“Racked by controversy that has led to a police investigation in South Korea, the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra has canceled an 11-day spring tour of the West Coast and Midwest,” including performances in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, writes Mike Boehm in Saturday’s (3/14) Los Angeles Times. “The orchestra issued a statement Friday saying it was forced to cancel the tour because Seoul’s municipal government, a leading source of its funding, had withdrawn financial backing for the trip. ‘I am deeply saddened,’ music director Myung-Whun Chung said. ‘This is due to financial reasons entirely beyond our control.’ … The orchestra’s top business executive, president Park Hyun-jung, resigned under pressure in December, pointing to Chung as the cause of her woes and criticizing his spending…. The Seoul police raided the orchestra’s offices Wednesday and seized computers, cellphones, flash drives and emails as part of an investigation into anonymous allegations against Park that she had harassed employees sexually and verbally…. Park … blamed conductor Chung for targeting her and for running the orchestra ‘as if it were his own private club’… [In January] Chung complained that the orchestra’s budget had declined 20% over the previous three years, and that the U.S. tour was in jeopardy.”
Posted March 16, 2015
