In Thursday’s (9/18) Guardian (London), Tom Service speaks to the Atlanta Symphony’s principal guest conductor, Donald Runnicles, who wrote a public letter to orchestra management a few weeks ago with Music Director Robert Spano and “speaks now with even greater desperation, passion, and sadness about what is happening to an orchestra he loves. ‘The lockout is essentially the board and management punishing the orchestra: it means they have no access to the place where they work, where they make music; it means their health costs are not going to be paid. And what on earth has that punishment got to do with two invested parties in a discussion-finding consensus? It’s a one-sided attempt to force the orchestra to its collective knees. It also paints the orchestra as this intransigent group of musicians. But in fact they have shown extraordinary willingness to come to a common agreement, as what happened two years ago proves. The fact that it should have come to a lockout again is simply devastating.’ … The question is how many more players the management wants to lose, and at what point the ASO ceases to function as a ‘world-class’ ensemble, as Runnicles puts it.”
Posted September 19, 2014
