More orchestras are slated for Chapter 11. The slippery slope, I think, has been the decades-long recalibrating for a mid-market patronage. These people do not have the financial strength to make up the loss of major patrons and they also lower the quality of the music and repertoire (tune into any classical music station these days; this is, in the apt criticism of Frank Zappa, mere "Top 40" music).
In other words, symphonic orchestras entered a death spiral with the end of civic capitalism, the geographic scattering of the wealthy, and the rise of the middlebrow. That's not in the linked story, but that's what I've been observing.
Producers must understand that the New York Times reader, the PBS watcher, the NPR listener, these are cultural straphangers, not major patrons, and they cannot carry the weight of a city's culture in their personal tastes or finances.
The disbanding of opera companies is not mentioned here, but the loss of the Baltimore Opera crimped me rather hard. The other nearby opera companies are either middlebrow or painfully intermittent.
