“With just five performances scheduled in their farewell season, musicians of the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra are clinging to hope that something comes of a proposed partnership with the Madison-based Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra,” writes Paul Srubas in Friday’s (12/5) Green Bay Press-Gazette (Wisconsin). “Mark Cantrell, executive director of the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, has been making frequent visits to Green Bay to gauge support for the survival of the symphony orchestra…. Cantrell cautioned that his exploration is in the early stages…. The goal would be to keep Green Bay’s orchestra in Green Bay and the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra in Madison but combining some assets. ‘Rather than having two managers, two staffs, duplications of everything, there’d be one organization running the whole thing,’ [says Cantrell]. The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra … wants to be a state resource, not just a Madison one, and partnering with the Green Bay orchestra is consistent with the chamber orchestra’s mission of building community through music, Cantrell said….. ‘Any time a community loses an orchestra, it rips the fabric of the community,’ … Cantrell said. … The loss of the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra, a 100-year-old institution, would be a tragedy, just as it would be a tragedy for the city to lose its civic symphony, Cantrell said.”
Posted December 9, 2014
