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 A leading official said the symphony broke even on its $57.6 million operating budget, but said the orchestra will not know until the fall whether it actually made a profit.
"This has been a very successful year in the life of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra," Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association President Deborah Card said in a statement. "What we have been able to accomplish is a testament to our world-class musicians and dedicated audience members and donors."
The orchestra lost money during its last two seasons, falling short $737,000 in fiscal 2006.
"The auditors are only now getting ready to look at all the figures, but I think I can say we have a good sense that we have a small surplus," Card added in a later telephone interview.
Card said at least some of the credit for the good fiscal news should go to the yearlong Silk Road Chicago project that ended last month. That project, the brainchild of cellist Yo Yo Ma, brought the CSO together with a number of the city's other cultural institutions and musicians from Ma's own Silk Road Ensemble for a number of nontraditional concerts and musical events.
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 "It was something that gave people a focal point, and then led many of them to buy tickets for more traditional concerts when they liked what they heard," Card said.
She said the orchestra also is beginning to reap the benefits of innovative programming initiatives begun several years ago. Card said a contemporary music series nearly doubled its ticket sales over last year, while there was an 84 percent increase in subscriptions to the CSO's Beyond the Score series, a multimedia program that gives the audience an in-depth look at individual orchestral masterworks.
There was also a 71 percent increase over last year in ticket sales for casual afterwork concerts aimed at downtown commuters.
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On the Net:
http://www.cso.org/
[Associated Press;
by F.N. D'Alessio]
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