Paying the Piper: The Halle and the city of Manchester (Manchester Sounds volume 1: 2000)

The Hallé Concerts Society was founded in 1899 to continue one man’s work. Charles Hallé, like a number of other founders of orchestras in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Leopold Damrosch and Theodore Thomas are examples in New York, and Henry Wood and Thomas Beecham in London) was both conductor and entrepreneur, musician and impresario. Concert-giving societies run by well-to-do music-lovers also existed: in Manchester there was the Gentlemen’s Concerts Society – founded in 1799 and considering itself ‘the oldest musical society in the kingdom’¹ – which first brought Hallé to Manchester in 1848 (ten years before he began to organise his own concert series) and which lasted until 1920; in Liverpool there was the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1840, which is still in existence.

The Hallé Concerts Society came into being to continue the concert series which Hallé ran at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester (‘Sir Charles Hallé’s Grand Concerts’, as J Aikman Forsyth, Hallé’s business manager and proprietor of the Deansgate music emporium, styled them on his letterhead, even after Hallé’s death).²

The three personal guarantors –  Forsyth, Gustav Behrens  and Henry Simon – who were assigned the goodwill of the concerts by Hallé’s executors (deed dated November 21st, 1895)³ continued them for 1895-6 and the following three seasons. After this the Hallé Concerts Society was formed, and incorporated on June 28th, 1899, after which, on December 6th, the two surviving original guarantors assigned the ownership of the concerts to it (Simon had died in July).⁴ Fifty members (soon afterwards increased to 200) guaranteed up to £100 each, which could be called on from time to time to make good any deficit on the activities of the society.⁵

The origins of the City of Birmingham Orchestra (the ‘Symphony’ came later) are different. It was set up in 1919, after a number of other short-lived attempts at orchestra-founding, by Birmingham Corporation, and subsidised by it from the start.⁶ Like the Hallé, it was to go full-time during the Second World War. The Liverpool Philharmonic Society was different again. It appointed a conductor from time to time (Hallé held the job from 1883 until his death, succeeding Max Bruch) and employed an orchestra which, from Hallé’s time, at any rate, was substantially the same as the Hallé Orchestra in membership (a situation which continued until 1939). In 1942 Liverpool Corporation took a major part in the launch of the new, full-time Philharmonic Orchestra, and took over ownership of the Philharmonic Hall from the society, granting it an annuity and rent-free use of the hall (an arrangement which lasted until 1988, when the hall was leased back).⁷

The Hallé’s relationship with the city of Manchester has not been as consistently close or dependent as that of either of the other two orchestras with its respective home city. But it has had a long history and a notable effect on the orchestra’s artistic achievement: in some respects it has influenced the latter radically. The shifting pattern of aid from Manchester and the surrounding local authorities, and the artistic outcomes which have accompanied it, are the subject of this article.

Private finance – the guarantors

The Hallé Concerts Society was created with the principal objective of continuing the Manchester Hallé Concerts.⁸ It was incidental to achieving this that it sustained the Hallé Orchestra. From the outset the role of its guarantors was crucial. The Hallé society, by 1913, had sustained trading deficits on more years since 1900 than it had achieved surpluses,⁹ and was having to issue substantial ‘calls’ on its guarantors to remain solvent. Hans Richter (principal conductor from 1900 to 1912) was paid the then enormous fee of 50 guineas a concert, with 40 engagements a season guaranteed. (His successor, Michael Balling, was offered only 25 guineas a concert). In today’s terms, Richter’s fee must have been the equivalent of about £10,000 a concert,¹⁰ but if we consider the prestige his presence brought, it may have been money well spent. At all events, the Hallé experience, even at this stage, weighs against any supposition that symphony orchestra economics may have been inherently balanced (in terms of earned income and total expenditure) at any time in the past 100 years. Studies of major American orchestras¹¹ indicate that in the first two decades of the 20th century they, too, were unable to meet their expenses purely from performance income, and in some cases required large donations to survive. Any assumption based on the theory of Baumol & Bowen¹² of the necessarily super-inflationary growth of the ‘earnings gap’ in the economics of symphony orchestras, that one could extrapolate such positions backwards to a point in the early 20th century when they were profitable, is not convincing.¹³

The beginning of subsidy

When Hamilton Harty took on the Hallé mantle, after the First World War, its finances were in no better state than before. Players’ salaries were reduced after his first season (1919-20), and the Hallé renewed calls for help from Manchester City Council which it had made, unsuccessfully, during the war. (The Gentlemen’s Concerts Society, which had no guarantors, foundered in 1920 because the net worth of its investments – which must have seemed quite substantial before the war – fell below the amount of its accumulated deficit).¹⁴

A series of negotiations ensued in which Dr Walter Carroll, Manchester City Council Education Committee’s musical advisor, played a major part. He saw the value of linking the spending of ratepayers’ money to the education of ratepayers’ children, and the first Manchester Municipal Concerts, with cheap seats (from 8d to 3s 6d, and 500 reserved for children at 6d each, compared with standard Hallé prices of 3s to 10s, with standing room at 1s 2d), the City Council bearing the costs, were begun at the Free Trade Hall in autumn, 1924. The first incurred a loss to the Corporation of £169 10s 11d, but, with 2346 tickets sold, ‘the result was considered to be in every way satisfactory.’  Similar losses were incurred at the next two Municipal Concerts, with similar attendances (the third sold out at 2402) and the Hallé Committee was told ‘the Town Hall Committee considered the results to be most gratifying.’¹⁵

The Municipal Concerts continued on the same pattern, with ten concerts a season, until 1929-30. Later¹⁶ they were reduced to seven, in 1933 to four, and after five in 1939-40 they were discontinued.¹⁷ (From 1926 Carroll organised an annual concert by a schoolchildren’s orchestra and choir – the choir, trained by Gertrude Riall, performed in a Hallé Municipal Concert on March 4th, 1929, and the famous Columbia recording of Nymphs And Shepherds and Brother Come And Dance With Me followed, made on June 4th, 1929.¹⁸ The children’s choir appeared in the final Municipal Concerts of 1930 and 1931 also).

The instigation of the Municipal Concerts represents the first recognition by the Hallé and Manchester City Council that they had a common interest in making concerts available for the benefit of the less well-off, and that, in order for music of the quality provided by the Hallé to be accessible in this way, drastically reduced admission prices were necessary. Educational need was part of the justification for the plan from the beginning, but only part, as the concerts were not limited to a schools audience. They were part of the growth of interest in classical music between the wars – fed no doubt by the emergent gramophone industry and, of course, by the BBC.

The Depression years (1930 onwards) hit the Hallé hard financially, and though its Committee tried most courses of action available to cut costs and find new income – reducing the orchestra’s pay, accepting local authority help with whatever strings were attached, seeking recording income, beginning an endowment fund, reforming the guarantor system, and forming a ladies’ committee (with the intention, one assumes, of fund-raising) – none of this was to have as significant an effect as co-operation with the BBC. Harty left in 1933, and from 1934 to 1943 the Hallé enterprise became effectively a joint one with the BBC, and the same players constituted both the BBC Northern Orchestra (employed part-time but year-round) and Hallé Orchestra (engaged for the winter season and sometimes for summer ‘Proms’). There were still regular calls on the guarantors, however, in the 1930s, which meant that private individuals, not businesses, were contributing significant amounts (typically more than the cost of a top-price season ticket for the full series of 20 concerts) year by year.

1943 – ‘Death or glory’

As is well known, things changed considerably during the Second World War. By 1942-3, the Hallé’s performance income was more than twice that of any season from 1931-2 to 1939-40, and the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust was in its third year of supporting its concerts outside Manchester, resulting in a large increase in the number of such ‘tour’ engagements. It was also now clear that the newly-established CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts – the forerunner of the Arts Council of Great Britain) would offer support if the Society took the plunge of offering full-time contracts to its musicians. The Hallé’s hand was forced, effectively, by the BBC’s decision to form its Northern Orchestra as a full-time body. The Hallé announced that it would do the same, but the majority of Hallé/BBC players accepted BBC contracts, and it became clear that by the spring of 1943 the Hallé would have few musicians left from its old membership. It was, as the Hallé chairman, Philip Godlee, observed in a later reference,¹⁹ a case of ‘death or glory’, and it was at this stage that the offer was made to John Barbirolli to return to Britain from the United States to accept the permanent conductorship of the orchestra, with (as the telegram from R J Forbes rather disingenuously put it) ‘important developments pending’.²⁰ The resourceful Barbirolli, whatever his initial feelings about being launched into a situation where the first bookings were about a month away and he had less than half the minimum players needed,²¹ created what was in effect a new orchestra in four weeks, and it gave its first performance (in a cinema in Bradford, not in Manchester) on July 5th, 1943.

The following year, the Hallé received £1500 from Manchester City Council.²² The City of Birmingham Orchestra also became full-time in 1944, with a separate existence from the BBC Midland Orchestra (with which, in a similar arrangement to the Manchester Hallé-BBC partnership, it had shared its players since 1934) and an annual grant of £14,500 from Birmingham City Council, more than half of which was to be for schools work.²³ In Liverpool, the Philharmonic Society also put its orchestra on a full-time basis from 1943 (it was the first British provincial orchestra to do so) - a step linked with a radical financial arrangement whereby Liverpool Corporation took over ownership of the society’s Philharmonic Hall (itself rebuilt only in 1939 after a fire), and undertook to pay the society £4,000 per year and grant it rent-free use of the hall. In 1945 the Corporation paid off the Liverpool society’s accumulated deficit.²⁴

Progress and crisis

Grant income from the newly formed Arts Council for the Hallé was £4,000 in 1945-6,²⁵ with £1,552 coming from Manchester Corporation. Arts Council grants continued on a yearly basis and increased in 1948-9 to £9,433, the next year to £10,000, and by 1953-4 to £12,000.

Negotiations were in progress between the Hallé and Manchester City Council for aid on a long-term basis, as financial support was seen as vital to increase the orchestra’s strength to its pre-war number of 95 and reduce its workload.²⁶ In 1947 Philip Godlee reported that there had been a ‘satisfactory outcome’ to talks with the Council, and the Hallé was able to claim indemnity against its losses from the city, up to a total of £9,000 per year, for the next three years.²⁷ Thus at this time Arts Council and City Council subventions were of roughly similar value, each contributing 7% to 8% of the Hallé’s annual turnover (see the table). The City Council insisted on increased representation on the Hallé Committee, which was readily conceded,²⁸ and the arrangement brought immediately increased support from the Arts Council,²⁹ which was beginning to introduce its policy of ‘pound for pound’ (ie that local authorities should match its contributions to the regional orchestras), which was fully set out in its annual report for 1950.

The City Council guarantees were called upon in full in 1948-9 and 1949-50, so it came as a severe shock when the Hallé was told that the Council had not agreed any grant or guarantee for 1950-51, against a claim for £7,664.³⁰ For the last time in the Hallé’s history, a ‘call’ on the private guarantors was made, but this was little more than an accounting exercise. The balance sheet already showed around £5,000 as ‘amounts received from guarantors in advance of calls’, and only £880 was transferred from those amounts or raised during the year.³¹ Few of the old-style guarantors still existed: a new category of membership had been introduced in 1946 under which people paid their ‘guarantee’ in small annual instalments and could not be called on to donate more.

The Hallé was thus brought to a major crisis in 1951-2 – the season in which it moved back into the re-built Free Trade Hall.³² That this was dealt with so quickly and effectively is evidence of the abilities of Kenneth Crickmore, appointed General Manager in succession to T E Bean in September, 1951. Despite the initial refusal by the City Council of the Hallé’s claim for 1950-51, he ultimately obtained £6,485 from them, and was then able to record (with the help of a new three-year outright Council grant of £9000 per annum) first a reduced loss for 1951-2, and two years of increasing surpluses.³³

But the Hallé for a time faced financial disaster, and Crickmore’s first answer was that it should work its way out of trouble. His introduction to Manchester in 1952 of the Hallé Proms (a summer series of popular programmes) and ‘Industrial Concerts’ (later renamed ‘Opus One’ concerts – a series of popular content, for which employers made block bookings at low prices) brought the number of engagements per year rapidly back up from 209 (for the 1951-2 season) to 267 (1953-4). It is very clear from the documents that the change in the pattern of Manchester concert-giving was a direct response to what seemed, at the time, to be a refusal of support from the City Council. That change had an effect which has lasted to this day – oddly enough, an increase in the number of concerts performed in Manchester.

Barbirolli’s role in the achievement of the new relationship with the City Council was direct and probably decisive. He repeatedly threatened to leave the Hallé (and cited many offers to tempt him) and in 1952 spelt out his willingness to stay if only the Corporation would live up to its assertions ‘that Manchester shall have an orchestra worthy of ranking with the world’s best’, asking for ‘a clear indication of our future for, say, the next three years . . .’³⁴ That is exactly what was voted.³⁵ Barbirolli himself then undertook to conduct 132 concerts a year instead of his previous 120, for the same salary, for which the Committee offered him its ‘grateful thanks’.³⁶

Sir Kenneth Clark wrote, in his chairman’s report of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1953: ‘Municipal patronage is taking a large and increasing share of the cost of providing the arts . . .’ and though Manchester Corporation’s grant was not renewed in 1954-5, a new ‘Joint Scheme’ involving most of the local authorities of Lancashire and Cheshire, including Manchester, which was designed to provide equally for the Hallé and Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestras, partly took its place. From 1958, the Hallé Orchestra’s centenary year, Manchester also resumed its own direct grants, in addition to contributing to the ‘Joint Scheme’.

The golden age

The 10 years following 1955 were a period of remarkable stability for the Hallé Concerts Society.  The City Council grant grew rapidly, overtaking the total derived from the Joint Scheme in 1962-3 (it had begun with a value of less than half of it), and exceeding it by more than a third in 1963-4 and succeeding years. By 1965-6 the Hallé’s reserves, at £82,622, were the highest hitherto recorded (and not to be exceeded, even in nominal terms, until 1974-5).

This was the time which Kennedy (1960) aptly describes as ‘the golden age of Barbirolli’. The contract with Associated Rediffusion for regular televised performances, negotiated by Crickmore in 1955 and which was continued until 1964, brought resources to the Hallé which enabled it to give a large number of concerts in London and the South of England – nearly 130 over a period of five years.

Temporary set-back

The Hallé’s finances deteriorated in the late sixties, despite Arts Council contributions which rose to 27% of operational costs in 1967 and never fell below 23% thereafter (see the table). Manchester’s grant and the ‘Joint Scheme’ of Lancashire and Cheshire local authorities contribution were both frozen from 1963-4 until 1967-8, while escalating costs took the Hallé increasingly into annual deficit – with 1967-8 (Barbirolli’s ‘silver jubilee year’, with no summer Proms and an expensive tour of South America instead) by far the worst.

Interestingly, it was at this time that the orchestra’s artistic standards began to be widely questioned. Charles Reid wrote³⁷ that in Barbirolli’s later years the ‘old magnificence’ of his performances with the Hallé was only intermittent, and attributes this to the variety of guest conductors working with the orchestra. The New York Times critic Harold Taubman wrote in 1970 that standards at the Hallé had descended to an indifferent level.³⁸ And Gerald Larner of The Guardian was describing the CBSO, not the Hallé, when he wrote ‘there is no better British orchestra outside London’ in autumn, 1970.³⁹

The Hallé performed much less frequently in London after the end of its links with Associated Rediffusion in 1964 (it had given 14 London performances in 1958-9, and 11 in 1963-4; after that there were never more than six, and in 1969-70 only three); while the CBSO, after the building of the motorways enabled it to get its players back to base before the ‘witching hour’ of midnight (in terms of overtime payments), was giving more, with 19 central London performances in 1969-70 – as pointed out by King-Smith (1995). The mere fact of one orchestra being given notices more frequently than another by the London critics of the national papers may, in time, have had its effect on perceptions.

The Loughran years

James Loughran was appointed Principal Conductor in 1970 after the death of Barbirolli (Moshe Atzmon was the Hallé’s first choice for the job, and contractual negotiations with him began before Barbirolli died, but he finally turned the appointment down after it became clear he would not be given a free hand over the hire-and-fire of orchestra personnel).⁴⁰

Attendances in Loughran’s early years were at an all-time peak (in particular the Opus One series, which was promoted with television advertising). Box office income, however, was at its lowest, as a percentage of turnover, compared with any other sustained period in Hallé history (see the table). The reason for this apparent paradox is that subvention income was so high: the Arts Council and local authorities between them were supplying close on 50% of the Hallé’s income in grants (see the table). At this time, the CBSO was not so well favoured: in 1969-70 the Birmingham city fathers gave it £50,000 and other local authorities added £9,463, whereas Manchester gave the Hallé £52,513 to which the ‘Joint Scheme’ added over £20,000. The totals of local authority support in 1973-4 were: Hallé £104,836; CBSO £82,380; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic £92,500.⁴¹

With the contribution of the ‘Joint Scheme’ before 1975, and the newly-created Greater Manchester Council after it, the Hallé never received less than 19% of its operational costs from local authority sources, for more than a decade from 1970 onwards (see the table). In five out of the six years from 1973-4, the Society recorded a surplus, and its reserves grew in every year. By 1978-9, reserves stood at £155,177, and there was no accumulated deficit. The credit for this remarkable achievement, in a time of high inflation, must undoubtedly go to the General Manager of the time, Clive Smart, but the City Council’s role deserves acknowledgment, too.

A new Hallé endowment fund, proposed in the annual report in 1971, was established as the Hallé Endowment Trust Fund in 1974-5, but at this stage income from it was not used to supplement ordinary receipts. (The Hallé Trust Fund, launched in April, 1964, had been established to mark Barbirolli’s 21st year with the Hallé. Its main purpose was to provide finance for ventures such as foreign tours which were outside normal budgeting, and for which Barbirolli had already regularly donated a large part of his own fees. It has subsequently been renamed the ‘Charles Hallé Foundation’.)

After 1978-9 the Hallé ran into much harder times. Its complaints were addressed mainly to the Arts Council, which was avowedly changing the balance of its donations to give less support to the major orchestras (see its annual report for 1980). The GMC, however, maintained support for the Hallé, in most years, at a level comparable with the combined Joint Scheme and City Council grants of 1970 to 1975. After 1975, the City Council itself, however, gave the Hallé only £5,000 per year more than the amount of its own rent bill for the Free Trade Hall. The City of Birmingham’s grant to the CBSO was then even lower, at £20,000, because of the contribution of the West Midlands County Council. The metropolitan authorities had primary responsibility for symphony orchestra support.

But the balance between the two cities thereafter began to shift.  Manchester City Council’s grant for the Hallé remained at £30,000 per annum from 1974-5 through to 1977-8, rose to £35,000 for the next two years, but then fell again to £30,000 for 1980-81 and to £20,000 for 1982-3, remaining at that level or near it for the next 10 years. Birmingham’s CBSO contribution, which was only £20,000 in 1975-6, rose year by year to £39,780 in 1982-3 and to £103,235 the following year, £170,000 in 1984-5 and £211,361 in 1985-6. Birmingham now supported its orchestra ten times more generously than Manchester did the Hallé. Even greater munificence was to come.

By 1980, the Hallé had exhausted its reserves, and the accounts began to include provision in case of insolvency. The trust funds were, however, its bulwark against disaster, and Clive Smart admits that building them up was more important at the time than sustaining reserves, as the Arts Council had shown it would penalise the latter policy.⁴²

Abolition of the GMC

But the real beginning of major problems for the Hallé came with the abolition of the GMC in 1985 (two years after James Loughran was succeeded as Hallé conductor by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski). From that point, the Hallé lost a major component in its income – approximately equal, in proportionate terms, to the Arts Council’s own contribution in the previous ten years – which was never adequately replaced. AGMA (the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities) was expected to take on the GMC’s role in this area, but the level of aid it gave was established at the outset on the basis that the Arts Council would replace a large part of the metropolitan counties’ contribution, whereas after one year the Arts Council’s own resources were cut by the Government and the gap was never made up again.

The Arts Council chairman, Sir William Rees-Mogg, stated in its 1986 annual report that settlements with the successor authorities in the areas of the former metropolitan counties ‘mostly exceed previous expenditure in total’,⁴³ and, in the 1988 report, that ‘we were able to ensure that the arts took no harm’. These comments are particularly hard to understand, contrasting with the secretary-general Luke Rittner’s remarks (also in annual reports of the time) that the reduction in ‘abolition funding’ would be ‘a critical test’ (1986), that ‘more and more arts organisations are staving off financial disaster . . . because the essential core funding was no longer enabling them to fulfil the demand . . .’ (1987), and that inflation had outstripped grant-in-aid levels by 6% (1989).

Nonetheless, throughout the the years from 1985, the Arts Council’s support for the Hallé never fell below 23% of operational costs, a figure which compares well with those of previous periods (see the table). The element which was reduced was the contribution from local authority sources, after the abolition of the GMC. The Hallé’s General Committee appreciated from the start that this factor would be critical, but found itself in the middle of a buck-passing process involving the Arts Council and the local councils represented by the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities. The impression is very strong that consideration of the Hallé’s position was being simply postponed, at a time when the choice had to be made between seeking to emulate the CBSO or aiming simply to survive.

A particular effect was the process which led to the reduction of the Sunday concert series from 1990-91. By 1988 the Hallé faced a deficit on all capital and reserves – technical insolvency – and pinned its faith on an Arts Council appraisal, but for which, the Hallé annual report said, the deficit ‘clearly  . . . could not have been contemplated’. Smart had been asked by the Hallé Committee to prepare a list of economies in order to eliminate the deficit, which became known as the ‘Retrenchment Policy’. It included a reduction of the Sunday series to eight concerts, rather than 15 or 16, and reduced rehearsal hours. Skrowaczewski had to comply with the latter, but urged his colleagues ‘Let us not forget that the real successful “survival” of an orchestra depends on artistic excellence and proper preparation.’⁴⁴

The appraisal report recommended ‘a significant increase in local authority support’ for the Hallé, and that the argument for this was ‘unanswerable’, but after a meeting between Arts Council and AGMA representatives in September, 1988, the local authority decision was that no increased help would be forthcoming for 1988-9, £140,000 more per annum would be available in 1989-90, provided the Arts Council gave £60,000 more, and that the remainder of the £500,000 per annum which Smart said was needed in base funding should be obtained by the Hallé ‘through sponsorship’.  The result was not only that the ‘Retrenchment Policy’ was brought into effect immediately, but that a new base level for local authority funding was established which was well below the amount the appraisal had contemplated. Its effect was masked at first because of a major sponsorship deal agreed with Brother International Europe (£500,000 over three years, making an increase in total sponsorship income of 125% in its first year), but the effect showed in the Hallé’s rapidly worsening financial situation after 1993.

AGMA’s attitude, expressed by the officers who spoke for it, strikes one as singularly unsympathetic at this time, with comments that ‘the cumulative deficit was the Hallé’s own responsibility to sort out’ (although at the same time advising against ‘any precipitate action’ – the Arts Council, on the other hand, refused help with the deficit on the grounds that the Hallé should have acted sooner to avoid its creation).

Manchester City Council in particular cannot be said to have been supportive. The fact that councillors were apparently prepared to call the Hallé ‘elitist’ – and that the Hallé considered the council itself also ‘elitist’⁴⁵ – is indicative of a lack of real engagement with the issues. One councillor in 1988 insisted that the Hallé should have ‘a greater involvement in local affairs’ and that it was ‘deliberately incurring deficits’.

Skrowaczewski bowed out at the end of the season in 1991, saying that ‘... Although a number of my initial artistic aspirations and goals for the orchestra have still to be achieved, I do not foresee these being reached in the present financial circumstances ...’⁴⁶ In the event, the fact that by 1990⁴⁷ the Hallé declared that its only option was fund-raising is hardly surprising.

Over-optimism

However, the attempt at a great leap forward that followed the appointment of Kent Nagano in 1991 seems to have been the result of the constant battles with local politicians for funds, and comparisons made (by the Arts Council and the Hallé itself) with Birmingham’s generosity to the CBSO. It was an Arts Council mantra at the time that increased subsidy from itself would automatically bring greater gains from non-Arts Council sources – see Anthony Everitt in the annual report of 1991. It was tempting to suppose that the appointment of Nagano, a dynamic young conductor, would evoke all the same enthusiasm that Rattle seemed to inspire among the Birmingham city fathers – but this proved over-optimistic. Local authority assistance was little changed after the Nagano appointment. Only Manchester City Council’s grant for 1993-4 was significantly increased – but from such a low base that it made scant difference to the Hallé’s position. The decision, in 1994, to use large amounts from the Hallé Trust Fund in an attempt to balance the accounts for 1994-5, was a measure of the desperation to which the Hallé had been brought.

There is a noticeable pattern, from 1988 onwards, in which the Arts Council sought to influence the level of local authority grants for the Hallé by indicating that its own responses would be conditional on the amount of theirs, but at the same time was undermining the Hallé’s case to the local authorities by repeated criticisms of its artistic policy. It is hard to escape the conclusion that some of the judgments made were inspired more by a desire to justify the unique nature of the extra help being given to the CBSO⁴⁸ at the time than by objective assessment of the Hallé.

Flat-lining

In the latter half of the 1990s, both the Arts Council and the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities grants to the Hallé were frozen for a number of years, and the orchestra ran into very serious deficits (for a number of reasons) which resulted in its much publicised near-death experience of February, 1998, and the adoption of the ‘Rescue Plan’ and Hallé Appeal Fund which are only now seeing a return to more stable finances (along with a welcome freeing of Arts Council purse-strings which seems to have come with the change of national Government).

In between, of course, the Hallé had moved into the spanking new Bridgewater Hall, a change which many hoped would result in financial salvation. More cautious voices, however, pointed out long before the move that it would create extra costs of about £500,000 per year beyond those which could be balanced by its benefits.

It is noticeable that the crisis of 1998 came about after the first full season in the new hall, just as the crisis of 1952 did after the move back into the rebuilt Free Trade Hall. Explanations of the 1998 crisis have referred to poor budgeting and the costs of particular projects in 1997, but some of those closest to events have pointed out that the increase in the City Council’s grant to the Hallé at the time of the move did no more than provide cash to pay for the high rental it now had to incur for the privilege of performing in its new ‘home’ (and was thus a hidden subsidy for the hall, which is supposed to operate without local authority revenue support) – and that, although termed an ‘offsetting grant’ it did not fully offset the increased costs involved. The Hallé’s 1998-2000 ‘Rescue Plan’ has seen a reduction in the size of the orchestra, drastic cost-cutting and moves to rehearse away from the hall when possible in order to save money.⁴⁹

Commentary

As one approaches the present day, it is easy to become preoccupied by day-to-day events in the orchestra’s financial fortunes. This survey has attempted to put an emphasis on longer-term trends and developments. It is very clear that the proportion of its income which the Hallé receives from local authorities has decreased dramatically since its peak in the 1970s, and particularly since 1985. This was not the case in Birmingham, where from 1987 the city took back full responsibility for supporting its orchestra, and the CBSO has benefitted accordingly.⁵⁰

The last Conservative Government wanted arts organisations to be less dependent on public funds, and by the end of the 1980s it had finally persuaded the Arts Council itself to reiterate its views.⁵¹ The Hallé attempted to live within this framework, and after 1988 became more dependent on earned income and sponsorship than at any time since 1965. (Ironically, it was the CBSO, which received much more from public sources – ie, its own local authority – which was given priority in practice by the Arts Council, whatever the theories were).

The Hallé, of course, is not the City of Manchester Symphony Orchestra. Its local authority did not bring it into existence and has not always, apparently, been proud of it. But one or two interesting reflections flow from the survey of artistic outcomes and the repertoire and attendance analyses I have made in the course of research in the Hallé archives.

One is that severe, but temporary, financial instability, rather than longer-term pressure, has twice had a remarkably lasting effect on the Hallé’s artistic work. The City Council’s hesitation over its guarantee in 1951-2 led directly to a plunge ‘down-market’ in the Hallé’s Manchester programming and a dependence, which continues to this day, on repeatedly drawing large audiences for ‘popular’ programmes in both summer and winter seasons. The financial trials of the late 1980s and the hesitation by Manchester and AGMA over support levels led directly to the curtailing of the Hallé Sunday series in Manchester from 1990-91 onwards, another move which seems to have had lasting effects.

Instability, however, has been a marked characteristic of the Hallé’s local authority support over the years, compared with the relative reliability of the Arts Council’s contributions (see the table), which have veered up and down but have not been subject to quite such irregularity.

And longer-term constraints of this sort are observable as coinciding with patterns in the artistic output of the Hallé, too. Since 1943, both novelty and enterprise in programming have been at or near their greatest when public funding (particularly local) has been at its most generous (ie in the 1970s).⁵²

James Loughran’s earlier years were not, as has sometimes been supposed,⁵³ a period of artistic decline. The Hallé conductor who gave the most frequent world premieres this century was James Loughran (next was Hamilton Harty); the conductor who has performed the widest variety of composers is Kent Nagano, but James Loughran comes next; the conductor who gave the widest variety of music in the context of the number of concerts overall was James Loughran.⁵⁴

And the highest attendances – not surprisingly, at times when admission prices were at their lowest in real terms⁵⁵ – were in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. The conductor who achieved the highest average attendances was James Loughran (next is Barbirolli). In the 1980s and 1990s, raising prices by above-inflation amounts to achieve maximum earned income was accompanied by noticeably decreased attendances. (This pricing policy was another development encouraged by the Arts Council during the years of Conservative Government, and was based on research which concluded that attendances would not suffer. The research was rapidly proved to be flawed, both in theory and practice.)⁵⁶

If the lessons of the Hallé’s history in its first century are to be learned, it surely behoves the local authorities of Manchester and Greater Manchester to match their frequent praise of the Hallé as the area’s cultural ‘ambassador’ with the kind of support which will keep its reputation high and its audiences able to afford to hear it. They have done so in the past: let us hope they will not shirk the challenge in the future.

Earned income and subventions as percentages of Halle operational turnover 1946-1999

Year     Earned income   Arts Council    Manchester    Joint Scheme/

                                                                City Council   GMC/AGMA

1946-7               93               6                          -                      -

1947-8               85               6                         7                      -

1948-9               81               8                         8                      -          

1949-50             79               8                         7                      -

1950-1               80               8                         5                      -

1951-2               76               7                         7                      -

1952-3               85               8                         6                      -

1953-4               90               9                         7                      -

1954-5               87               8                         -                       2

1955-6               87               5                         -                       3

1956-7               82               6                         -                       6

1957-8               78               7                         3                      6

1958-9               78               8                         3                      7

1959-60             79               9                         3                      6

1960-1               72              14                        5                      6

1961-2               70              14                        4                      7

1962-3               66              13                        7                      6

1963-4               63              20                        9                      7

1964-5               61              21                        9                      7

1965-6               62              21                         8                     6

1966-7               55              27                         8                     6

1967-8               51              26                        7                      5

1968-9               50              38                        14                    8    *

1969-70             52              26                        15                    6

1970-1               52              24                        15                    6

1971-2               53              25                        14                    6

1972-3               56              23                        12                    7

1973-4               53              26                        13                    7

1974-5               48              24                        5                      18

1975-6               52              23                        4                      18

1976-7               57              22                        3                      17

1977-8               56              21                        3                      16

1978-9               55              20                        3                      17

1979-80             51              23                        3                      18

1980-1               56              19                        2                      15

1981-2               53              22                        2                      17

1982-3               60              21                        1                      16

1983-4               59              21                        1                      16

1984-5               55              22                        1                      16

1985-6               58              21                        1                      20

1986-7               58              30                        1                      4

1987-8               56              29                        1                      4

1988-9               68              28                        1                      4

1989-90             65              26                        1                       7

1990-1               64              27                        1                      7

1991-2               66              28                        1                      7

1992-3               67              27                        0.5                   7

1993-4               59              26                        3                      6

1994-5               63              23                        4                      6

1995-6               58              29                        5                      7

1996-7               62              23                        3                      8

1997-8               49              19                        3                      5

1998-9               58              21                        4                      5   **

* 1968-9 was an 8-month year, because of a change in the Halle financial year-end

** In 1998-9, 12% of income was from the proceeds of the Hallé Appeal

From 1982-3, earned income includes contributions from the Halle’s trust funds as well as performance income

Source: Halle annual reports and accounts

NOTES

1 Gentlemen’s Concerts Society minutes, May 11th, 1910, Henry Watson Music Library.

2 Original letter preserved with Gentlemen’s Concerts Society minutes at May 22nd, 1896, Henry Watson Music Library.

3 Halle archives.

4 Halle archives.

5 See Michael Kennedy, The Halle Tradition (Manchester, 1960).

6 Beresford King-Smith, Crescendo: 75 years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (London, 1995).

7 Margaret Lewis, The Educational Functions of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society 1840-1990. (PhD thesis: University of Liverpool, Department of Education, 1998).

8 Halle Concerts Society Memorandum and Articles, 1899, Halle archives.

9 Kennedy (1960), 143.

10 Beer, one of the few consistently available comparators, was 2d a pint then and is not far from £2 now, so a factor of around 200 does not seem inappropriate. Those who wish to pursue such comparisons are referred to Newman & Foster, The Value Of A Pound: Prices and Incomes in Britain 1900-1993 (Andover, Hants., 1995).

11  Edward Arian, Bach, Beethoven and Bureaucracy: The case of the Philadelphia Orchestra (University, Alabama, 1971); Philip Hart, Orpheus In The New World: The Symphony As An American Cultural Institution (New York, 1973); Howard Shanet, Philharmonic: A History of New York’s Orchestra (New York, 1975).

12 William J Baumol and William G Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (New York, 1966). The theory states, in its simplest terms, that as growth of earnings in the general economy is accompanied by productivity improvements and savings in costs per man-hour, and as labour in the performing arts is an irreduceable element and can therefore show no such improvements, wage costs for performing arts organisations as a proportion of turnover are bound to rise by a greater amount than the general rise in incomes.

13 A recent book by John Pick and Malcolm Anderton, Building Jerusalem: Art, Industry and the British Millennium (Amsterdam, 1999) suggests that before the Second World War many arts activities in Britain existed happily from box office income alone, but their evidence does not support this conclusion in relation to symphony orchestras – even their reference to Hallé’s own career in the 19th century is inaccurate and out of context, in my opinion.

14 Gentlemen’s Concerts Society minutes, Henry Watson Music Library.

15 Hallé Committee minutes 1922-30: 57, 61-2.

16 Kennedy (1960) says in 1930-31, but the programme books indicate there were still ten in that season.

17 Kennedy (1960), 218.

18 The record, COL 9909, became one of the biggest selling items in Columbia’s catalogue, and even in the 1950s was one of the most requested items on BBC Radio’s ‘Children’s Favourites’.

19 Speech to the Hallé AGM, December 8th, 1950.

20 Quoted and illustrated in Kennedy (1960).

21 He had been through a curiously similar experience in California only the previous autumn, as it happened, and there are indications that he had not completely made up his mind to stay in England when he left the USA in 1943, despite his later accounts of receiving the February telegram and exclaiming ‘This is it!’ – see Robert Beale, ÔBarbirolli in California 1940-43: A Little-known Episode’, The Barbirolli Society Newsletter (1994). His first Hallé contract was not signed until October 27th, 1943.

22 Thus the claim by T E Bean, the first post-war Hallé General Manager, in The Future of the Halle Orchestra: A Question of Finance (Manchester,1950) that ‘for the first four years it actually paid its way’ was not really true: it had also received grants from ENSA and CEMA.

23 It gained Arts Council support, now as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, only in 1948.

24 See Lewis (1998).

25 Hallé annual reports.

26 Hallé annual reports 1945 and 1946.

27 Hallé annual reports 1947-1950.

28 Halle Committee minutes 1947.

29 Halle Committee minutes November 20th, 1947.

30 Hallé Committee minutes October 11th, 1951.

31 Hallé annual reports 1951, 1952.

32 Kennedy (1960) makes much of the miscalculation of suitable ticket prices for the new hall as a reason for the trouble. This may well have been the explanation most favoured for public consumption at the time, but the reality was that the increase in the size of the orchestra to 88 players was the main factor, plus the immediate cash-flow problem created by the City Council’s refusal of the expected guarantee payment. The Hallé’s total reserves then amounted to little more than the value of one year of Council guarantee.

33 Hallé annual reports.

34 Letter in Hallé archives.

35 Hallé Committee minutes July 31st, 1952.

36 Hallé Committee minutes August 21st and September 18th, 1952.

37 Charles Reid, John Barbirolli: A Biography (London, 1971)

38 Harold Taubman, The Symphony Orchestra Abroad (Vienna, VA, 1970), quoted in Denis McCaldin, ÔHallé Orchestra’, Symphony Orchestras of the World, ed. Robert R Craven (New York, 1987).

39 King-Smith (1995), 160.

40 The negotiations are recorded in the Hallé Committee minutes, and I confirmed the reason for Atzmon’s refusal with him on his recent visit to conduct the orchestra.

41 Annual reports.

42 Personal communication.

43 In relation to the provincial symphony orchestras, the Ritterman Enquiry Consultative Document (Arts Council of England, 1994) makes it clear that though the overall total of local authority support was higher, this was mainly due to Birmingham’s generosity to the CBSO – implying that the trend for the rest of the sector was actually the other way.

44 Hallé documents, 1988.

45 Hallé documents.

46 Press statement, January, 1990.

47 Annual report, 1990.

48 The CBSO ‘Development Plan’, hatched at first in secret and then welcomed by the Arts Council in 1986 with exceptional enthusiasm and unprecedented procedures, was mainly a device to enable the orchestra to attract the best musicians from the London market, and to increase other rates pro rata. See King-Smith (47, 50, 381) – although he claims that the Arts Council ‘never paid more than lip service’ to the plan and that it was the city council which ‘repeatedly came to the rescue’ (233).

49 Robert Beale, ÔRaising the Titanic’, Classical Music, June 12th, 1999.

50 In 1989 Birmingham Corporation gave the CBSO £580,000, in 1991 £880,000, in 1994 £1,000,000 and in 1995 £1,125,000. The combined figures for AGMA and Manchester’s grant to the Hallé are: 1989 £133,476, 1991 £299,040, 1994 £467,834, 1995 £551,300. It is, incidentally, not the case that the Birmingham area has a higher degree of interest in orchestral music than elsewhere and thus merits this expenditure of taxpayers’ money: the Ritterman Enquiry Consultative Document (1994) pointed out that the West Midlands is bottom of the league table of English regions for percentage of adults attending orchestral concerts, saying this was ‘most surprising’ in view of the existence of Symphony Hall.

51 See Sir William Rees-Mogg and Luke Rittner in the Arts Council annual report, 1988, echoed by Peter Palumbo’s call for a new tradition of private patronage – annual report, 1989.

52 The methods by which terms such as ‘novelty’, ‘enterprise’, ‘variety’ etc. are defined and evaluated in this context require description in their own right. For the present I can only invite readers to contact me for explanations if they require them.

53 Some newspaper columnists, it seems, have swallowed a line propounded by the Hallé’s own publicists in the early 1990s and written off everything that happened after the death of Barbirolli. For example, Hugh Canning, Sunday Times January 16th, 1994, ‘the Hallé . . . has languished somewhat since the demise of its great conductor, Sir John Barbirolli, in 1970’; Andrew Clark, Financial Times November 12th, 1994, ‘Eclipsed by orchestras in Birmingham and Liverpool, it needed awakening from the sleepy conservatism into which it had lapsed since the death of Sir John Barbirolli in 1970’; Rachel Pugh, Manchester Evening News February 14th, 1995, ‘An orchestra which has been stagnating since the legendary Barbirolli days’. Michael Kennedy’s second book on the Hallé,The Hallé 1848-1983 (Manchester, 1982) records the praise that was given to Loughran and the orchestra in the 1970s.

54 Again, I must ask the reader to take these statements on trust for the present purpose, but can provide the empirical evidence if asked.

55 The real prices of admission to Hallé concerts (ie after adjusting for inflation) varied considerably during the 20th century. Briefly, the pre-First World War period was the most expensive, Harty’s time was less so, post-Second World War prices were the lowest of all (being comparable with mass entertainments of the time such as the cinema); since then the real level has climbed steadily, equalling the inter-war period by the end of the 1980s, and in some cases overtaking it in the 1990s.

56 See Peter Walshe, Pricing in the Arts Report 1990 (London,1991); RSGB (Research Surveys of Great Britain), Omnibus Survey: Report on a Survey of Arts and Cultural Activities in Great Britain (Arts Council of England, 1991; Peter Walshe, Peter Verwey and Roger Tomlinson, What Price the Live Arts? (London, 1992); Chris Blamires, ÔWhat Price Entertainment?’, Journal of the Market Research Society, 34 (4) (1992): 375-388; Chris Blamires, Pricing Research Manual (London, 1995).