At a sparsely attended press conference last week, John Richman seemed surprisingly subdued. Richman, chairman of the board of trustees of the Orchestral Association, parent organization to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, had just succeeded in wresting a unanimous vote from his fellow trustees to launch a whopping $92-million expansion project that will test the limits of the CSO’s fund-raising and management skills. It may be a decade before we know whether the decision ushers in a new and glorious era for one of the world’s great orchestras or leaves the CSO foundering under an imposing edifice it cannot afford.
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The plan calls for the transformation of Orchestra Hall and the adjacent Borg-Warner Building into a new state-of-the-art symphony center with a projected opening date of 1998. About $50 million of the total expansion budget will be spent acquiring and razing the present Borg-Warner structure and building a new facility on that site, while the remaining money will go into renovating the existing concert hall. The completed center will provide the orchestra, staff, and audiences with luxuries heretofore unavailable at Orchestra Hall: spacious lobbies, lounges, and rest-room facilities; a music library; more on-premises office space; a significantly larger stage and larger rehearsal facilities; a gift shop; archives; a new cafe and catering facilities; and–last but not least–what is hoped will be an acoustically improved concert hall.
An absence of guarantees, however, hasn’t dimmed CSO executive director Henry Fogel’s enthusiasm for the project. Disappointed last year when the trustees voted against his proposal for a new performing arts center, Fogel seems convinced that this project’s financial assumptions are sufficiently conservative to keep the orchestra from drowning in red ink. “We have tried to put enough contingencies everywhere.” But at the moment Fogel has considerably more than the new project’s finances to worry about. High on his agenda is ensuring that the orchestra’s annual operations remain on budget in a tough economic climate and that audiences grow enough to keep the new facility from becoming a white elephant.
