To the editors:
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It is interesting to see how repetition can turn fiction into fact. In Lewis Lazare’s “Culture Club” column regarding the strike at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra [September 20], one of our musicians was quoted as saying that the Orchestra management had insufficient money to give the musicians an appropriate contract, but was willing to spend $200,000 of extra cost to take John Corigliano’s symphony to Europe next spring. A recent letter to the editor in the Reader accepted this as gospel, and took off on an entire diatribe that rested entirely on this one “fact” [October 11].
Henry Fogel
Though I clearly indicated that the $200,000 figure was the musician’s calculation, not Henry Fogel’s, I appreciate Fogel’s effort to set the record straight. Would that it had come sooner. I did seek management’s response to musicians’ statements made in the heated early days of the strike. But a CSO spokeswoman told me that Fogel would not be available for comment and that management would not answer questions about CSO expenditures and staff increases because they were issues in the negotiations.
