End of Eos Orchestra Is Seen as Wake-Up Call for Music
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The nonprofit arts group Eos Orchestra is dissolving after 10 years of presenting little-known works of classical music in experimental fashion.
The orchestra, which used the tagline “A New Way to See Music,” won critical and popular acclaim with 10-minute operas and programs featuring music by the expatriate writer Paul Bowles and the composer Bernard Herrmann, who scored films by Alfred Hitchcock.
The orchestra, composed of free lance musicians, varied in size depending on the program. It had eight fulltime office employees.
During the past three years, the group presented more than 50 concerts, in venues such as Zankel Hall and the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Its budget last year was $2.5 million.
News of the closing saddened the music world and prompted one maestro to decry the lack of private support for classical music.
“This is a wake-up call to all of us about the collapse of patronage,” the musical director of the American Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein, said.
“The generation that has the money is interested in the visual arts and film,” he said, “and those who are interested in classical music are conservative and drift toward very established institutions.”
Indeed, as the 2005 season approached, the orchestra faced another grueling round of fund-raising to go forward.
In the end, the founder and guiding light of the enterprise, the composer and conductor Jonathan Sheffer, 51, decided to end his group.
In a letter to supporters dated December 20,Mr.Sheffer cast the decision to close the orchestra in a positive light. “Eos’ mission is complete,” he wrote.
“Eos has been at the center of a robust dialogue about the future of concerts, and of the performing arts in America,” he said.
During its lifespan, the orchestra became well-known to New Yorkers and earned national attention with broadcasts on PBS and National Public Radio, and with performances throughout the country.
Part of the group’s success was attracting new audiences. “At a time when a lot of people were wondering whether concert music would keep its audience, Jonathan was out there proving that new audiences exist,” said the president of the Alliance for the Arts, Russell Bourscheidt, said. He served on the Eos board of advisers.
In a tough period for financing of the arts, the Eos Orchestra had managed to grow and to expand its programs over the years. Program expenses for the 2002-03 and 2001-02 seasons were $1.8 million, as reported on the group’s IRS 990 form. In the year 2000-01, total program costs were $1.7 million, a jump from $1.4 million the previous year.
But with success came new demands. “Ultimately it became too difficult and too costly,” one board member, Peter Kazaras, said. He noted, “Ten years is a pretty good run for any organization.”
Indeed, Mr. Botstein finds the group’s longevity insignificant.
“The importance of an organization cannot always be measured by its permanence,” he said. “Jonathan’s efforts with Eos are in a very noble historical tradition.”
Furthermore, romanticizing Eos “would only make the process of doing something new more daunting for a younger generation,” Mr. Botstein said.
“It should be used as a model, an inspiration for others to do the same thing,” he said.
The Eos legacy is contained in five compact discs, including the 2002 Grammy-nominated “Celluloid Copland”; in four books on musical topics, and in the artistic talent Mr. Sheffer nurtured along the way.
Mr. Kazaras, an opera singer, switched roles and directed Stravinsky’s opera “Pulcinella” with the Eos Orchestra. “Jonathan more than encouraged me – he put his money where his mouth was,” Mr. Kazaras said.
Mr. Kazaras called the orchestra “controversial, quixotic, occasionally striking out and occasionally batting things out of the park in a way that was truly breathtaking,” he said.
Mr. Sheffer seemed to have posted that record of achievement without being lavish in his productions.
“I didn’t have the feeling that he was squandering money on anything he did,” said another member of the board of advisers, the philanthropist James Marcus. “He used imagination instead of dough. A lot of people think it’s the glitz, but it isn’t. It’s the quality of the performance.”
The editor of Musical America, Sedgwick Clark, was philosophical and forward-looking about the silencing of Eos.
“It’s too bad when an orchestra goes under, but these things happen,” Mr. Clark said. “It’s not the great catastrophe, but a lot of musicians are unemployed now. I hope that someone comes forth with another orchestra that does as interesting things as the Eos. And maybe it will be Sheffer, who knows?”
Mr. Sheffer, born in New York City, was a disciple of Leonard Bernstein’s at Harvard. He founded Eos Orchestra in 1995 after a career composing and conducting in Hollywood. He held the title of Eos’s artistic director without a salary.
From the first concert at Alice Tully Hall in 1995, the goal was to offer new definitions of classical music. Familiar repertoire and new works were presented in novel ways, using a mixture of media and smaller ensembles that blurred the distinction between chamber and orchestral concerts.
The 2005 season, announced in September, was to include an interactive video installation by artist Leo Villreal set to Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, as well as new works by composers Julia Wolfe, John King, and Phil Kline, performed with the group Ethel. The New York performances dates at Zankel Hall have been canceled, as have bookings in Lewisburg, Pa., Santa Fe, and Los Angeles.
Mr. Sheffer is scheduled to conduct a non-Eos orchestra in a four-date engagement in May at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, featuring cantatas by Haydn, Britten, and Berlioz.
Mr. Sheffer also remains the artistic director of a small experimental orchestra in Cleveland, Red, which is modeled after Eos. Its next concert is January 30 at the Masonic Temple in Cleveland, featuring pieces for piano by Mozart, Saint-Saens, and Prokofiev.