Matthew Murphy for The New York Times Giancarlo Guerrero conducting the Nashville Symphony at Carnegie Hall in 2012.The musicians of the Nashville Symphony â€" which had been riding a wave of successes before the recession and a destructive 2010 flood imperiled their financial future â€" ratified a new one-year contract this week that will cut their pay by 15 percent.
The agreement paves the way for the symphony’s new season to begin on schedule on Sept. 5 with “Russian Spectacular,†a night of Mussorgsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The symphony’s concert hall, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, which opened in 2006, was saved from the auction block earlier this summer when one of the symphony’s biggest patrons, Martha Ingram, stepped forward to stave off foreclosure.
The orchestra said that the cuts the musicians agreed to were similar to cuts that the administrative staff had taken. The symphony’s president and chief executive officer, Alan Valentine, praised the musicians for sharing in the sacrifice, saying in a statement that the new contract “will allow us to continue offering the same high level of programming for our audiences.â€
Laura Ross, a violinist and union steward, said in a statement that “as challenging as this agreement will be for many of our musicians, it was ratified because we believe our role in this community is important.â€
