A standoff between the city and one of its most prestigious nonprofit tenants appears likely to leave Denver’s symphony hall without a symphony as early as next year.
For certain, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra will have to temporarily vacate Boettcher Concert Hall in June 2015 to make way for a season-long, $17 million renovation. The question is: Will it return?
Not unless it can get a better deal from its landlord of 36 years, orchestra officials insist. The organization, which has battled financial hardships lately, says itneeds a significant rent reduction or it will have to move elsewhere.
But Denver’s Arts & Venues department, which manages the theater, has made it clear that won’t happen. The agency counters that it is already operating Boettcher at a deficit and the CSO, like all organizations that use public facilities, must pay a reasonable share.
The situation is more than a squabble between landlord and tenant. It’s the positioning of two cultural institutions, with the best of intentions, trying to make their way through a shifting arts market. Consumers are giving both sides a reason to stand their ground.
Audiences for live arts events have been on a slow and steady drop for more than a decade as leisure options have increased and in-home entertainment becomes more popular. Both the CSO and the Denver Performing Arts Center are resolved to stay viable.
“This isn’t about history or the hall. It’s about the fact that we just can no longer pay as much money as it costs to play in Boettcher Hall,” said CSO executive director Jerry Kern.
The CSO, while regarded widely for artistic excellence, rarely draws a crowd big enough to fill Boettcher’s 2,600 seats. Still, it pays the city $323,000 in rent and raises roughly $317,000 more for Denver through a 10 percent “seat tax” added onto every ticket sold in a city-owned venue.
Additionally, CSO supporters contend, it delivers in other ways, bringing tens of thousands of affluent concertgoers downtown each season to patronize restaurants, taxis and parking lots. Their argument: Shouldn’t the city be willing to subsidize a cultural entity that public officials always brag about when touting Denver’s assets?
Operating at a loss
But Boettcher costs about $1.18 million a year to operate. Even factoring in other revenue attributable to the CSO from concessions and parking, the hall lost $362,000 in 2013. That amounts to a considerable subsidy for the orchestra already.
Cutting rent isn’t feasible and, more important, it could be shortsighted, the city believes.
DPAC, like a lot of other urban art centers across the country, wants to diversify its income and expand the people who perform in its venues. Not only are audiences shrinking, revenues are shaky. Its three main fine arts tenants — the CSO, Opera Colorado and the Colorado Ballet — seem to be in a constant state of financial crisis. As tenants, they’re hardly a responsible bet.
Additionally, they draw older, mostly white audiences in a city that, from a demographic standpoint, is increasingly Latino and young. A traditional arts diet won’t feed the facility long into the future.
The CSO’s own survival plan, recently enacted, includes more concerts away from the urban core, in places like Lone Tree and Parker, where new concert halls have been built, and maybe this is a natural time for the organization to move on.
“The city needs an orchestra to perform in a downtown venue,” said Arts & Venues director Kent Rice. “But whether that is possible at Boettcher remains to be seen.”
Expanding the programming at Boettcher beyond a single tenant, the city figures, could allow a wide array of offerings, pave the way for smaller groups to perform in the prestigious theater and make the center attractive to people who don’t use it now.
Need answers now
The clock is ticking for both the city and the CSO. Classical concerts involving guests soloists who perform around the world are often scheduled years in advance. The move would have to take place at the end of next season (2014-15), and that leaves little time for venue shopping.
The CSO isn’t divulging anything concrete, though it is exploring the possibilities of a short-term arrangement with local theaters, churches, colleges or a developer. There are no easy answers, since Denver isn’t exactly overloaded with empty, 1,500-seat venues up to the high audio standards that unamplified orchestral music demands.
And there’s this: If the CSO has to invest in making a new hall work, shouldn’t it invest in something that lasts more than a single season, especially if Boettcher is already too large and too costly?
There are other advantages to leaving a city-owned facility where leases are limited to five years, unions push up production costs and concessions are controlled by the government.
“We’ve begun looking at venues on both a part-time and permanent basis,” said Kern, though he’s not ready to disclose progress.
For its part, the city would like to know who its tenant is going to be at Boettcher. It is entertaining proposals from design firms for the hall’s makeover but can’t proceed with certainty unless it knows how it will be used. The process was put on hold officially, though Rice says the renovation must proceed as planned.
As much as 60 percent of the renovation money will go toward electrical, plumbing and other overdue mechanical upgrades for the 1978 building. That leaves roughly $7 million to be directed toward realigning its function.
Rice insists the city wants the CSO to stay in the fold. Arts & Venues has a number of properties: the Ellie Caulkins Opera House and its Studio Loft theater, the Buell Theatre and the 5,000-seat Bellco Theatre in the Colorado Convention Center.
The CSO could be worked in for its 2016-17 season — but only around the opera, ballet, the Broadway series that takes place there, and the conventioneers who use Bellco frequently. Rice has pledged some financial assistance toward constructing an acoustic shell for the Ellie stage that would make it possible for an orchestra to play there, maybe even permanently.
That’s in the city’s best interest as much as the orchestra’s. The DPAC venues are engaged only about 50 percent of their available evenings, and Denver sees that as a missed cultural and financial opportunity. Boettcher operates at a loss now, but it is unknown if it can be made any more viable without a steady tenant like the CSO.
A shuffled season could be a disaster for the orchestra, which has to cover $6 million a year in musician salaries, no matter what, under its present labor contract. Its audiences can be older, conservative and perhaps not so flexible that they’ll follow it around from place to place.
Plus, it wants to control its own destiny. As an organization, the CSO has done much lately to shed the baggage of its aging genre by playing in alternative venues, shaking up programming and collaborating for sold-out concerts with pop acts. An affordable home it can count on, city-owned or not, will allow it to keep soaring artistically.
“We know where we’re going,” said Kern, about the CSO’s artistic mission. “It’s just a question of how fast can we get there.”
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
