Volume 24 Issue 4 - December 2018 / January 2019

REAR VIEW
MIRROR
TSO:
Crises Weathered,
Challenges Ahead
ROBERT HARRIS
It’s been less than two years since the then-chair
of the board of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra,
Richard Phillips, and eight of his senior colleagues,
including Sonia Baxendale, stunningly and abruptly
resigned from the organization one December afternoon.
It remains a mystery to this day why they left.
Had this kind of thing happened at other similar organizations –
the New York Philharmonic, or the Metropolitan Opera, let’s say – it
would have been front-page news. Here, it barely caused a stir, and
since then, Richard Phillips and Sonia Baxendale seem to have been
more or less expunged from the history of the TSO. Which is a pity.
Because what’s interesting about Phillips and Baxendale is that
without them, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra may well have gone
bankrupt in the spring and summer of 2016. Today, as the TSO is
finally achieving some desperately needed organizational stability,
it’s hard to imagine how different things were not that long ago. But
in March of 2016, after the now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t departure
of short-lived TSO president and CEO Jeff Melanson, the TSO was
within a few thousand dollars of insolvency. Senior financial officers
were approaching department heads to inquire whether there was
anything that could be sold to keep the organization afloat. In a situation
streaked red with emergency, Phillips and especially Baxendale
(who became the organization’s acting CEO, for an agreed six-month
term, after Melanson’s departure) steered the TSO ship rockily but
successfully to a small surplus in fiscal 2015/16. They accomplished
this by applying the appraised value of a valuable TSO viola against
the organization’s accumulated deficit (reducing that deficit by four
million dollars), convincing the Toronto Symphony Foundation to
double its annual contribution to the TSO, and one assumes, by
writing some generous cheques of their own. For thanks, within eight
months they had disappeared from the organization.
Perhaps Phillips’ and Baxendale’s departure was karma for the
sin they had committed of hiring Jeff Melanson to be the orchestra’s
president and chief executive officer in the first place. We shall never
know the full extent of Melanson’s toxic influence on the TSO, but it
can be effectively argued that the organization is just now recovering
from it. Before Melanson, the Toronto Symphony had had one CEO
for 12 years, Andrew Shaw. In contrast, there have been four changes
of leadership since – four administrative regimes in four years. A
year and a half of Melanson, six months of Phillips and Baxendale,
two years of Gary Hanson as interim CEO, and now a few months of
Matthew Loden, the TSO’s just recently appointed CEO.
It is a tribute to the TSO that it has not only survived these ongoing
challenges, but has seemed to emerge from them with momentum. The
latest annual report showed an operating surplus for fiscal 2017-18 of
over two million dollars (although that surplus was buoyed by a $3.2
million grant from Canadian Heritage that will not be repeated next
year). Matthew Loden, the new CEO, comes with a fine track record
with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The appointment of a new Music
Director, Gustavo Gimeno, was announced this fall, to replace the
recently retired Peter Oundjian, although Gimeno won’t actually take
over until the fall of 2020. Throughout all the organization’s troubles
and travails, the staying power and continuity of the true heroes of the
Toronto Symphony, Loie Fallis, vice-president of artistic planning and
Roberta Smith, vice-president and chief of staff, can’t be over-estimated.
I’m guessing that the organization’s outgoing and highly popular
former music director should also be included on that list.
The TSO seems to have weathered the existential crises of the past
five years, bending without breaking. All arts organizations these
days, worldwide, are perched on very delicate financial precipices,
the distance between success and catastrophe very short indeed. The
real challenge for the Symphony is that the organizational turmoil
of the past few years has prevented the orchestra from effectively
redefining its artistic mandate and raison d’être in the post-Oundjian
era. Andrew Davis has stepped in as the organization’s titular
head as the TSO awaits Gimeno, but all of Oundjian’s signature
programming initiatives of the past few years have been erased.
There will be no Mozart Festival this year, no Decades projects, most
distressingly, no New Creations Festival. A city’s symphony orchestra
should be the primary musical institution in any metropolis, if
only by dint of its size and budget and prestige. But programming
counts for something too, and here the TSO is losing that primacy.
Tafelmusik is playing these days with greater assurance and selfknowledge,
under the inspired new leadership of Elisa Citterio. The
Royal Conservatory is outflanking the TSO in terms of New Music,
having just moved its successful 21C Festival to January, to fill the
gap in the winter calendar where the TSO’s New Creations Festival
used to be. The Canadian Opera Company, although not really a TSO
competitor, has come to dominate the musical public relations scene
in the past few years.
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