Detroit Symphony Returns to a Giddy Reception
Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times
Leonard Slatkin, left, and Detroit Symphony on Saturday, at the first performance after a labor dispute. More Photos »
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: April 10, 2011
DETROIT — As the musicians took the stage, applause and cheering erupted. “We love you guys!” a concertgoer yelled. A violinist mouthed, “Wow,” another tapped her music stand with her bow in appreciation, and the awe-struck players stood facing a packed-to-the rafters audience for five minutes while the love flowed over them.
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The Detroit Symphony Orchestra was back.
The men and women in black and white appeared in Orchestra Hall on Saturday night for the first time after a corrosive six-month strike, having reached an agreement with management last week.
Detroiters snapped up free tickets for the hastily arranged reunion. People stood in the back of the hall and a screen was set up for the overflow. Dozens were turned away. Many seemed to be newcomers to the hall, and dress was a mix of ties, bandannas, pearls and T-shirts. Couples clutched hands and some in the audience teared up. Shouts of “Yeah!” and whoops and whistles sounded amid the clapping.
“Welcome home,” said the music director, Leonard Slatkin. “It’s been the longest six months,” a period to be regretted and put in the past, he said. “This evening is about celebration. It’s about you.”
The moment was about something more than the end of a bitter labor dispute. The sounds of music at the hall (along with the Tigers’ victory in their home opener on Friday) were like the chirpings of a bird in the bleak days of late winter. It finally meant some good news in a town so often described as hollowed out, shriveled up and abandoned.
The census figures in March were the latest gloomy development. They showed that over the past decade the population dropped by a quarter in Detroit, where a fifth of the lots are vacant, and the city’s leaders are demolishing 10,000 empty residential buildings.
At the least the orchestra survived, albeit with the phrase “near-death experience” repeated often. Detroiters are used to seeing businesses go bust, leaving workers — on strike or not — without jobs. The strike played out, sometimes viciously and to a large degree over Facebook, as the governor in nearby Wisconsin sought to cut back on collective bargaining rights, fueling a national debate over the place of unions in society.
“This is a blue-collar factory town,” said David Lewin, 56, a native of the city and a 10-year subscriber to the orchestra who works in advertising for the two Detroit newspapers. “Our image is the Rust Belt. Just down-and-out Detroit, and a lot of that is true,” he said, as he waited for the concert to start in the Max M. Fisher Music Center’s atrium.
He got emotional at the thought of the city’s decline. “But we have gems — the Detroit Symphony and this hall,” Mr. Lewin said. “What classical music represents, human expression at the highest level, juxtaposed with this hell hole we call our city,” he said, stopping to fight back tears. ’“It’s remarkable.”
While many know Detroit more for Motown, its symphony is a storied one. Dating to 1887, it has always been considered a major ensemble, if one step below the orchestras in Cleveland, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. It is a hub of musical education for poorer school children and for the major universities nearby.
With some bitter-sweetness, supporters said the attention from the strike may help put the orchestra back on the map. “Now we can no longer call ourselves the Invisible D.S.O.,” said Shelley Heron, an oboist.
The strike ended a dispute over pay cuts that the players said would turn them into a second-class orchestra, along with changes in work rules that they said would detract from the mission of presenting top symphonic performances. Management said Detroit had simply run out of money to pay for an orchestra at its old level of spending.
In the end the players accepted large salary reductions but preserved their health insurance and even improved their pensions. Nonsymphonic work — teaching, coaching and chamber concerts — became the source of more potential income. Minimum salaries dropped to $79,000 the first year of the contract, down from $104,650 last year. They will rise slightly over the three-year deal.
A number of other major orchestras — including those in Philadelphia, New York and Boston — are facing or undergoing negotiations for new contracts, and the outcome here will be scrutinized by musicians and their employers.
Despite the Saturday night love fest serious problems remain. Even with the cost savings, the symphony is projecting a yearly deficit of $3 million and labors under a $54 million debt from the music center that was built to supplement its hall, a 1919 gem that seats 2,000 people.
The city’s decline has sapped donations and ticket sales. Its reputation keeps some wealthy suburbanites away. “Downtown is still a tough ticket for people,” Mr. Slatkin said in an interview. “It has some frightening images.”
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Much bitterness remains. “I resent what’s gone down,” said Joseph Striplin, a Detroit native who has played violin in the orchestra since 1972. He blamed board members and orchestra executives, “a mix of politically reactionary right-wing figures who never saw a union they didn’t hate” and a leadership with a “distorted vision of what a symphony orchestra should be.”
But like others who expressed lingering anger, Mr. Striplin said he still loves the orchestra and the city, and promised that the musicians’ professionalism would shine through.
“We are not going to go out there and pout and not play well,” he said. “It’s you and the music now, and the music is why you are there.”
During the strike the players worked on their public relations efforts; practiced exercises or solo works they usually have less time for; and traveled the country substituting in other orchestras, a time-honored tradition among the brotherhood of musicians. In fact, about 20 of the current 81-member roster were elsewhere this weekend, including several principal players. Substitutes filled their spots.
The musicians also put on 19 concerts of their own in churches and schools outside the city center. Mr. Slatkin, who used the strike time to be a guest conductor and to visit colleges with his 11th-grade son, said he was so inspired by the concerts’ success that he would adopt the idea next season.
On Saturday night Mr. Slatkin led off with a sprightly “Candide” Overture by Bernstein. John Williams’s “Summon the Heroes” followed. “It’s a call for all of us,” Mr. Slatkin told the audience. Then came the Barber “Adagio for Strings,” to commemorate the sufferings of Japan and elsewhere over the past six months, and a jaunty “American in Paris.”
The second half consisted of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” written, Mr. Slatkin said, by a composer in America yearning to go home, “because it’s home we welcome all of you,” he said. He announced that all tickets to the cobbled-together spring season would be $20 per concert.
With the musicians having only three rehearsals and six months off, the performance had its imperfections. But the concert was not for the critics. For an evening, it made playing and hearing Dvorak the most exciting thing in the world.
Backstage after the concert some musicians seemed giddy. “It’s the closest to rock stars we’ll ever feel like,” said Bryan Kennedy, a 28-year veteran of the horn section.
