HET Symphony Orchestra won't get its 2016 budget done

THE Symphony Orchestra does not have a balanced budget for 2016. Without additional money from the province, it can no longer perform its core task, nor can it fulfil all the commitments it made earlier. That is the gist of the letter CDA deputy commissioner Hester Maij sent to Provincial Council, ahead of its meeting on 7 October. The subject of the letter: "progress business plan/redemption subsidy HET Symfonieorkest". And how long this has been going on you can read here and here.

At the previous State Assembly meeting on 1 July [hints]Here is the pictorial report of that meeting, click on agenda item 8[/hints], during which Hester Maij received critical questions from almost all parties about that business plan and the evaporated provincial millions, she was more or less forced to keep Provincial Councils informed of all developments at the orchestra. She added a twist to this by stating that she would not write a letter immediately with every piece of news, which was reluctantly accepted by the councillors.

You would think, then you keep quiet for a while as an orchestra, but no. On 20 July, the orchestra sent a letter to the province stating unequivocally that it cannot submit a balanced budget for 2016. Because:

Cuts necessary to achieve a balanced budget would lead to such a small formation that the orchestra would no longer be able to play a medium-sized symphonic repertoire.

HET actually no longer exists

There HET Symphony Orchestra says quite a lot. After all, the orchestra's core task is to perform the symphonic repertoire, which is what it gets five million a year from the state for. And then not just medium-sized repertoire, but also really big, think Mahler. The Enschede Orchestra has not been able to do the latter for ages, at least not without hiring a lot of substitutes. But if medium-sized symphonic repertoire also becomes a problem, then you effectively no longer exist as an orchestra.

While the cancellation of concerts in Zwolle and Deventer - with which the orchestra no longer met the province's dispersal requirements - was still resolved with concert series outside the theatres, those one-hour small concerts too are apparently in jeopardy.

Anyone looking at HET Symfonieorkest's concert calendar will see that the number of activities has fallen drastically. Musicians are sitting at home because there is simply no more money to pay them. In the quarterly report of 27 August, enforced by the Provincial Council, HET Symphony Orchestra therefore reports that "additional funding from the province is necessary for the survival of the orchestra in its current form."

The panic in the province and also the municipality of Enschede is now great, because admitting that all the millions were pointless and that money has to go back to the orchestra will inevitably lead to many painful questions. And so a letter, with...

a new plan... er, research

Unfortunately, Hester Maij sent her letter to Provincial Council without attachments - the original letter from HET Symphony Orchestra and the quarterly report are not attached. To our request for those documents, her spokesperson replied

We still have to figure out how formally or not these have to be legally applied for.

Maij does report that there will be an "external counter-expertise", which should put concrete answers on the table to questions such as:

How were all those provincial millions deployed?
Are revenue estimates realistic?
What can cooperation with other institutions bring?

And the most painful:

At what level of turnover and performance does a symphony orchestra still qualify for state subsidy?

This question is particularly painful because the answer is already known: without a balanced budget and the ability to perform the broad symphonic repertoire, HET Symfonieorkest cannot even submit an application. So provincial money has to come in quickly, before 1 February 2016, because the orchestra must have submitted its grant application by that date.

Meanwhile, the most logical solution, a merger with the Gelderland Orchestra, still remains unmentionable. And that things can get even crazier, Gelderland shows. More on that tomorrow.