Symphonies & Scorpions: Expenses, Then & Now
WELCOME TO THE 19TH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.
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Beijing to Shanghai, Saturday, May 3
Feeding the Stomach and the Soul
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Caroline Pliszka is not only a stand partner nonpareil, she’s also the ultimate activity planner. Along with associate concertmaster, Elita Kang, we’re up’n at ‘em at 7:00 a.m. for an excursion to the Temple of Heaven. We arrive by subway just as the park opens so, by God, it’s not crowded! And the sky is blue!
The stunningly ornate temple, iridescent as a peacock, was constructed between 1406 and 1420 during the reign of the Yongle Emperor, who also oversaw construction of the Forbidden City in Beijing. The temple complex was extended by the Jiajing Emperor in the 16th century, who used it to pray for bountiful harvests.
Hmm. Let’s think about what kind of harvest that means in today’s terms: Say the average daily per capita food consumption in China is a modest pound. That’s 1,500,000,000 pounds, or three-quarters of a million tons of food per day. Multiply that by 365, and you’ve got 273,750,000 tons of food per year. I guess the Emperor’s prayers paid off. For now.
For me, even more impressive than the temple is the life of the park itself and the activity within. Scientists tell us nature abhors a vacuum, and by 9:00 AM, when we have to leave to return to the hotel, the tide of humanity flooding the previously empty park with a goodly number of those 1½ billion folks suggests this law is true for social science as well. Interestingly, these outdoor lovers are predominantly adults, many of them elderly. Even more remarkably, they play games with each other. Now, that’s not something one routinely sees in American parks. Older folks in America don’t play games very much. Competitive sports, yes, with scores and winners and losers. Tennis, golf, that kind of thing, but not so much playing simple games just for the joy of it. Personally, I think it’s a great idea. I think we’d live longer. And more happily.
I watch some games I’m familiar with, like badminton, except these guys don’t bother with nets. Just hitting the birdie back and forth is sufficient fun and exercise. There’s also an intriguing two-person game in which each participant holds a wooden paddle in each hand, and from paddle to paddle balances a rubber ball, winds it around his back, and flips it gently to his partner a few feet away, who does likewise. It appears to take quite a bit of skill, as there are some old guys managing to keep the ball from ever touching the ground, compared to some younger novices who are having a hard time preventing the ball from taking on a life of its own.
There’s also group tai chi and other disciplined exercises of that sort. For the less athletically inclined, there are card games galore played at small tables, where crowds of onlookers surrounding the players peer intently over contestants’ shoulders.
[image error]Temple of Heaven, with BSO violinists Elita Kang and Caroline Pliszka.
Playing the Numbers
If my off-the-top-of-my-head calculations about food consumption in China are pie-in-the-sky, the numbers BSO orchestra manager, Ray Wellbaum, rattles off to me on the bus to the airport are down-to-earth.
The 1979 Boston Symphony tour to China cost about $600,000. This one costs more than four times as much. The airfare alone is about $3,000 per musician. There are about 150 musicians with their significant others plus staff, so just getting us to work on this tour equals the whole ‘79 budget.
Then there are hotels rooms. They were less expensive than I thought, only about $200 per night. Ray says these days you can still get group discounts at hotels, but no longer from airlines, and that China is still cheaper than Europe. I don’t know about Japan, but let’s say the $200 figure pertains there as well. That’s $200 per night multiplied by 12 nights, multiplied by approximately 100 rooms per night (not 150 because there are some shared rooms). That’s a quarter-million dollars for beds.
For food, each musician received about $1,400 per diem, so that’s $140,000.
What am I leaving out? Two weeks of salaries of course, both for management, staff, and musicians. In 2014, BSO musicians receive a base, pretax salary of about $2,300 per week. Multiplied by 2 weeks and then by 100 musicians, and adding overages like principal pay, seniority, FICA, pension, and health care contributions, that expense totals an easy half mil. I don’t know what the tour staff and managers’ salaries are, but I’d guesstimate you could tack on another $100,000.
Then there are Maestro’s fee and paydays for all the support teams I mentioned earlier. No doubt there’s more. This is just a rough estimate.
In the past, Ray made advance trips to scout out accommodations and the like, which was standard practice, but he said there’s little need to do that anymore. The BSO now relies on word of mouth from trusted partners in the industry, and has confidence in relationships with travel companies who are experts in working with symphony orchestras. And with the Internet and instant communications these days there’s no need to do advance trips, but if they ever need a volunteer I’m more than happy to make myself available.
Sponsors help underwrite some of those formidable costs. These days, they are often multinational corporations, and for this tour the lead sponsor is EMC2, an American multinational headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts that offers products and services enabling businesses to store, manage, protect, and analyze data. Sometimes local businesses, like the State Street Bank, also provide essential financial support.
Then there are the concert presenters, who pay the orchestra a substantial fee for their services. As they too need to make ends meet, they derive income from advertisers and sponsors of their own, with the rest of their costs passed down to the concertgoers in ticket prices. By anyone’s measure these are expensive. Japan concert tickets, for example, ranged from about $125 to $375. Fortunately, the BSO has been a very popular brand in Asia for more than a half century, starting with the lengthy tour in 1960 under Charles Munch and continuing through the twenty-nine-year reign of Seiji Ozawa.
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NEWS FLASH: MY FIRST POLITICAL THRILLER, THE BEETHOVEN SEQUENCE, IS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE ON SEPTEMBER 8! A MENTALLY UNBALANCED MUSIC TEACHER BECOMES PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! PREPOSTEROUS? STAY TUNED.
