Atlanta Opera stays above curve by trimming season

By Pierre Ruhe

For the AJC

Arts managers are calling it "the Great Recession," and it has been brutal for opera, the most rarified (and expensive) of all the arts. But the Atlanta Opera plans to stay afloat despite announcing Thursday that it will perform just three operas next season.

General director Dennis Hanthorn said total ticket sales, including subscriptions and single-tickets, dropped 19 percent over the past two seasons, while fundraising revenue has decreased 13 percent. (The current season will continue as planned: "Aïda" opens Feb. 27 and "The Magic Flute" opens April 24.)

Trimming the 2010-2011 season "is a bad news but also a good news," said the opera's director of communications, Cristina Herrera, "and the good part is that we are able to make the cuts in a proactive way. Dennis [Hanthorn] has helped build up this company artistically, and we weren't going to let that artistic product slip" -- in other words, a managed descent now is better than a panicky free-fall later.

“We’re not alone in making difficult decisions like these, but that doesn’t make it any easier,” Hanthorn said in a statement. “Our goal is to ensure the long-term sustainability of The Atlanta Opera so that we can continue to bring high-quality opera performances to the Atlanta community. We felt that cutting a production was the most fiscally responsible decision we could make at this point in time.”

Hanthorn's words come as some other U.S. opera companies have gone bankrupt in this recession, including the Baltimore Opera.

Atlanta's 2010-11 season will be announced in January. The three operas to be performed have been finalized, but the contracts have not yet been signed.

Amid much hoopla, the opera became a tenant of the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center, just after it opened in the fall of 2007. The move was seen as controversial and watched nationally: it was one of the first major performing arts organizations in America to depart its historic in-town location for a new venue in the suburbs. Given that the opera's previous spaces were terrible for opera -- including the 4,500-seat, acoustically wretched Fox Theatre and, most recently, the 4,600-seat, sterile Atlanta Civic Center, both in Midtown -- Hanthorn and the board of directors felt the 2,750-seat, voice- and orchestra-friendly Cobb Energy center was their best option.

And in their first season at the Cobb Energy center, the opera did great business, almost doubling ticket sales and adding a significant boost in fundraising. But starting with a "Madama Butterfly" in the fall of 2008 -- as the financial world was collapsing -- ticket sales have been dropping precipitously.

For the 2009 fiscal year, which ended June 30, the opera ran up a debt a little shy of $500,000. Hanthorn projects the company's balance sheet will show a larger debt for FY 2010. An official audit will be completed soon and is expected to be announced at the next board meeting in January. The company has no endowment to speak of.

News of the opera's financial woes come just a month after the artistically strongest production in the opera's 30-year history: Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice," starring Atlanta-based countertenor David Daniels as the hell-and-back hero. It drew critical raves and set a new standard for the company.