Honolulu.

Syracuse.

Louisville.

Philadelphia.

What do all those cities have in common?

The sad answer is that their orchestras have either declared bankruptcy, are in the process of declaring bankruptcy, or are on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.  And we could probably add Detroit to the list, even though their players recently ended a strike by accepting a pay cut, as well as Indianapolis, which is widely believed to be heading in the same direction.

The situation in Philadelphia stands out from the trend, however, as it's one of the storied "Big Five" of American orchestras - its collapse is to classical music what the collapse of the Intiman Theatre is to American theatre.  (Although actually, it's arguable - given the number of civic orchestras in financial danger - that the nation's orchestras are under more financial pressure than the nation's theatres.)

Of course a flashpoint in this ongoing situation remains the question of wages.  I remember two years ago when I wondered at the fairness of the BSO's union pay (entry level, around $128 K, much like that at the Philadelphia), given that the best local artists in other fields could command less than half that salary, I was ridiculed from all sides.  One hyperventilating classical music fan was so offended he actually began a blog to "oppose" me (I think he long since shut that down - one of two short-lived blogs, by the way, that have been devoted entirely to attacking me; another validation - if Harvard's attacks weren't enough - of the power of the ideas expressed in the Hub Review).  At the same time, local Globe second stringer Matthew Guerrieri lectured me, in several heated exchanges, that BSO salaries were actually a result of free-market competition.

Uh-huh.  I was never quite sure how union salaries were supposed to be the result of free market competition (don't they represent the antidote to free-market competition?) - but whaddya want when it comes to economic argument from Matthew Guerrieri, he's a composer! At any rate, over time what has become the sticking point in most of these bankruptcies, including Philadelphia's, is the fact that salaries and benefits at the orchestras do not, actually, result from free-market competition but rather represent a compromise between union demands and the willingness of the symphonies' Boards (that is, the local business communities) to support them.  That's how orchestra salaries are set, all you libertarian classical fans.  Not through the free market (as ticket revenue rarely covers more than two-thirds of costs), but through Board largesse.  In Philadelphia, for example, ticket sales this year brought in $33 million, but the orchestra's costs were $46 million.  Even after a round of emergency fund-raising, the deficit still amounted to $5 million.  And yes, the Philadelphia has an endowment of $140 million, but given an annual deficit rate of $5 million (and nobody thinks the deficit is going to go down),  if the orchestra began to tap that fund, it would be gone in little more than a generation (and at the actual deficit rate of $13 million a year, it will be gone in little more than a decade).

And you know, Board largesse runs strongest when workers' wages are falling against revenues (and thus the wallets of the rich are fatter than usual), so it's hard not to intuit that every time a player in an orchestra like the BSO gets a raise, that increase parallels a pay cut to the respective city's working class, at least in relative terms.  I'm not saying there's causation there (before you write in), but still - that see-saw is the none-too-pretty economic picture of civic orchestras (and for that matter of any arts organization that can't meet its payroll through ticket sales).  You could try to argue, as Matthew Guerrieri did, that there's still a kind of limited competition at work within, say, the oligopoly of the Boards of the "Big Five" - New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland - and oops, I guess not Philadelphia anymore, but maybe L.A. now.  But the point is, even if you want to call that cooperative understanding a "market," it still looks like the bottom just fell out from under it.

Of course there's a strong case to be made that union wages aren't the only thing killing off America's orchestras.  Or even the main thing.  I wouldn't argue that they are.  I'm sure mismanagement, rising real estate costs, etc., have all played a role in the debacle in Philadelphia and elsewhere (and maybe even the leading role).  And it's worth remembering that the Philadelphia isn't really "dead;" it's just in a state of legal limbo in which all its contracts - especially its contracts with its unions - are open for re-negotiation by management.

But here's the rub.  Since the orchestras survive on Board donations, they have to convince America's ruling class that their union wages aren't what is undermining their solvency.  Only America's ruling class doesn't really want to hear that, do they.  And does the working class (for whom unions are now largely a thing of the past) want to hear it either?  Somehow I doubt it.

See this is were things get - how to put it? - culturally sticky.  Because actually, the only people who might be sympathetic to the argument of the orchestra unions are America's artistic classes (people like Matthew Guerrieri!), but for better or worse, they're on the losing side of a libertarian cultural meme that began to build steam with the fall of the Berlin Wall and is now pretty much dominant in our discourse, even among the "educated."  Thus supporters of symphony musicians try to play the game both ways - by simultaneously guilting the Boards into coughing up more cash ("The whole problem is your management incompetence!") while pretending these salaries are the result of the free market.   Although I think many of these types do honestly believe that "value" aligns with remuneration in some vague but deeply true way.  So if you're the very, very best violinist in the whole wide world, in their minds you're bound to make a very good living.

Only it doesn't work that way anymore, largely  because the forces of digitization, the Internet, and globalization are all undoing the foundations of what we used to think of as "value" - which was never really intrinsic to labor or talent, anyhow; it's always only been purely a function of replacement costs.  Somehow the educated retain a touching faith, however, in the idea that value isn't tied to those costs, or to things like geographic location and market barriers.  Seemingly hypnotized by a series of naive economic gurus, they seem to believe that value can still exist in a virtual world in which all boundaries have been erased and everything at last is "free" - in short, an "economy" in which everything is replaceable, and yet somehow everything still retains its value.

Of course what happens instead in such a world is that value aligns more and more with political power (or its factotum, celebrity power).  That's why Arianna Huntington could get so rich off the efforts of people she didn't pay at all; and that's why young people are so desperate to get into the Ivy League - not for the education (please!) but rather for entrée into a class that has the political power to look after its own well-being.  The rest of the nation, of course, isn't so lucky.  Indeed, the great social problem of the millennium is probably not racism, but instead the way that globalization and digitization have undermined the foundations of economic value.  That is what has rendered unions powerless, and what has left the working class in a seemingly permanent economic slide.

But I digress.  The point is that orchestra unions may have thought they were protected from this trend - after all, you can't import a BSO concert from China, can you - but in the end, the trend is catching up with them anyway, if indirectly.  For to a non-unionized populace, especially one equipped with a theory supplied by the chattering class, the perks of a specialty union - whether in the arts or in government - look undeserved and unjustifiable.

This is the atmosphere in which the BSO will be going into its next round of contract negotiations (the current contract expires in August).  Of course the BSO hasn't declared bankruptcy, and I doubt it's in any serious monetary straits.  Still, I also don't get the impression that James Levine's tenure has really done it all that much financial good.  He was very expensive, of course ($1.6 million, last I heard), and he tended to demand extra money for special projects; and while I think audiences stabilized after his controversial first season, he got more lip service than money-love from the Hub.  The ongoing search for his replacement basically represents another question mark hovering over the negotiations - although it's probable that whoever is chosen will be both healthier and cheaper than Levine.  Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more uncertain financial environment for these negotiations.  It's almost enough to make you wish all this was determined by the free market.

Our most interesting living composer takes on the world's greatest playwright.

To my mind, Thomas Adès is the most interesting composer alive, the young talent I'm most certain will find a place in the standard repertoire.  Yet perversely enough, we've heard little of him in Boston; instead, we've been listening to the latest from Carter and Birtwistle (two accomplished elder statesmen of modernism whom I don't find particularly compelling), or pretending that Schoenberg is still shocking. Yes, Opera Boston performed Powder Her Face a few years back, and I vaguely recall the BSO playing the great Asyla and the intriguing Living Toys sometime around the millennium.

But in the meantime, the "savior of British music" (as Adès was once known) has all but taken the rest of the world by storm - and found an American home not in Boston or New York, but L.A. (where he has enjoyed a special relationship with the L.A. Philharmonic for several years). Major operas and commissions have flowed from him, he's been showered with awards, all while building a distinguished recorded catalog as a pianist (he also conducts). It's wrong at this point to describe the 40-year-old composer as "the next big thing." He IS the big thing.

So his arrival on the podium of Symphony Hall last weekend was long overdue. Still, he played to plenty of empty seats. Remember what I said the other day about Boston still being a hick town? Well, that goes double for the BSO crowd.

But Adès himself didn't seem to mind - he seemed thrilled to have finally arrived in America’s greatest concert hall; and at any rate, he had bent his intellectual energy on a program that teased out deep cultural issues in a way that BSO programs rarely do these days. Part of the concert was devoted to his violin concerto Concentric Paths, a small wonder in its own right. But the majority of the program was focused on Shakespeare's The Tempest - in particular the musical response to the Bard's last masterpiece by Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and, yes, Adès himself.

Now Shakespeare posits a strange conundrum for composers, I think. He has always attracted them - and yet have any of them, even the greatest, fully understood him, or been able to express what truly sets him apart from other dramatists? It's a puzzling, and troubling question (and one that, amusingly enough, classical music aficionados rarely seem to be aware exists; they naïvely imagine their art is the most profound one around). But even a masterpiece like Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream (wonderful as it is) only conjures the atmosphere of Shakespeare's play, not the depth or contradictions of its text. The irony is that (as the Hub Review has long contended) part of what makes Shakespeare's dramatic thought so complex is that it's structured musically (my guess is that Monteverdi and the madrigal posited the model for Shakespeare's contrapuntal intellectual structures). And yet oddly enough, the classical musical tradition can't seem to match the achievement of the dramatist it probably inspired.

Verdi, for instance, can give us a chillingly grand Iago, but can't really convey the sense (as Shakespeare does) of the conceptual inexplicability of evil. Likewise Mendelssohn expertly conjures the rich fancy of Midsummer, but when it comes to its last-act parody of its own means - or even the opposed musings of the lunatic, the lover, and the poet - Mendelssohn is helpless. But then music is rarely good at deconstructing its own meaning (it's only good at deconstructing other music) - so how could a composer approach the probing self-critique that's central to plays like Hamlet and Henry V?

It was unsurprising, then, that the first two Shakespearean offerings of the evening were essentially variants on scene-painting (which Adès led competently, but not brilliantly). Tchaikovsky concentrated on a soaring love-theme, as if The Tempest were merely a later variant of Romeo and Juliet. Sibelius, meanwhile, was most inspired by the script’s eponymous sea-storm, and created a heaving, crashing soundscape of startling verisimilitude. This was better than the Tchaikovsky, but it was still essentially movie-music – more thematically intriguing was the surprising vigor and rusticity of Sibelius’s music for Ariel and the clowns.

But only Adès seemed to engage with the actual ideas of the play. The Tempest, of course, is not merely a highly rarefied fairy tale; it is a probing, and utterly sober, meditation on the “problem” of power and freedom – neither of which, in Shakespeare’s mind, is an unalloyed good. And you could feel this moral and emotional tension latent in much of the music from Adès’s celebrated 2004 opera (which has yet to play Boston, but which is now widely regarded as the greatest recent achievement in the form).

Indeed, there was a literal tension between high and low in the songs for Ariel, Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand that the composer had chosen to showcase, as well as a sense of mournful unresolvability, which captured much of the intellectual mood of late Shakespeare. I should mention that Adès did not work directly from Shakespeare’s text – he commissioned a libretto by Meredith Oakes, which simplifies the play, and emphasizes the roles of Ferdinand and Miranda. That may sound dismaying, but I was surprised to discover that Oakes had preserved Shakespeare’s underlying themes even in her own variations on his text – in her Tempest, Prospero confronts in his child’s romance yet another conundrum of power, love, and freedom.

Much has been made of the vocal writing for Ariel in the opera – almost all the sprite’s songs float up around high E – that’s at the very top of the “Queen of the Night” aria, for ready reference. It’s almost impossible for a soprano to actually vocalize consonants up there, so quite a bit of Ariel’s songs came off as a kind of abstracted sonar, which only Prospero could comprehend. But this, too – although it violates the sense of prettiness we expect of Ariel - is much in line with Shakespeare’s text, which stresses always that this spirit isn’t human, sounds like a kind of sweet buzzing to everyone but Prospero, and is always yearning to escape to the freedom of, in Oakes’s text, “higher spheres.” (You can’t get much higher than high E.)

And luckily the BSO had soprano Hila Plitmann on hand to superbly carry off these high-altitude acrobatics (she even did so with something like the sweet lightness we’d expect of Ariel). Meanwhile Christopher Maltman made a grounded, commanding Prospero, and Kate Royal a gorgeously thoughtful Miranda. I only had doubts about Toby Spence’s Ferdinand, who didn’t seem quite ardent enough to hold his own in this amazing company.

The other major work by in Adès on offer was his 2005 violin concerto Concentric Paths, a hypnotic piece in three movements which paralleled, appropriately enough, his writing for Ariel. Once again, a “vocal” violin line orbited at the top of the instrument’s range (essayed dazzlingly by Anthony Marwood, for whom the piece was written), while, in later movements, the rest of the orchestra sighed heavily below. What’s fascinating about Concentric Paths is the sense that its tonality is unstable in a curiously post-postmodern way, spiraling through key signatures yet seemingly drawn toward some sort of gravitational tonal center – what you might call a “strange attractor” if you were speaking in terms of chaos theory (which I think in a way Adès is). The audience appeared mystified by this eerily attractive gambit – despite the clean authority of the performance (the composer's conducting came alive for his own stuff).  They slowly warmed, however, to the vocal marvels of The Tempest (there were many singers in the audience, as the concert was a freebie for Tanglewood Festival Chorus members). Let’s hope that Boston only grows more and more familiar in future with this amazing talent.

Voice of the prophet

The BSO - and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus - raised Elijah from the dead last weekend.

Incredibly, this weekend's BSO performances of Mendelssohn's Elijah (above) marked only the third time the orchestra has mounted the work. Actually, maybe that's not so incredible: it's a huge undertaking - and not nearly as interesting as, say, The Trojans or Moses and Aaron, no? (Har de har, that was just my little philistine joke.) What's more, even these performances almost didn't happen: first James Levine was sidelined by ongoing back problems, then tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko withdrew due to a throat infection. But in a pair of miracles that would have done the prophet himself proud, the BSO came up with worthy replacements in both cases: the much-loved Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos picked up Levine's baton, and the Grammy-winning Anthony Dean Griffey stepped into the roles of Obadiah and Ahab.

So the show went on, and proved to be, well, if not revelatory, then still pretty terrific in a satisfyingly old-fashioned way. Needless to say, if Elijah has been neglected over the years by the BSO, it's still utterly familiar (in piecemeal fashion) to anyone who cares about choral music, or, for that matter, most anyone who goes to church: several of its ravishing numbers are staples of the Sunday morning repertoire. Still, it's rare that one gets a chance to hear Mendelssohn's grand tribute to Bach (and great precursor to Wagner, ironically enough) at full size, as it were. Chorally speaking, I'm kind of a secret size queen, I admit, and as the Tanglewood Festival Chorus (all 150 of them) filed onto the Symphony Hall stage, I felt myself getting - well, a little excited. And I wasn't alone (I find again and again that most straight people are secret size queens, too). Not that I don't adore our smaller, professional chorales, like the brilliantly nimble Boston Baroque and Handel and Haydn choruses. But ya know, they're kind of - well, not small or anything, but . . . well . . . hmmmm. Maybe I should stop there.

Anyway, what's wonderful about huge choruses isn't really the size of their sound but its depth. This is a hard quality to explain in the abstract, but as they say, you know it when you hear it. Of course the trouble with such choruses is that to get that depth, you often have to sacrifice clarity - the voices in large groups aren't always uniform in quality, and their diction can get blurry, and even the singing itself can be a little ragged around the edges. (Just you try to get 150 people to start and stop on a dime.) The BSO's secret weapon, however, is John Oliver, founder and long-time director of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, who sculpted the chorale's gigantic sound with nearly unbelievable precision. Even though they were singing from memory. In German. We were impressed.

Given the virtuosity of the chorale, the rest of the performance sometimes seemed like almost an afterthought. But it must be said that Frühbeck de Burgos demonstrated once again why he's the BSO's go-to-man in times of crisis - he seems to be able to pull most of the Western repertoire out of his hat at short notice. His Elijah boasted no deep insights or sense of new conception, it's true - but then, you don't really go to the BSO to hear musical ideas; even James Levine doesn't really have any original ideas. You go to the BSO to hear a top-drawer rendition of the conventional wisdom about this or that piece, and in the case of Elijah, that's probably enough. Frühbeck de Burgos clearly knows and understands the work, somehow conveyed a sense of its structure, and drew both sensitive playing from the orchestra as well as palpable dramatic attack throughout the oratorio's two-hour-plus playing time. And simply watching him throw himself into the musical climaxes, sawing the air and literally leaping against the podium, was like watching a maestro capably ride a colossal tiger.

What he didn't get, however, was a similar sense of drama from his soloists, although musically, soprano Christine Brewer and mezzo Stephanie Blythe were exquisite - and actually both were fine dramatically in their stand-alone moments (Brewer made a very moving Widow, and Blythe soared as the Angel). Tenor Anthony Dean Griffey was almost in their league, but not quite - perhaps because he was a last-minute draft, as it were. Griffey certainly has a gorgeously rich timbre, and sang with fluidity and grace - but he wobbled here and there in his sustained notes, and didn't really have the same general sense of clarity that the women displayed. There was lovely work from the secondary soloists, who joined the group for some beautifully blended quartets, and a charming turn from young treble Ryan Williams (last seen in The Turn of the Screw) in the famous "rain" recitative that closes Part I. The only real gap in the performance, however, came, unfortunately, in the role of Elijah himself. Bass-baritone Shenyang certainly had the pipes for the part, but he was stiff and dramatically unconvincing, and seemed to imagine that he was singing - and emoting - all by himself. It's a tribute to the rest of the many moving parts of this performance that a gap in the lead role hardly seemed to slow it down.

Which leads me to return to a point that infuriated a lot of BSO fans when I brought it up the first time - the disparities in pay that are evident on the Symphony Hall stage. The star of Elijah was clearly the Tanglewood Festival Chorus - only its members were paid not a dime for their efforts. Local blogger Matthew Guerreri once scoffed at my raising the question of why BSO unionized players were paid so much more than session players (and, well, just about any other performer of classical music in Boston). In Guerrieri's circular logic (and to be fair, in the opinion of many others), BSO players were hardly overpaid at all, because players in other metropolitan areas were overpaid at precisely the same level. I wonder, though, whether the fact that the instrumentalists onstage at Elijah were looking at salaries of, say, from $130,000-$200,000 a year, while the singers were looking at annual incomes of - well, ZERO - gives him any pause. Of course perhaps the symphony choruses in Chicago and L.A. are likewise expected to donate their time - but is that as it should be? Does Guerrieri agree that their artistry is, at least in the coin of the realm, literally worthless?