An Orchestra’s Near-Death and Transfiguration

GARDEN GROVE —  It was a symphony orchestra that had no musicians, no concert hall and no conductor, and was missing almost everything that makes an orchestra an orchestra.

Overwhelmed by debt and unpaid taxes, the Orange County Symphony had fallen so low that rumors of its death had been constant for three years.

But the symphony lives.

It is operating in the black and this summer had a series of three concerts in Coto de Caza. In November, the symphony will give its regular Children’s Concert in Garden Grove.

To put the Orange County Symphony back on track, a cadre of music lovers dealt with a budget nightmare, an angry Internal Revenue Service, a fed-up musicians union, personality conflicts on the symphony board and a romantic tangle that a board member compared to “Peyton Place Revisited.”

“What’s amazing about what’s going on now is how far they had fallen and how far they’ve come back,” said conductor David Warble. Warble, a former conductor of the Disneyland orchestra who is now touring with Broadway performer Betty Buckley of “Cats” fame, has often volunteered his services to the orchestra and will lead its November concert.

“It would have been much more easy to just roll over and play dead,” Warble said. “But they just refused to die.”

For a community orchestra to become mired in financial problems is common. By any measure, though, the Orange County Symphony’s collapse was dramatic.

When it was founded in 1984 as the Garden Grove Symphony, it was greeted by enthusiastic crowds at concerts, most of them held at Garden Grove High School.

Then the name was changed to give the symphony broader appeal, the orchestra grew and so did the audiences. The symphony hired well-known soloists and celebrities, such as Patrick Stewart of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” to work with its mix of professional and community musicians--and the board went deeper and deeper into debt.

“It got worse and worse and worse,” said Martha Alves, president of the symphony board. “I think there was this pie-in-the-sky attitude about making beautiful music, but in the meantime the ship was sinking.”

It finally capsized in late 1993, when the symphony did not pay its musicians for a concert, and the musicians union local refused to contract for other engagements.

Then the state Franchise Tax Board and the IRS noticed that the orchestra had not paid $20,000 in employment taxes and fines, and prepared to seize its assets. There also was the $50,000 that supporters had loaned the symphony.

To keep the orchestra’s assets from tax collectors, the conductor and the board president at the time stashed its property--a grand piano, three timpani, 100 chairs and a director’s stand--in storage, Alves said.

“It caused a great deal of confusion, because the board knew nothing about it, but I sincerely believe that everything they did was in an effort to protect the symphony,” Alves said.

Then the conductor and the board president quit the organization--and later married, taking with them the symphony’s grand piano in lieu of the conductor’s back pay, Alves said.

That’s when Alves got the job. She put strict financial controls on the symphony, adopting a strategy of presenting concerts that cost the organization nothing.

With a donation of about $15,000 from Target, she offered to pay the musicians’ back wages if they would play a concert for free. They agreed.

“The new board was doing whatever they could to keep that organization going,” said Frank Amoss, president of the musicians union. “People knew they were sincere, and really it was in the best interest of the musicians to hopefully keep the symphony alive.”

Beyond pecuniary interests, playing in community orchestras can offer professional musicians satisfaction they cannot find elsewhere, he said.

“We have many members who make over six figures a year making movie music, and although it pays well, the chance to play some Mozart is worth whatever the cost--even at $85 a night,” Amoss said.

Besides Target, Time Warner Inc. and a host of other businesses, large and small, made donations or advertised in symphony brochures. Some forgave the symphony’s debts, including the supporters who were owed the $50,000. The Garden Grove City Council gave the group free office space.

A year later, at the end of 1994, Anaheim accountant Sylvia Lane volunteered to oversee the orchestra’s finances. A former Army lieutenant, Lane created a budget and reined in attempts to spend a penny more than the organization possessed.

“Before the new board came in, they were operating without a budget and not knowing the actual costs of everything,” she said.

The back taxes were paid off this summer, and the symphony is free to concentrate on music. Its immediate goals are to continue bringing local talent to the community and to raise enough money to resume regular performances, Alves said.

The programs often have a classical/pops tone and feature music meant to be accessible to all, not only those accustomed to classical works.

“Nobody’s fooling anybody that they’re trying to compete with the Chicago Symphony for CD space on a shelf, and a lot of smaller groups have that delusional vision,” Warble said. “But to me a good, solid community orchestra offers music at the gut level. It’s really a labor of love.”

That’s why Dr. William Sloan, a urologist in Garden Grove, has continued to play with the orchestra since 1991. A violinist with an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music and the owner of a 1714 Stradivarius, Sloan said the symphony’s relationship with the community made playing special.

“It wasn’t just going and working in an orchestra,” he said. “My friends and patients were attending concerts, and their children in school were listening to us--I mean people rooted for us.”