In Thursday’s (6/26) Guardian (London), Tom Service writes that it’s “impossible not to celebrate the fact the Glenn Dicterow has spent 34 years as the [concertmaster] of the New York Philharmonic; he’s retiring this month … But the most astonishing factby far for a British reader is how much Dicterow was paid. In the most recent New York Phil accounts we have access to, 2011, his annual salary was $523,647 (£304,000) … Nobody’s going to begrudge Dicterow his dues, but that’s a sum that’s exponentially more than any [concertmaster] of a British orchestra could ever dream of making. And while Dicterow is an exception, the average pay of a sample of US orchestras in 2013 and 2014 makes jaw-dropping reading for anyone in a British orchestra …. In the salaried orchestras in the UK …precise figures aren’t available, but based on recent-ish figures, average orchestral wages hover around the £30,000 ($50,900) mark. … That’s not enough, either in terms of a meaningful reward for a lifetime’s dedication to their instrument and their art-form, or for a larger sense of being valued by the society in which they live and work. … our orchestral musicians are not fairly remunerated.”
Posted June 27, 2013
