Montana Summer symphony to fall silent

With little fanfare, the Montana Summer Symphony announced on Friday that it has played its postlude and is dissolving.

By EVE BYRON – IR Staff Writer

The organization, which brought western-themed songs to an outdoor symphony stage at Carroll College for the past five out of six years, said that the costs of putting on what was one of Helena’s favorite family affairs was overwhelming after it lost it’s major corporate sponsor for the $450,000 event.

The Montana Summer Symphony Corp. struggled to find other sources of funding, including charging for what initially was a free event, but in the end the financial burden was too much, noted Nancy Lee, the symphony board’s vice president.

"It just got to where we felt that if we could hire a grant writer to go out looking for funding … that it might work, but we didn’t even have the funding to make that happen," Lee said on Friday. "If anyone else would want to do it again, we have a lot of knowledge and could help, but it just got to be too much for us."

One of the largest costs of the event was the $140,000 cost for the sound stage, stage lights and the sound system, including the projection screens, and labor to build and take down the stage, security and feeding the workers.

The Summer Symphony was the creation of the former Montana Power Company in 1998 — an expensive public-relations effort that for five years brought top musicians from around the state to a free concert and video show on the Carroll College campus.

Only about 6,000 people attended the inaugural event, but by 2000, it had crescendoed to become a highlight of Helena’s summer, attracting as many as 20,000 people. Montana PBS said its television broadcasts likely reached 15 million viewers across the nation.

However, Montana Power was sold to NorthWestern Corp., and Touch America is now a separate company that declared bankruptcy. Touch America decided two years ago that it could not serve as the major sponsor.

By 2002, it became apparent that even with large donations by many Montana businesses, the concert no longer could be free and admission was charged. An estimated 9,000 people attended last year’s show. About half of those in attendance were paying adults.

While the admission fee and donations of some of the services offset some of the costs, the symphony incurred more than $25,000 in debt from the 2002 show. The board held memorabilia drives, which raised more than $10,000, and some of the organizations, including the Helena Lions Club and the Montana Association of Symphony Orchestras, waived around $8,000 in expenses associated with the 2002 show.

But even that wasn’t enough to save the symphony, which was composed of 100 musicians who came to Helena from orchestras around the state. Organizers canceled this year’s show, but said they had hoped to put together the event for 2004.

Lee said they had some sponsors committing to fund up to $25,000 each, but that there weren’t enough of those to cover expenses.

"You can’t just go out and fund a half a million dollar event with that," Lee said. "We didn’t want to let this go, but we also didn’t want the quality to go."

Sally Slocum with the Helena Symphony said there’s been some talk of their organization putting together a smaller outdoor event in conjunction with Carroll College, but it’s too early to say whether that will happen in the near future.

"We have talked about doing some kind of summer music festival program … but it’s very much in the early planning stage," Slocum said. "We don’t have anything solid, and I’m not sure if we could put it together for this summer."

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Reporter Eve Byron can be reached at 447-4076 or by e-mail at [email protected].

http://helenair.com/articles/2003/10/11/helena_top/a01101103_02.txt