Since the onset of Covid-19, regional and national arts organizations have struggled to remain viable. This December, as we all gather with families, either physically or virtually, to celebrate the season and usher in a new year, leaders in the arts community are issuing a call to arms to save the very thing that makes living and celebrating life worthwhile: Music, theater, history and the visual arts. Glastonbury Lifestyle, in recognition of the value this community places on the arts, reached out to both our local historical society as well as the Hartford Symphony to talk about the arts in the time of the pandemic. You can read our story on Page x about how the Glastonbury Historical Society is coping with the abeyance of one of their most popular programs this year. We also spoke with Ruth Sovronsky, director of development at the Hartford Symphony, who described for us some of her organization’s challenges in the past few months.
“The loss of our ability to perform means so much more than just the loss of revenue. It meant the loss of our education program for school children, the loss of a wonderful collaborative program (HSO Ambassadors) with several local colleges, including Goodwin and Capitol Community, and the loss of our ability to host a Naturalization Ceremony.
October would have marked our fourth year hosting a Naturalization Ceremony on the opening weekend of Masterworks. Each year we naturalize 10 citizens, and invite four of their family members to stay as our guests to enjoy the performance after the ceremony. Carolyn Kuan, our music director, was naturalized on our stage in a moving ceremony in 2016. Carolyn became our 11th naturalized citizen that year when we learned her citizenship application was ready and she had passed all the necessary steps.
Welcoming the community - and doing all we can to expand and serve our community - is the mission of the HSO. We were founded under the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal initiative created to lift this country out of the Great Depression. The WPA helped unemployed actors and musicians and one of the results was the birth of small orchestras around the country, including the Hartford Symphony.
The HSO survived because of an outpouring of support from the community that helped move the young symphony away from dependence on the federal grant funds, which restricted the symphony's ability in many respects, including the ability to sell tickets.
This year would have been our fourth straight year of a balanced budget. We had finally turned the orchestra around. We launched a $10 million campaign, Music Builds Community, and in February reached our goal, ahead of schedule. These funds are primarily intended to support our endowment, which was woefully inadequate. Of course, there is so much more work to be done and meeting that goal was just one of the many steps we’ve taken to secure the orchestra's future.
Then Covid hit.
We are now in the process of putting together our 2020 Annual Message which will show a deficit as a result of Covid. Our report is the ongoing story of every arts organization in our country. We can’t perform, we can’t risk the health of our audiences or musicians, and yet we are determined to have a symphony when we come out the other end of this.
We’re doing all we can to remain vital and offer value to our community. On the "entertainment" side, we’ve launched a new online Masterworks In Depth with Carolyn Kuanf.
We hope to launch a Spotlight series, we created HSO To Go - a virtual platform on our website, hartfordsymphony.org/hso-to-go. This is the place where we post everything we’ve created this year, including an important conversation about Anti-Black Racism in American Orchestras, which we believe may be the first to be held by any American orchestra.
We are continuing to reinvent, create, innovate and elevate voices in our community who have much to contribute through the performing arts. We will continue to partner with other arts organizations, such as The Wadsworth, The New Britain Museum of Art, Hartford Stage, TheaterWorks, Real Art Ways, The Mark Twain House, The CT Science Center, the Connecticut Historical Society and so many more.
A strategic plan created by the city of Hartford included a survey asking all stakeholders to list the top values of the greater Hartford region. The top answer was the arts. The greater Hartford community has an incredibly high concentration of all art forms - museums, theaters, music and more.
And now, with Covid, we stand to lose it all.
We must act to preserve the arts. We need an outpouring of support from individuals and businesses who can afford to be generous, to be philanthropic, and to make sure we get through this as a community. If we don't, we will lose the top value that we all treasure - makes this region such a joyful place to live. The arts drive the value of our homes, the vibrancy of our communities, and the lifestyle we treasure.
The Hartford Symphony is now launching our Annual Fund Campaign and we need people in our region to recognize that the arts is precious. We’re just part of the larger effort to "Save our Stages,” a national initiative to ensure we don't lose the arts in our communities.
A Portion of an Open Letter from Music Director Carolyn Kuan
So many have lost so much this year. This past summer, among other things, I was to make my debuts with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Lincoln Center Mostly Mozart Festival. Every plan was cancelled, and to be honest, my spirits crashed. There are days when I am overwhelmed with worry about the future of arts organizations and artists, and I ache for our amazing and hard working musicians. But on the darkest days, it is your support and encouragement that gives me hope and courage.
Seeing so many of you donate tickets to cancelled concerts, make gifts large and small to the HSO, and send positive messages of affirmation makes me truly grateful for that which will see us through: our community and our caring for one another. We all look for silver linings. I am grateful to have more time to focus on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commitments of the HSO.
I have treasured my time at home with Elizabeth, instead of my usual scenario of months on the road, conducting operas and concerts in venues throughout the world. For the first time, all 24 of the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellows were united virtually with 18 music directors/chief conductors from 16 different countries.
I wait impatiently for the day when we can be back on the stage, but until then, we are creating new ways to share music together, even if only in a virtual space. I hope you will all join me in a new virtual adventure, Masterworks In Depth With Carolyn Kuan. I miss making music and I miss the electricity that we create when we are together. Stay hopeful, stay safe and know that I am with you always, even when you can only see me on a screen.
