The end of the 3rd movement of my 2nd symphony
The tram around 1920
... what one doesn’t know!
As you can see from my catalogue of works, I have written compositions for various musical ensembles. Due to my many years of conducting the quasi-professional municipal wind orchestra of Nice, which bears the endless name ‘Orchestre d'Harmonie de la Ville de Nice’, I also wrote compositions for symphonic wind orchestra, as well as numerous arrangements for this and smaller wind ensembles, which I needed for weekly performances in Nice and to enrich the repertoire and motivate the orchestra's soloists.
The elderly ladies in the audience were always very enthusiastic about these concerts and remained loyal patrons and fans of the orchestra until almost their last breath. Most of them were not very well-off, which made them all the more grateful for the gift that the city of Nice offered them free of charge every Sunday. To ensure they could always get their favourite seats without a fight, they arrived up to an hour before the concert began. In contrast, the city's upper, wealthy class had practically no interest in brass music; it was never a subject of interest to them. No, these fortunate individuals always went to the opera and the city's symphony concerts, where everything was performed at the highest level and they were among like-minded people.
On the beach in Nice
I would like to tell one more little story regarding money and music. A few years ago, the cities of Nice and Cannes wanted to merge their two symphony orchestras into one large orchestra for financial reasons. In order to celebrate properly and pompously this event, the city of Nice assumed an internationally famous pianist for a short period of time, asking him to perform the 15-minute-lasting Rhapsody in Blue by G. Gershwin with the Nice Philharmonic Orchestra paying him 50,000 Euro. The only problem was that the city of Nice had no more money to pay for the star pianist. That is why, they had the original idea to take the money from the very limited yearly budget of my wind orchestra which was financed by the city administration and that has immediately been done by the culture department of the city administration. Therefore, as conductor of the orchestra, I had no choice but to cancel quickly eight concerts and sixteen rehearsals of my orchestra composed of sixty musicians, only in order to allow the city to finance the ridiculously short performance of a famous pianist. For this event, it would have been very easy to assume another excellent but unfortunately not so famous pianist from the region for only 2,000 Euro. Consequently, my audience would not have been forced to go without its eight Sunday concerts and the audience of the symphony orchestra would anyway have got its money’s worth.
The city administration’s management of this situation was purely and solely unprofessional and megalomaniac and had absolutely no longer anything to do with music, culture, Beethoven and humanity!
The only quirk of fate was that this planned merging at the end didn’t even take place because of internal quarrels and power struggles and each city had no other choice but to keep financing its own orchestra.
It is all about the painful issue of disproportion.
Your Urs Brodmann
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