The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony says it will play again, more than a year after declaring bankruptcy.Steven Senne/The Associated Press
When the players of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony were told in September, 2023, that their season would be cancelled and the organization would enter bankruptcy, they refused to let it go quietly.
It was devastating, both artistically and financially, says French horn player Kathy Robertson.
“Many of us have built our lives in the community around the assumption that we would be musicians in this symphony orchestra for a long time,” she says.
So the musicians took the symphony’s fate into their own hands. They got in touch with its foundation and creditors, and built a new board, tapping Bill Poole, a retired local lifelong arts administrator, to chair it. The newly-formed team of directors and musicians spent months trying to find a way to resuscitate the Southern Ontario symphony.
And in October, they pulled it off, getting the approval of both creditors and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. “If it weren’t for the musicians, we would not be here today,” Poole says.
The return of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony this fall is a slice of good news at a moment when organizations across the arts-and-culture sector are struggling to survive, pinned between sluggish revenue and soaring costs. In this context, of course, the revival is riddled with caveats: it will likely be a long time before the orchestra will return to Kitchener’s 2,000-seat Centre in the Square concert hall or deliver its musicians the regular income they once enjoyed. But the orchestra now has a fresh start.
“What we need to do, for ourselves and for the community, is to be able to demonstrate how we will go forward in a really meaningful way, without ever getting close to going down the same dead end,” Poole says.
That dead end came in the form of an emergency announcement in September, 2023, when the orchestra’s then-chair said it needed $2-million “immediately” to keep operating.
The announcement shocked members of the symphony, some of whom were so new to the organization they worried they wouldn’t be eligible for employment insurance.
Luckily for some, Kitchener-Waterloo’s Southern Ontario location meant relatively easy access to other markets, opening up freelance opportunities within a reasonable drive. Some members had already taken to jokingly calling their orchestra “the 401 Philharmonic,” Robertson says.
The musicians launched a GoFundMe, raising nearly $500,000 to support the out-of-work players and to put on concerts, including at the roughly 450-capacity St. Matthews Lutheran Church in Kitchener. Robertson and a group of other musicians began to wonder what was salvageable from the original orchestra. If very few potential creditors would get paid from bankruptcy proceedings given the multimillion-dollar shortfall, the musicians reckoned it wouldn’t affect creditors too greatly if they avoided bankruptcy entirely and still didn’t get paid.
So they went to the Canadian Federation of Musicians, who connected the musicians with lawyers – who in turn confirmed that if they could find a way to satisfy creditors, it might be possible to save the orchestra.
Keeping the old orchestra’s legal entity intact was crucial so it would remain eligible for federal and provincial funding, which often requires a multiyear track record with project grants before offering operating funding – a crucial lifeline to get the K-W Symphony back on track.
The organization had about $115,000 in assets, thanks to two recent bequests, says Paul Ross, the new board’s treasurer and a retired KPMG Canada partner, in an e-mail. The proposal to creditors – which those creditors approved – limited the total number of entities to which it had to disburse this cash.
Bankruptcy trustee BDO Canada provided charitable donation receipts to its cancelled season’s subscribers, Ross says, so they were not considered creditors. Unsecured creditors included musicians, staff, suppliers and, for rent, the city of Kitchener.
The proposal, which the board shared with The Globe and Mail, divides most of the symphony’s assets into two pots: just under $40,000 in unpaid employer contributions to the Musicians’ Pension Fund of Canada, which was a preferred creditor, and just over $76,000 in fees and expenses to its trustee, BDO.
The symphony owes about $10,000 to one secured creditor, its foundation, and has not finalized a repayment plan yet, Ross says.
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice approved the proposal to annul the bankruptcy on Oct. 9, paving the way for the K-W Symphony’s debt-free return. Though it’ll be a long journey to regular, large-scale concerts, its musicians had already set up more concerts at St. Matthews Lutheran Church under a temporary name; those will now happen under the original Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony banner.
The next will take place Nov. 16, featuring the music of Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Avril Coleridge-Taylor. It will close with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.
After that, more hard work is ahead. “There’s figuring out what the artistic vision needs to be in 2025 and beyond,” Poole says. " The other piece of it is coming up with a sustainable operating model.”