It costs about a million dollars a week to take a major symphony orchestra on tour. So says Rita Shapiro, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra; and she should know, because her orchestra has just announced a second international tour within a span of eight months. The National Symphony Orchestra, which leaves for a 15-day trip through South America this week, is also going to Europe in January.
Touring has long been a staple activity of orchestras. It declined in the early years of the 2000s, precisely because of the prohibitive cost. Now a lot of orchestras are on the road again: Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh are among those that have made national or international tours this season. The reasons for touring may have changed, though $1 million a week is a lot of money to throw at a target without knowing exactly what it is you want to hit.
(Margot Schulman) - NSO Music Director Christoph Eschenbach.
The NSO went on its first tour in 1959, also to South America. Touring in those days was a different animal. In 1959, most orchestras in this country, including the NSO, didn’t offer full-time work; musicians routinely held down other, nonmusical jobs in the off-season. The appeal of a three-month tour was obvious: you got to work longer as a musician. Emphasis on “work,” because in those years before modern union contracts, an orchestra tour was even more grueling than it is now. This June, the NSO will be playing eight concerts in 14 days — but at least the musicians are taking charter planes, staying in top-of-the-line hotels and are contractually protected from performing on travel days. In 1959, there were no such protections and perks, and the orchestra played in more than 20 cities around the continent.
Ironically, although touring itself was more grueling, it also had more cachet. The NSO’s 1959 tour was sponsored by the State Department, at a time when the State Department was active in the cultural outreach game and sponsoring visiting artists all over the world. And such visits were still rare enough to make an impact. “We cannot emphasize too much the political value of our orchestra’s visit to the Latin-American countries,” Paul Hume, The Washington Post’s music critic, wrote in a tour report in The Washington Post in June, 1959, “where clearly the musicians are observed and met as citizens of the United States quite as much as musicians.”
Cultural diplomacy is not entirely off the table today: think of the New York Philharmonic’s concert in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 2008, or the Florida Orchestra’s ongoing exchange with Cuba (Cuba’s National Symphony Orchestra will come to the United States this fall). But in today’s global culture, large touring orchestras are not as a rule presented as official emissaries of the U.S. government, or of American culture. While the NSO has a single new American work in its South American repertory, it’s dispensed with the formality altogether on its European tour.
Now, its major corporate sponsors — in the case of the NSO’s South America tour, Dow Chemical andWhirlpool — who help pick up the tab, in part because such tours are seen as value-added public-relations devices for the company’s own employees. Cultural amenities, companies have learned, are a factor in people’s estimation of whether a given city is an attractive place to live.
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