In tune with the times

May 17—Alain Trudel, music director at the Toledo Symphony, couldn't have guessed that the March 13 concert would be his last onstage performance for the next 14 months. Yes, the effects of the coronavirus pandemic were already being felt — the Toledo Museum of Art had closed its doors to the public the day before, and Trudel conducted Johannes Brahms' Symphony No. 4. before an empty Peristyle. Still, Trudel thought nothing of returning home to Canada on the weekend.

The country's borders closed shortly thereafter, and the Toledo Symphony suddenly found itself facing a season — or two, as it turned out — without its musical director. What followed for Toledo Symphony was a mad scramble to stay ahead of the tsunami of plague smothering its peers across the country.

"This is what they're calling in the performing arts, 'The Long Intermission,'" said Zak Vassar, president and CEO of Toledo Symphony. But while a second or third act typically follows an intermission, it did not and will not for many of the nation's orchestras, ballets and theaters.

The Toledo Symphony's mission statement, updated after it merged with Toledo Ballet to form the Toledo Alliance for the Performing Arts, or TAPA, in 2019, is "to bring together our community in lasting musical moments." The pandemic subjected Toledo Symphony's commitment to that mission to a sudden stress test.

"We realized we couldn't go dark," Vassar said. "We couldn't become part of that long intermission."

THE LONG INTERMISSION

The interminable intermission of the coronavirus has devastated the performing arts industry in the United States. A Brookings Institute study estimated that America's arts and creative industries lost more than $150 billion in sales and 2.7 million jobs through July, 2020, with the fine and performing arts industries alone losing an estimated $42.5 billion in sales and 1.4 million jobs.

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According to a study by philanthropy research group Candid and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, arts and entertainment nonprofit organizations — of which Toledo Symphony is one — are especially vulnerable to closures within the next two years because they depend on ticket sales and can't reduce expenses. The advocacy group Americans for the Arts found that, as of May 3, nonprofit arts and culture organizations have canceled roughly 523 million ticketed admissions.

Of those organizations, 48 percent have laid off or furloughed staff since the pandemic began. At the peak of the pandemic, about 63 percent of artists and creatives experienced unemployment.

"To keep performing keeps food on the table for our performers," said Vassar. "These are folks without an adjacent industry. If you can't play the violin or trumpet here, you can't just jump to another one down the street."

Distinguished pianist Jon Nakamatsu isn't from Toledo, but he has performed for Toledo Symphony five times since 1997. He'd just come off of a concert in North Carolina when the music, everywhere, stopped. He returned home to California, where most orchestras went dark and stayed dark.

As much as Nakamatsu enjoyed his newfound family time, he sometimes missed the energy of the music hall. But across the national soundscape he heard only a vast silence — one punctured, occasionally, by the notes emanating from a handful of distant orchestral oases.

"In the industry," Nakamatsu said, "we just heard that Ohio fared better than most states in general."

THE SHOW GOES ON

Trudel's last in-person concert may have been performed before an empty hall, but it did have an audience. For the past four years, the Toledo Symphony had kept a WGTE-TV camera crew onstage to shoot high-definition video so as to help the seated audience follow different facets of live performances. Enhancing the in-person experience had been all the cameras were intended for.

In the face of the coronavirus emergency, however, they were quickly repurposed for live-streaming. Plans for developing a streaming platform, once slated for 2024 at the earliest, were accelerated. In September, the Toledo Symphony released TAPA Streaming, which allowed it to host live performances that coupled limited in-person attendance with limitless virtual attendance. The platform offered an array of compounding benefits — ticket revenue continued streaming in, all of Toledo Symphony's musicians remained employed and salaried, and the viewing public could experience the the relief of music in quarantine.

The launch of TAPA Streaming, Vassar said, marked a "philosophical shift" for Toledo Symphony: "Usually the audience comes to us, now we came to them. The audience had us on their turf, but also on their time. They could watch us any time." The result was a level of accessibility unimaginable before the pandemic.

"We have almost 5,000 unique users right now, which I would certainly consider outstanding for a product that I think is still in its launch phase," said Vassar. "That's more than we'd be able to put in the Peristyle on a weekend."

ZOOMING IN

Live-streaming enabled the Toledo Symphony to have a 2020-2021 season, giving the staff a chance to worry about the questions their less-fortunate peers didn't. How do you seat musicians and audiences in a socially distant manner? How do you get trumpeters or clarinetists to safely play their instruments without masks? Most importantly, how do you plan a season of performances when your music director is stuck in a different country?

The answer, as has so often been the case during the pandemic, was Zoom — lots of it. Trudel spent his days in ceaseless virtual meetings, discussing everything from programming to performers. He coached chamber music through his iPhone, did rehearsal planning, and worked with different committees to select guest conductors to fill in for him. While travel restrictions made the last task more difficult by locking out international conductors, they also helped Trudel scout fresh talent.

"What people see and we do on the stage is the tip of the iceberg of what a music director does," said Trudel. Even sitting at home in Montreal, he was as busy as ever. Still, he couldn't help but feel wistful watching his efforts come to fruition with every successful performance: "You do all the groundwork, but you don't get to do the fun stuff, which is going onstage in a concert. You get your meal, but never dessert."

COMEBACK CONCERTO

At 8 p.m. Friday, after more than a year of waiting, Trudel will finally get his dessert. He will once again set foot in the Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle, this time to conduct a concert featuring pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin and Jessie Montgomery.

"I just can't wait to be back," said Trudel. "I can't wait to be there making music face to face with my colleagues."

Playing the piano is Nakamatsu. His presence represents a bit of accidental poetry — he was the soloist at Trudel's first concert as music director in 2018, and now he will be the soloist for Trudel's first concert back. It's Nakamatsu's comeback concert as well, kicking off a summer of tours after a year of none.

"I'm slightly terrified to be back onstage again, because I've almost forgotten what it's like to play in front of people," said Nakamatsu. "This will be a particular challenge as much as it will be an absolute joy."

Both Trudel and Vassar attributed Toledo Symphony's pandemic-time success to a lucky constellation of individuals and institutions: Toledo Symphony's musicians and board, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the local government and health department.

"This year has been an experiment," said Vassar. "What would it look like if you cut off everyone from art? If you closed all the museums, silenced all the musicians, and had the dancers stand still?" The resulting demand, he thinks, refutes any suggestion that a hunger for the classical arts doesn't persist in the modern world.

"The arts are always trying to define their relevance," he continued. "How is symphony orchestra relevant in the 21st century? How is classical ballet relevant in the age of hip-hop? If we've learned anything in this pandemic era, it's that creative expression in any form is always relevant."

Far from losing its audience during the coronavirus crisis, the Toledo Symphony has dramatically expanded it. Thanks to TAPA Streaming, its concerts now reach 46 states and 27 countries. The upcoming concert will, of course, be available to livestream at stream.artstoledo.com.

"Our audience knows that this is an organization that will keep the music playing, however it can," said Mr. Vassar. "That's a huge silver lining. That's a gold lining, if you ask me."

First Published May 16, 2021, 8:00am