Issue in focus: OCSM Delegates from Calgary, Regina, and Victoria report on venue challenges at their orchestras.
Our two main venues are the Royal Theatre, a 1400-seat venue built in 1913, and the 1200-seat Farquhar Auditorium at the University of Victoria, built in 1978. Most of our main series and pops concerts have been held at the Royal Theatre for most of the orchestra’s history. It is run by an arms-length society called the Royal and McPherson Theatres Society (RMTS), which has a board with representation from municipal councils and the Capital Regional District. The RMTS also manages the 771-seat McPherson Playhouse, another heritage facility built in 1914 as part of the Pantages chain of theatres.
The VS used to rehearse in a church hall until 1990, but at that time struck a deal with the Royal to hold rehearsals at the theatre for all our programmes scheduled to be performed there (with occasional exceptions). This deal served the orchestra well for two decades, then as costs grew, it became more difficult for the theatre to remain financially viable, as its grant from the CRD had not kept up with escalating costs.
During the 2018-19 season the board of the RMTS made the decision to raise the costs of rental to the point where it was no longer feasible to hold multiple days of rehearsal there prior to a concert. Furthermore, they asked the two highest-volume users of the theatre, namely, the VS and Pacific Opera Victoria (for whom the VS is the pit orchestra) to leave at least one weekend per month from the September to May period open so that the theatre would be available to other users (there are almost no other local-based users of the theatre except locally-based presenters that bring in artists from outside Victoria).
At that time the VS decided that for the 2019-2020 season we would move the majority of our programming to the Farquhar Auditorium at UVic. Then the covid-19 pandemic hit. As we emerged from the pandemic, problems with UVic as a principal venue began to emerge as well; the scheduling of services is terribly inconvenient for the orchestra on days when the university community needs the hall (it’s used by UVic’s School of Music for large ensemble rehearsals every week). We are often faced with what we call “split-double” days, where there is a rehearsal in both the morning and evening, with the afternoon off in between. A further problem at UVic: the university’s privacy policy forbids the kind of data collection essential for an arts organization to market to new audiences.
At this point, we are back to splitting our main series between UVic and the Royal, and when we perform at the Royal we no longer have the option to rehearse there. This makes it very problematic for guest conductors who have to conduct performances in a hall in which they have never set foot prior to the performance! Because of the costs related to both venues, the VS has pared all our main series programmes down to single performances (except pops concerts, which are Saturday night/Sunday afternoon and only require two rental days of the hall).
Most orchestras in Canada have no ownership of their facilities, but in Victoria we don’t even have the option to store equipment at either facility – at least not permanently. We have no permanent dressing rooms like they have in Calgary, Vancouver, Winnipeg, or a number of other orchestras. Our library and administration are a few blocks away from the Royal and a few kilometers away from UVic.
Not having our own concert hall, and not having a facility purpose-built for a resident symphony orchestra or opera company, is, in my opinion, one of the factors severely limiting the growth of both the Victoria Symphony and Pacific Opera Victoria. Right now we are entertaining the possibility of taking over a church property in downtown Victoria and building rehearsal and administrative facilities for the orchestra on site (similar to what organizations like Tafelmusik have done in Toronto). However this is something for the future, and in the meantime we are coping with rehearsals scattered throughout the community and experimenting with concerts in smaller venues.
Robert Fraser
Victoria Symphony Delegate
May 6, 2024