THE Cleveland Orchestra flourished in a recession worse than this one. A month after the Wall Street crash of 1929, it was given a blank cheque by a newly bereaved industrialist to build Severance Hall, one of the finest concert halls in America.
Its opulent Beaux Arts auditorium was John Severance's tribute to his late wife, Elisabeth DeWitt. It included a groundbreaking radio studio that was to build the orchestra's reputation far beyond northeast Ohio.
Today, as the industrial state suffers its biggest economic crisis since the 1930s, the orchestra is again appealing to the US spirit of benevolence. With ticket sales in long-term decline in a city that has shrunk by 17 per cent in a decade, the board is seeking benefactors with pockets deeper than Severance's to underwrite the orchestra's future.
Cleveland is a litmus test for the health of classical music in the US, where some of the world's greatest orchestras are struggling to make ends meet.
Cleveland, the 45th largest city in the US, has a smaller market than any of the top five orchestral cities, yet its citizens love their orchestra almost as much as their football team, the Browns.
In the prosperous post-war years, when Time magazine could claim that a town big enough to have a ballpark invariably had a symphony orchestra, the autocratic brilliance of conductor George Szell transformed Cleveland in his own image, "lean, precise, structurally lucid, severe and incredibly rich in detail".
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