San Diego Symphony

The San Diego Symphony is an American symphony orchestra, based in San Diego, California. On December 6, 1910, it gave its first concert as the San Diego Civic Orchestra.

Contents

• San diego symphony season 2014 15 winter highlights
• Announcing the san diego symphony orchestra s 2016 17 season
• Music Directors
• References

Currently, the Symphony performs over 100 concerts each season, including the Jacobs Masterworks series, the Winter Pops series, annual holiday programs, a Family Festival series, and the Light Bulb Series. From July through September, the Symphony presents an outdoor Summer Pops season. Recently, a "Thursday Night Jazz" series was initiated.

The Symphony performs subscription series concerts at Copley Symphony Hall, which was built in 1929 as a French Rococo style luxury movie theater, the Fox Theater. It was conferred to the Symphony in 1984. The Symphony Towers (the second tallest building in San Diego County) building was built around Copley Hall in 1989.

Since 2005, symphony musicians have also performed as the pit orchestra for San Diego Opera.

The orchestra encountered several periods of fiscal trouble over its history which forced it to cease operations. The first such period was from 1921 to 1926. The orchestra resumed limited summer concerts in 1927, but disbanded again in 1936. In 1949, the symphony began to play concerts again. From 1996 to 1998, the fiscal troubles of the orchestra led it to file for bankruptcy in May 1996 and to cease operations.

With a bankruptcy plan centered on a $2 million gift from Larry Robinson and through the pro bono efforts of prominent bankruptcy attorneys Ted Graham and Jeff Garfinkle of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, and receiver, Thomas F. Lennon, who managed the finances, the orchestra reorganized and restarted in 1998, with Jung-Ho Pak serving as artistic director. He had become the symphony's assistant conductor in 1994.

Several years after the orchestra's reorganization, on January 14, 2002, the San Diego Symphony announced the single largest donation ever made to a symphony orchestra – US$120 million by Joan and Irwin Jacobs. One report stated that the arrangement is for $50 million to be donated over a period of 10 years, at $5 million a year. The remainder would then be left to the orchestra as a bequest.

In 2001, the orchestra had ratified an agreement which would increase the musicians' annual base salary from $25,920 to $45,750, with an expansion of the concert season from 26 weeks to 41 weeks. In 2006, the orchestra ratified a new 5-year contract that raised the annual minimum salary from $45,750 to $57,776 over five years. The 41-week season will also expand to 42 weeks. As of 2006, the annual budget of the orchestra was $14 million. In September 2016, the San Diego Symphony announced a new 5-year contract which will increase base musician salaries from just under $70,000 to $80,000 per year.

In January 2016, the San Diego Symphony won approval to construct a new outdoor pavilion to host its Summer Pops programs.

Since 2004, the musical director has been Jahja Ling. In October 2007, Ling extended his contract with the orchestra to 2012. Since 2003, the executive director of the orchestra is Edward Gill. From 2006 until his death in 2012, the principal pops conductor of the orchestra was Marvin Hamlisch.

Melvin G. Goldzband, the San Diego Symphony's archivist, has published a book about the orchestra, San Diego Symphony From Overture to Encore.