Belinda Beresford
Eighty guns for hire sat proudly on the Linder Auditorium stage in Johannesburg on Wednesday, plying their trade for love and in the hope of money.
It was the inaugural concert of the new Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra (JPO), created by musicians from the now defunct National Symphony Orchestra (NSO). The NSO finally collapsed into the terminal stages of bankruptcy earlier this year after a long illness caused by lack of funding.
Proving that, contrary to popular opinion, lawyers do have hearts, the JPO is the product of 29 musicians and their attorney.
The JPO is looking for R30-million, double the amount the NSO needed to keep it breathing. According to Sara Gon, the Webber Wentzel Bowens attorney working behind the scenes, the orchestra is determined not to struggle along in a constant state of crisis. The model is the orchestra in Durban, which has secured multiple-year funding from different levels of government and business.
At the time of the NSO collapse several potential funders said they were deterred by the air of desperation surrounding it.
The increased budget is also to facilitate the plan to spend half the JPO’s time and resources on outreach programmes, bringing musical awareness, tuition and entertainment to children and adults in squatter camps as well as the more affluent northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
But the JPO’s struggle to find sponsorship has been exacerbated by the public and acrimonious end to the NSO.
Many sponsors who gave money to the previous orchestra say their budget for the year has been spent, while some are waiting to see how viable the new orchestra is. One financial institution spoke for several others when it said it was wary. Having given sponsorship money to the NSO, it had expected returns in the form of publicity or musical entertainment, which had failed to materialise.
The situation is even more complicated by the apparent attempts to start another orchestra, the African Symphony Orchestra, by members of the NSO management.
But funding is coming in. Two sponsors who took the leap of faith were CorpCapital and the Finnish embassy, who funded the inaugural concerts. The JPO is confident of having sufficient funding for a full musical programme to begin in October.
One orchestra member described the JPO as rising phoenix-like from the ashes of its predecessor. But a new phoenix is a replica of itself. Existing and potential classical music lovers, not to mention the musicians, must be hoping that rather than being a phoenix, the JPO proves to have been transmuted by its ordeal into something harder and more durable.