Rudman's city: Who needs the NZSO if it's going to behave like this?

By BRIAN RUDMAN

This time last year, the Wellington-based New Zealand Symphony Orchestra riled regional orchestras from Auckland to Dunedin by usurping their traditional places in the pit for the Royal New Zealand Ballet's tour of Cinderella.

After the ructions and bad odour that little job-snatching exercise caused, you might have thought the heavily state-subsidised senior band would have learned its lesson. But apparently not.

A few days ago it signalled its plans to join NBR New Zealand Opera to snatch the bread off the plates of its baby brother, the Wellington Sinfonia, in three of the next four opera seasons in the capital.

Naturally enough, the Sinfonia is screaming blue murder and once again questions are being raised about the place or even the need for a national orchestra.

For resurrecting this debate, the NZSO has only itself to blame.

The job demarcation lines between orchestras, as far as there are any, were spelled out by former Treasury secretary Dr Graham Scott in his 1996 review of the national band's financial woes.

His recipe was that the Auckland Philharmonia and other regional orchestras would get their base income accompanying opera and ballet, leaving the NZSO to tour as the flagship of the musical arts.

Until the Cinderella tour, the NZSO observed this convention. But when the Cinderella kerfuffle erupted, NZSO chief executive Ian Fraser told me that things could be about to change.

"I don't know how sensible it is that we continue under a self-denial ordinance where we say, basically, we're not in the market for pit work."

He said he was referring to Wellington there, not Auckland, because travelling to Auckland "to pillage jobs" from the Philharmonia would be "a fairly expensive option".

Pillaging from the Wellington Sinfonia, though, was obviously cheaper.

As I understand it, the saga began with the NZ Opera company planning a season of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov in July next year. The company decided its regular pit orchestra, the Sinfonia, wasn't up to the task and, behind its back, hired the NZSO.

A mixture of cold feet and dwindling funds had NZ Opera postpone Boris until March 2003 and substitute Mozart's popular Marriage of Figaro for the July 2002 spot.

When the opera company told the NZSO they would use the Sinfonia for this chamber-sized work, the orchestra insisted it had a contract for that season and to not do it would leave them with a gap in their programme. It also claimed the right to perform the delayed Boris.

The Sinfonia heard of its sidelining the same way All Blacks do - by press release.

Said angry general manager Roger Lloyd, "We get incredible reviews all year and then we're treated like some throwaway organisation. I find it extremely arrogant."

When you see the reviews of the Sinfonia's pit work in last month's season of Verdi's Falstaff you can understand the hurt.

"Verdi's mercurial score ... was handled with an aplomb that was quite superb," wrote Dominion critic John Button. This was echoed by the Evening Post's Lindis Taylor: "The orchestra rises brilliantly to the occasion, its playing as polished as you'd get in most European houses".

Wellington deputy-mayor and Sinfonia chairman Alick Shaw sees the NZSO's behaviour as "extraordinarily foolish", playing as it does, he says, into the hands of Aucklanders who argue the time for a national orchestra is over.

"If the national orchestra wants to be a national orchestra it should stop behaving like a regional one, otherwise nasty people in Auckland might get the wrong idea."

This nasty Aucklander can only agree with him.

It's only a year ago that the NZSO got another bail-out, boosting its Government funding to $12 million. It was told to go off and do its job, touring the nation as our premier arts institution.

Somehow, sitting in a darkened orchestra pit, filching the work off regional orchestras, doesn't quite fit that picture.

The Auckland Philharmonia's general manager, Ann Rodda, says her band is "trying to be as supportive as we can" for "our colleagues south of us who are struggling with the NZSO".

What is needed, she says, is "a national policy on what orchestras are meant to do in this country".

In fact there already is one. But with the NZSO getting away with its raids on the territory of the regional orchestras, no one seems prepared to enforce it.

That being the case, perhaps it's time to wipe the slate clean and conduct a proper review. One that considers, for instance, the option of replacing the one national orchestra, with three city-based orchestras.

These would share the funding and the touring functions that the existing national orchestra fails to do very well.