Toronto's Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra has figured out how to provide innovative programming and tour every year while not also incurring a budget deficit.
It helps that one is dealing with an orchestra of 20-odd musicians instead of the typical 80 or 90 of a modern symphony orchestra. But the bottom line is that there is a way to stretch your core audience's experience without alienating them -- and bring new people in at the same time.
The orchestra released its 2008-09 financial results this morning, showing its fifth consecutive surplus -- totalling $43,163 on net operating revenues of $4.64 million. Ticket sales are up 17 per cent. And the organization has launched an endowment drive with a hoped-for total of $20 million -- of which slightly more than $1.5 million is already in place.
The press release said that Tafelmusik offers 50 local concerts a year, as well as regular touring appointments in Germany and Italy. Last season, there were seven tours in all, including a Carnegie Hall début.
The most artistically exciting presentation of that 30th anniversary season was the Galileo Project, a multi-media programme that had the orchestra playing from memory and being choreographed. The Toronto performance was one of the outstanding concerts of the season.
Tafelmusik reports that it will tour the Galileo Project in the United States (including Disney Hall in Los Angeles) later this season, with further bookings confirmed in China, Malaysia, South Korea and Australia.
Here is one of a handful of videos Tafelmusik made from the Galileo Project elements. We hear the "Entrance of Jupiter" from the opera Hipolyte et Aricie by Jean-Philippe Rameau and the "Allegro" from a Concerto Grosso in D Major by George Frideric Handel:
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