The most recent performance by Royston Choral Society was one of its most ambitious – Bach’s St Matthew Passion. It involved six soloists and a full orchestra and, despite a packed audience of 240, it made a financial loss. We invited our Treasurer Caroline Franks to explain the money behind our music-making.
Rehearsal costs
All choir members pay a subscription to sing in the choir and rehearse each Tuesday evening in St John’s Church in Royston. Our Musical Director and Accompanist are paid for their time, and including venue hire, each weekly rehearsal costs us £295, or about £4 per head. As each term holds between 10 and 14 weeks, you will see how those costs, plus the library costs for the music, our annual insurance, performing rights fees and Making Music [a choral societies association] subscription take up the bulk of our subscription income. Our increased choir numbers do mean that there’s a little left over to put towards the costs of our concerts.
Concert costs
Concerts are our costly activity. This spring, we sang Bach’s St Matthew Passion, the most expensive work we’re mounted to date. It is a fantastic piece to sing, and we had a sell-out audience, but the costs on the day of that concert amounted to £8,900 (more than 90% of that paid for musicians and soloists). At £22 per ticket, that equates to 405 tickets needing to be sold to cover the concert costs. With the number of performers taking space in front of the conductor, the audience capacity of the venue is 240!
Unfortunately, despite having an experienced fund-raiser in the choir who has been able to secure amazing grant funding over the years, this time the only grants we received amounted to £100. The upshot for our March concert is that we ended up with a net loss of £3,700.
We’re committed to singing large works with orchestral support, but we need to balance those with smaller scale works, and work ever harder to sell the maximum number of tickets each time. Knowing that the Matthew Passion was coming, we performed our November concert this season with a string quartet, and we will do the same in July. In December we chose not to include the brass players who have joined us for the last few Christmas concerts.
Of related interest: https://www.roystonchoralsoc.org.uk/Articles/UnsungHeroes