More on Peter Gelb and the Met

After I blogged on Peter Gelb's turnaround plan for the Met, Joe Kluger e-mailed. Joe used to run the Philadelphia Orchestra; now he works with AEA Consulting. I asked Joe if I could share his thoughts, and he agreed. Very interesting thoughts here, about what has to happen -- in very practical terms -- for the Met to truly turn around:

Greg: I read your ArtsJournal blog on the Met, which I thought was a great synthesis of all the positive things about Peter’s plans. The initial reaction that some of us at AEA had when we read the first NYT account was that this could be a catalyst for a departure from the arts programming SOP throughout the U.S., which is based on the standard ratio of 2/3 “safe and familiar” to 1/3 “new, but mostly unlikable.” But, this programming philosophy shift will occur beyond the Met ONLY if the Met is actually successful with this new plan. Unfortunately, “success,” will not be defined by critics and professionals like us, but ticket buyers and donors. And the measures of success will be:

• Whether they can sell on average 90 to 95% of the seats every year and

• Whether they can balance the budget each year (without $25M annual gifts from Mrs. Bass)

What I did not see in the Met’s announcement was an acknowledgment that this bold artistic plan is both expensive and risky, and a list of the strategies they will use to minimize both. While I would not expect Peter to disclose publicly controversial decisions that have yet to be made, I wonder whether he actually has any plans to:

• Test audience receptivity to the new artistic approach and, if warranted, market the season in a segmented way, which gives subscribers the option of choosing what mix of familiar and new they want

• Test audience receptivity to the pricing strategy (I think they are seeing some price resistance already at the high end and will find increased resistance to the “Robin Hood” concept of raising top ticket prices even more to subsidize the lowering of the bottom prices)

• Reduce (or at least restrain increases in) personnel expenses. The amount of money that the Met spends on musicians, stagehands, chorus, singers, etc. is a huge portion of its budget. And, one of the ironies of Joe Volpe’s tenure has been that, for all of his public persona as a “tough guy,” he has bought labor peace by allowing increases in union contracts that regularly exceed inflation. To pay for Peter’s exciting artistic ventures, he will need to allocate more resources to production costs, stage designers and directors, conductors, etc. Since he won’t be able to fund raise enough to cover the incremental costs of the new artistic plans AND cover the existing structural deficit, I wonder if he has the balls to shift resources away from “routine” aspects of running the opera company to the “innovative” areas.

Anyway, I thought I would share these thoughts, not in any way to dampen my enthusiasm for the positive statements in your Met blog, but to suggest that you might want to do a follow up at some point, outlining some of the risks that the Met will face in achieving “success” with Peter’s new artistic plans.

Joe himself provided the followup…