Set adrift...

The strike by the San Francisco Symphony is now into its 2nd week and the musicians should have been on the East Coast this weekend performing a four concert tour with Yuja Wang. Instead, everyone is at home writing letters to Board President Sakurako Fisher or busking in front of Davies and elsewhere in Hayes Valley. As has been the case so far, Janos Gereben has the best account of where things stand over at SF Classical Voice, but reading his latest summary, posted on Wednesday, only makes it painfully apparent how horrible communication has been on both sides of this contretemps. There are far too many unanswered accusations and claims, and more insinuation than facts and proposals. Apparently, the ability to reason and effectively make one's case to the public has been lost to both sides.

One small, but positive change that occurred this week is the musicians seemingly realized they made a grave tactical error out of the gate in the tone and language used toward and about the Symphony's administration and have been trying to ameliorate that via a series of open letters to Fisher- all of which can be read on the musicians' Facebook page or website. It may too late to remove the bad taste left by David Herbert and Dave Gaudry's initial remarks, but at least no one else is waving around a spoon with a turd stuck on the end and screaming "eat this!" Thankfully those two have gone silent.

One small note: in the comments of an earlier post this week (hint: look for the picture taken from Blazing Saddles), a member of the orchestra reveals her own interesting perspective on all of this, and gives a sense of some of the issues which I don't believe have been discussed publicly anywhere else.