In Sunday’s (8/18) Kansas City Star, Steve Paul reports, “About 100 orchestral musicians from across the country will be in Kansas City next week for an annual professional gathering. Certainly some of the conversation among members of the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians (ICSOM) will involve the relative good fortune of the Kansas City Symphony and its musicians in a climate of troubling orchestra developments elsewhere. To hear Bruce Ridge, the group’s chairman, tell it, the organization hopes to accentuate the positive.… ‘The topic remains for us advocacy,’ Ridge said. ‘At a time when people seem to view all the negative things happening to orchestras, the Kansas City Symphony is proving that things can be done in the right way.’ The ICSOM members represent 51 of the nation’s largest orchestras.… ICSOM approaches the industry from musicians’ point of view. But as … ICSOM president Brian Rood, a longtime trumpeter with the Kansas City Symphony, noted, the local success story stems in large part from enlightened leadership on the management side and an absence of the labor-management animosity that typically exists elsewhere. ‘We need dynamic people, we need arts management that is charismatic and that inspires the community,’ [according to Ridge].”
Posted August 20, 2013
