All together now: To help sustain the orchestra, Conductor Slatkin took a pay cut.
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On a recent evening, conductor Leonard Slatkin lifted his baton and signaled the downbeat for that unfailingly lovable Baroque chestnut, Pachelbel's Canon in D. The music, played by 21 members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, was far less surprising than the venue -- but that would have been the case even if they had launched into a Lady Gaga medley.
The site of this concert was the Matrix Human Services Center, a former church in northeastern Detroit; the audience was a collection of some 70 residents of one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, all of them African American, many of them confronted with classical music for the first time. If it seemed like an awfully small audience for a performance led by one of the U.S.'s best-known conductors, the loud clapping and hearty cheering suggested that such music might have a future in Detroit after all -- even with the city's excellent orchestra drowning in debt, its labor contract up in the air, its corporate donors largely tapped out and its government support reduced to nickels.
The DSO is suffering the same hard times plaguing many of the nation's other symphonic ensembles. As one attendee at a recent League of American Orchestras meeting in Atlanta tweeted, "Anyone else at #Orch2010 catch the irony of including a performance of the Verdi Requiem in the conference?" But everything related to the economy is magnified in Michigan, where the unemployment rate is a stomach-churning 13.6%. Other local cultural institutions are struggling too. The Michigan Opera Theater is staggering under $20 million in debt. The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History is tightening its belt for the fourth straight year. The Detroit Institute of Arts, the city's most widely renowned cultural jewel, is audaciously -- and riskily -- planning to ask the region's voters to add what may turn out to be as little as a fraction of a penny to the property-tax rate to keep its doors open. But in southeastern Michigan these days, even so tiny a tax increase can look enormous.
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