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• 9 • From Provincial to World Cl ass T he Canadian Opera Company’s orchestra began as a student ensemble. As the company became more proficient, professional musicians were also hired. In 1968, the board signed an agreement with the distinguished Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and that ensemble played in our pit for the next eight years. The orchestra’s executive director was a man named Walter Homburger . He was meticulous, an elegant dresser, and a very smooth operator. In the course of his career, he had managed Donald Bell, Victor Braun, and Glenn Gould. From 1951 to 1955 he managed the National Ballet, and he had also brought a huge number of world-class artists to Toronto, ranging from Lotte Lehmann, Kathleen Ferrier, David Oistrakh, and Victoria de los Angeles to Duke Ellington and Victor Borge. Walter took over the Toronto Symphony in 1962 and ran it brilliantly. He was a fabulous negotiator and presented a great challenge to me. People like that always do. When I arrived on the scene, I was not particularly impressed by the sound of the orchestra. Andrew Davis had just taken over from the Czech maestro Karel Ančerl, whose long bout with diabetes had unfortunately led to a certain drop in the orchestra’s discipline and standards. I discovered that the procedure was to have an annual meeting with the bigwigs of both the Canadian Opera Company and the Toronto Symphony in a lawyer’s office to renew contracts and establish schedules. I went into my first meeting trying to be diplomatic and explaining to the others that Canadian Opera needed more time with its orchestra. We were getting ready to mount a production of Wozzeck, which would require a large number of rehearsals. Mr. Homburger countered that From Provincial to World Class { 131 the orchestra wanted to give us less time, and made some highly condescending remarks about opera in general, and the Canadian Opera Company in particular. “At the end of each season,” he said disparagingly, “we have to take at least a week or two for the musicians to correct their mistakes and bad habits.” In all fairness, it must be admitted that the Canadian Opera Company at that time had some fairly routine conductors. This fact, combined with the problems engendered by Maestro Ančerl’s health, had led to a situation in which the orchestra had become rather unimpressive. A more serious problem for our future was Mr. Homburger’s contention that the orchestra’s work with us was somehow “incompatible” with its concert function. I replied by saying, “Excuse me. You are from Europe. Would you make that statement about the Vienna Philharmonic? All of its members come from the Vienna State Opera pit, and many of them continue to do double duty in both orchestras, one evening in the opera house, the next on the concert stage. Are your musicians too weak to handle that challenge?” The members of both boards watched us joust. They had never witnessed anything like this, and it soon became clear that neither Walter nor I was about to back down. I must admit, we were both enjoying the show we were putting on for our respective board members. Later on, we became good friends and shared a lot of mutual respect. After this highly unproductive meeting, I asked John Leberg to undertake a study of our current orchestra costs and our options. John told me that our annual Toronto Symphony bill came to just a little more than a million dollars. Worse than that, we were contractually obligated to employ all one hundred or so members of the orchestra, even when we were doing Mozart. As if this weren’t bad enough, the pit at the O’Keefe Centre could seat only sixty-five players. That meant that every time we gave a performance, we were paying at least thirty-five musicians to stay at home. The arrangement was completely untenable and more than a little ridiculous. I asked John to draw up a budget for the option of contracting our own orchestra. He is a wizard with numbers and came back with a figure closer to $500,000. The Toronto Symphony, it appeared, was charging us for a great deal of its overhead. I took the problem to our board, we terminated our agreement with the orchestra, and that was how we started the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra. We made up a diplomatic story for the media. [18.218.48...

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