Symphony For Rent; Bargain Rates (Rehearsals Extra)

Psst! Wanna rent a band? Need something that goes beyond a grunge band or a jazz trio or a string quartet? What about a symphony orchestra? Have I got a deal for you.

If the plans for your festival, or convention, or corporate event or for that matter your birthday party require a big musical statement, hire the Spokane Symphony. It can be done. In fact it has been done.

Tuesday, the Spokane Symphony was playing in its usual home, the Spokane Opera House. But the 2,000 people in the audience were not the usual symphony crowd, they were mostly members of the spiritual organization Subud, in Spokane (and in the Opera House) for the 10th World Congress of the organization.

Subud, which places high value on the arts, had hired the Spokane Symphony for the occasion.

The Subud concert included some standard Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Rachmaninoff from the orchestra’s traditional repertoire. The performance also included world premieres of short, well-crafted works by Simon Lesley, and Ramon Roper as well as a fine, musically interesting cantata by composer-conductor Lucas Richman - all members of Subud.

The very next night, the orchestra played Copland, Grofe and Sousa along with music from Broadway musicals and films for the opening of the new Spokane Valley Mall. An audience of 1,500 to 2,000 listened. Some even danced to tunes from Disney scores.

The Symphony has hired itself out for a variety of concerts, from classics to rock. In January, Washington State University bought an all-Beethoven concert which the Symphony played in Beasley Coliseum. In May, the Symphony was hired to play at Hero’s Day with Norman Schwarzkopf and Johnny and June Cash at the Spokane Arena, sponsored by Washington Water Power. Also in May, the Moody Blues hired the symphony as their backup band for a concert at The Gorge for more than 8,000 nostalgic rockers in May.

Some people think the orchestra’s performances at the Festival at Sandpoint are official symphony events. They’re not. When the symphony played a powerful classical concert under the baton of Gunther Schuller to conclude this year’s Festival, the orchestra had been rented for four rehearsals and the concert by the Festival organizers.

You could do the same. You would, of course, need to hire a hall, rent a tent or have an appropriate meadow at your disposal, and you would need liability insurance. Your event would need to occur when the orchestra was not already committed to regular Symphony season engagements - summer would be a good time. But with those details taken care of, you could hire yourself an orchestra.

The Spokane Symphony comes in different sizes, from the 36 players who perform at The Met to the 85 or more who perform blockbuster classics at the Opera House.

Let’s suppose you want the Spokane Symphony to play, say, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and some other pieces requiring about the same number of players. The cost for the musicians would be about $5,800 for the concert itself. Every rehearsal would cost the same, and, of course, you would want at least two rehearsals for music of any complexity. There’s $17,400 on your bill.

The symphony requires that you pay to have instruments moved and musicians transported, you might need to rent some music, you would definitely need a conductor (he or she is an additional expense).

The bottom line is just shy of $25,000. Longer distances, more rehearsals, more musicians, a big-name conductor - all these would increase your bill. But basically, this is a bargain. Symphony orchestras in larger cities such as St. Louis or Atlanta would cost between $50,000 and $100,000 for the same kind of program.

The very idea of an orchestra for hire offends some people. I can hear distant mutterings about “the purity of the orchestra’s classical mission” and even “artistic prostitution.” When you consider the things professional musicians have to do to make a living while playing in an orchestra like Spokane’s, such objections seem puerile.

Many of the players have nice dignified musical jobs. They teach in private studios or in schools and universities. But other Spokane Symphony musicians have day jobs ranging from janitors and secretarial temps to lawyers and high-tech engineers.

Other orchestras and orchestra players around the country make money from recording, not just Beethoven symphonies, either. The Seattle Symphony does record the symphonic repertoire, but it makes a considerable income recording films and television scores. Symphony musicians in New York and Los Angeles can be heard on many a pop album. Musicians in the Nashville Symphony … well, you can guess.

Two other points: First, when shoppers hear the symphony for the first time at the Spokane Valley Mall or rock fans encounter them at The Gorge, maybe, just maybe, a few of them will be intrigued enough to come to a symphony concert at Opera House or The Met.

Second, when musicians play music, any music, preparing it well and carefully, who can lose? I heard them rehearse Grofe’s “On the Trail” under associate conductor Jung-Ho Pak for the Valley Mall performance using the same care they might devote to Haydn or Webern. Those same cultivated skills carry over to the orchestra’s classics concerts.

Financially, symphony orchestras are not having an easy time in these days of rising costs, dried-up government funding and declining season ticket sales. There are limits to how much support even the most clever fundraisers can coax from individuals and corporations.

Orchestras like the Spokane Symphony are making themselves available for non-traditional performances. So, rent a symphony. The work helps and the music’s fine.

, DataTimes