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Springfield Symphony Orchestra musicians stage concert in midst of contract dispute with SSO management

Roberto Machado Noa
/
LightRocket via Getty Images
The free concert at Symphony Hall is 'sold out' but will be livestreamed

First Symphony Hall performance since March 2020

There is a free concert tonight at Symphony Hall in Springfield.

Musicians from the Springfield Symphony Orchestra will be back on stage for the first time in 19 months.

This performance comes as the musicians and their union are locked in a contract dispute with orchestra management that has held up the start of a new concert season.

Tonight’s concert is being produced by an independent group, The Musicians of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra.

When the free concert was announced last month, the board of directors of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra issued a statement that said the musicians’ plan “will further muddy the waters and appears designed to create confusion among the concert-going public.”

In a follow-up, management said it is still working to achieve a resolution and agreement with the musicians despite an earlier threat to cancel the concert season if a deal was not reached by October 1st.

One of the musicians who will be on stage tonight is Thomas Bergeron, who is the principal trumpet. He spoke with WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill.

Thomas Bergeron

We've got over 65 musicians playing on the stage. So it's a full orchestra, full brass section, full winds, full strings, we have our fantastic conductor Kevin Rhodes, coming to town to conduct us. And we'll be performing a collection of symphonic hit. In fact, a lot of the music that Kevin conducted during his audition concert 20 years ago, in Symphony Hall, including music from Tchaikovsky, parts of his Fourth Symphony, music by Devork, parts of the New World Symphony, parts of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Seventh Symphony, and a couple other little surprises as well.

Paul Tuthill 

Now this concert is being put on by the musicians of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, but it's not being produced by the Springfield Symphony Orchestra. And that's because you're in a contract dispute, right?

Thomas Bergeron

You're correct. It's not being produced by the Springfield Symphony Orchestra Corporation. We are independently the musicians are independently putting on this concert. The Springfield Symphony has has not announced the season yet. And they've been asking us to agree to their contract terms before they agreed to produce any concerts at all. So we we've taken it upon ourselves to bring music back into Symphony Hall, because it's time to do that.

Paul Tuthill 

Yeah, normally, normally, the symphony season would have started, of course, there was no season last year because of COVID. But normally you would be you would be back in we would expect at the concert season, whatever zoom, but it has not. Because this, this dispute has been going on for some time now. Right?

Thomas Bergeron

Yeah, yes, exactly. Yeah, the board of the Springfield Symphony has essentially been threatening us for months, that they will not put on a season unless we agree to their contract terms. And they've even been writing to SSO patrons, saying that they're not sure that the symphony orchestra will be viable moving forward. So when the musicians heard this, you know, we we've decided it was time for us to, to do what we whatever we could do to bring the music back to Symphony Hall because that's what the public wants. And the mayor was nice enough to help us get Symphony Hall for free. We found out that Kevin Rhodes was available this weekend. So that's what kind of motivated us to get going on this and get this event together. And we're offering it to the public for free. So it's free and open. Although it is sold out at this point, there's still a waiting list that you can get on if you go to our website.

Paul Tuthill 

And you're live streaming it too, right?

Thomas Bergeron

Exactly. Yeah, we just decided a couple weeks ago to add the live stream when it looked like we were about to sell out all the tickets. So Focus Springfield is helping us with that. And we'll have high quality audio fed into the live stream as well with multiple cameras so you'll get a pretty good view and sound of the orchestra if you tune into the live stream, which is also available on our homepage SpringfieldSymphonyMusicians.com.

Paul Tuthill 

Is this concert, part of an effort to raise awareness draw more attention to this labor dispute?

Thomas Bergeron

Our goal is simply to perform symphonic music for the Springfield people. That's what we're supposed to be doing. That's what that's what we've been trained to do and what we are used to gathering to do every year. And it's what we love doing most. And so all of this work is is simply to to be able to do what we do, which we haven't been able to do for almost two years now. So we're just we're just really motivated by the music

The record-setting tenure of Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno. The 2011 tornado and its recovery that remade the largest city in Western Massachusetts. The fallout from the deadly COVID outbreak at the Holyoke Soldiers Home. Those are just a few of the thousands and thousands of stories WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill has covered for WAMC in his nearly 17 years with the station.