In Tuesday’s (1/5) St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sarah Bryan Miller reports, “The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra started out 2010 with some good news: Despite the down economy, the orchestra’s revenue and attendance are still headed up. SLSO president and CEO Fred Bronstein announced Monday that all the right numbers rose during the first half of the season, compared with a year before, in a date-to-date comparison. … The 10 of the fall concerts that were between 90 percent full and completely sold out were a dramatic improvement. Sales for the orchestra’s mainstay, the orchestral series, were up 6.5 percent—$3.41 million versus $3.2 million—with actual seats sold rising almost 7 percent. Average per-concert attendance rose by 15.6 percent. … Last October’s gala, the Symphony’s first in more than a decade, featuring Yo Yo Ma, sold out and brought in a record $800,000 profit, 25 percent more than projected. … Bronstein expects the improvements to continue, if not at quite so dramatic a pace. ‘We’re turning around five or six years of decline,’ he said. ‘It’s a four- or five-year process, and we’re still early in that. But the initial indicators are good.’ ”
Posted January 6, 2010
