Music in the Mountains

Music in the Mountains approached the 2023 Festival season with an abundance of confidence following the success of the 2022 season. We continued to offer our popular free community concert series on top of our pre-pandemic three-week orchestral season, making the festival four weeks long. Following are FY 2023 operations notes: Management continued to concentrate on both managing expenses and maintaining strong donor relationships. Inflation and the cost of everything is having a substantial impact on our financial statement. The local (and national) labor shortage/crisis is REAL and continued to impact Music in the Mountains operations severely. This season we had several new contractors and employees: stage manager, operations manager, graphic designer, festival assistant, and summer intern. Much time and energy were spent in recruiting, hiring, and training. Three months of the 2023 fiscal year were managed with only one full-time employee. After the 2022 Festival, Artistic Director, Gregory Hustis, retired from the organization after 35 years of excellent service. The strategic decision was made to consolidate the artistic leadership positions following Hustis retirement, and Guillermo Figueroa, who has been our music director & conductor since 2007, assumed the additional role of artistic director in 2023. This resulted in significant savings. The 2024 Festival will be Guillermo Figueroas final year as our artistic director & conductor, and we will spend the year celebrating his 18-year tenure. We will also begin the important, expensive, and time-consuming task of conducting a national search for his replacement. We expect it to take two fiscal years. In the current environment, local businesses are still recovering and may not be able to sponsor at past levels. The lodging situation in Durango continues to be challenging. The organization is tasked with finding adequate housing for all musicians - and in many cases their families - and the cost/night in Durango has risen to double what it was in 2019. Music in the Mountains was the beneficiary of a one-time $150,000 bequest. As a result, we ended the year in a favorable financial position. The aforementioned financial position is a temporary and misleading bottom line. It will be very important to communicate the full story. As a non-profit performing arts organization, we must continue to rely heavily on the generosity of individual supporters and corporate sponsors to operate. At the time of this writing, the plan for Festival 2024 is to bring the full orchestra to Durango for the regular three-week season to be presented at the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College plus the additional week of free community outreach concerts throughout the region.