ficult topics.” But community support for the merger is strong. The City of Sacramento has offered three years of free office space for the new organization, named the Sacramento Regional Performing Arts Alliance. Once the Philharmonic and Opera had done their financial due diligence under La Piana’s guidance the board issued its own stamp of approval with a unanimous vote in favor of the merger. “In performing arts
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bined budgets for the groups previously. Salary cuts seem all but inevitable, and Hill has been careful to be transparent about that with current staff. The merger will also require a renegotiation of the musicians’ contract. “Right now, the opera services don’t count towards our contract, they’re not part of our guaranteed services,” Hill says. “So we’re going to have to talk about the size of the core, rates, and guaranteed services, and those will be dif-
Guest conductor Ari Pelto leads the Phoenix Symphony during its TRIO! gala, a collaboration with the Arizona Opera and Ballet Arizona.
mergers you’re always looking for the winwin,” says Michael Morgan, the Philharmonic’s music director and frequent conductor and artistic advisor for the Opera. “Especially with the classical arts, in most cities everything seems to rise and fall together. So if groups don’t get together and figure out how to present themselves as vital parts of their communities, they’re probably both going to suffer.” Morgan should know: his other orchestra, the Oakland East Bay Symphony, merged with the Oakland Symphony Chorus and Oakland Youth Orchestra under East Bay Performing Arts in 2010. Applying that experience to Sacramento, Morgan is particularly looking forward to offering a more coherent package of arts programming for the community. He’ll be aided by a fresh face on the administrative side, with Robert Tannenbaum taking over for Hill and Sacramento Opera General Director Rod Gideons when the merger goes into effect. The Phoenix Symphony has been taking a test-the-waters approach to its recent collaborations with the Phoenix-based Arizona Opera and Ballet Arizona, spearheaded in large part by Phoenix Symphony President and CEO Jim Ward. When he arrived as interim CEO in January 2011, talks about creative partnering were already underway between the three groups with consultant Joe Kluger and funding from the Piper Foundation, Ward says, but had “stalled out.” His initial attempts to revive the process met with little enthusiasm. But, he says, “I was just a dog with a bone that didn’t let go.” A committee of board members from all three organizations came up with three conceptual “buckets” through which they could explore collaboration. One was a consortium allowing Symphony employees to train
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