD-quality classical recordings for the corporation’s in-house recording company. But general manager Randy Barnard says he is continuing to develop box sets and anthologies from the company catalogue of 400 master recordings.
Most are budget-oriented sets by well-known performers. Two new boxes of Glenn Gould recordings sold 12,000 units for CBC Records last year, in a market niche (Canadian classical recordings) in which 2,000 to 3,000 copies is considered good. Three-quarters of those sales were made outside of Canada, through CBC Records’s distribution deals with Naxos and iTunes. Barnard said a Tafelmusik box set is on the agenda for October.
“The business of doing new classical-recording projects is on hold for the moment,” he says, sounding hopeful that individual projects could be negotiated with the network in the future. CBC Records will do three pop-oriented projects this year, in co-operation with Radio-Canada’s Espace Musique.
Barnard probably has time to wait for the winds to change in the company’s favour. CBC Records had revenues of $800,000 last year, including a rising proportion from online sales, and has been in the black for the past 10 years.
There could also be a bright future for CBC Records within a joint online platform. Barnard would like to see a consolidated site (MyCBC.ca, perhaps) that would deliver Radio 2′s podcasts and concerts-on-demand with streaming content from CBC Records and possibly other labels under licence. That would seem to mesh with Steinmetz’s belief that an increasing number of listeners want to be able to hear and buy music from the CBC online. In June, there were 1,382,100 page views of Radio 2′s website.
The website will be a major venue for the successor to the young-composers’ competition, which was last held in 2002. Steinmetz says the revived contest, which is to be launched formally in September, would put new emphasis on the activity of composition, not just its results.
“I think the compositional process is really mysterious to most Canadians,” he says. After consultations with composers, including Montreal’s Tim Brady, a plan was made for a three-week competition in which the creation of the finalists’ 15- or 20-minute contest piece would be tracked on the radio and through a video blog.
The tentative title is Project Under Construction, which might not be a bad name for much of Radio 2 these days. The five finalists, all under 35, would be selected by a preliminary jury on the basis of past work, and for their verbal communication skills, as demonstrated in a “five-minute personal video introduction.” All or part of the three-week final sequence would be carried out at the Banff Centre, and would also involve Espace Musique.
“It’s going to be one of the major priorities of Radio 2 next year,” says Steinmetz, who says the composition of the final jury would also be different than in the past, and that listeners would have a choice to vote on a people’s choice award. “I want the jury to be more varied, not just the deans of Canadian composition.”
It’s not clear that three weeks in a fish bowl is going to be conducive to writing a first-class piece. But high-pressure deadlines have sometimes resulted in good work: Rossini wrote all of The Barber of Seville in under three weeks, though he wasn’t expected to talk about it in public while writing.
Radio 2 is also considering a less dramatic way of fulfilling the function of its young-performers’ competition, which in the past helped the careers of musicians such as tenor Ben Heppner and pianist Angela Hewitt. Steinmetz says the competition was expensive to run, produced only a few evenings of radio, and had been eclipsed to some extent by similar contests in Canada.
“We weren’t making a lot of impact,” he says. “And some of the bigger performers weren’t coming to us, because other competitions were offering bigger prizes.” Measha Brueggergosman, for instance, skipped the CBC contest (top prize: $10,000) in 2002 in favour of the new Jeunesses Musicales Montreal International Competition, where she won a total of $45,000.
Steinmetz says part of the function of the competition would be taken over in non-competitive weekly broadcasts that would feature a different young performer each time, and would also include a profile of the artist. The recordings would be broadcast on Sunday Afternoon in Concert, and probably repeated at least in part on the weekday-afternoon classical program that is still in development. Decisions about the form and destination of the young-performer segments will be made in the fall, he says, with a projected date for the first productions some time in the early New Year.
In short, much that seemed to be falling out of CBC Radio seems to be returning in new ways. As they say in the broadcast business, stay tuned.
Topics: Articles About CBCRO, Articles about CBC, CBC, CBC Radio, CBC Radio Orchestra (CBCRO), Press About CBCRO, Press about CBC | 1 Comment »
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August 9th, 2008 at 11:55 am
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