Last year, the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra tried something new: three performances of music from Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” films.
The elaborate, expensive production featured plentiful effects and a big orchestra. And it lost $70,000 in a single weekend, Executive Director Jane Kenworthy should.
“It’s important for symphonies to try new things,” she said. “It was adventuresome. You take risks, and sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. And this time it didn’t.”
The loss from the ill-timed Memorial Day weekend concerts was part of a mounting burden of debt that Kenworthy inherited as the new head of the well-regarded regional orchestra. When she took the executive director spot in September 2005, the symphony owed more than $250,000.
Now, at the organization’s 50th anniversary, she said the organization is entering the season without debt, the result of an outpouring of donations and cost-cutting measures that included trimming administrative staff and temporarily cutting musicians’ pay.
It’s a major change from a year ago, when the orchestra was struggling to pay for its first performance of the season.
“We were concert to concert, just to make sure we had enough to sustain the operations,” remembers Jerry Gordon, who heads the symphony’s board. “And that had been the case for two years. Now, we’re on pretty solid footing.”
Kenworthy said she re-negotiated every contract and outstanding liability. Though orchestra members agreed to a 10 percent pay cut for the second half of the season, they maintained the size of the 90-piece group. Meanwhile, they nearly tripled the number of individual gifts from the previous season, she said.
Gordon, also president and chief financial officer of the county’s Economic Development Authority, said the symphony now plans to build an endowment to carry the organization long-term.
“We need to get ourselves away from the point where we are concerning ourselves with finances on a day-to-day, or even a year-to-year basis,” he said.
