Still a Men’s Club?

As protests go, the one mounted five years ago outside the Orange County Performing Arts Center to deplore the hiring practices of one of the world’s greatest orchestras was small, quiet and rather elegant.

Many of the 60 or so picketers came attired in evening gowns and handsome suits. One of their signs said, “Vienna Philharmonic Discriminates--Musical Ability Does Not Know Gender or Race.” They all wore big white buttons with a black musical note in the middle and the slogan “Gender Blind” in large red letters. Among them were a mother and son who played a duet on flute and violin.

Deon Nielsen Price, one of the protest leaders, recalls that patrons flocking to the charms of Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 and the mystical depths of Bruckner’s Ninth on that early March evening were not keen on stopping to hear about gender prejudice.

“They were pretty unfriendly. They looked straight ahead, as people do.”

But the protesters already had won their round. Their informational picketing was the understated coda to a monthlong crescendo against a visiting orchestra that, no matter how esteemed for its music, was going to be hard put in America to justify its 155-year-old policy of excluding women.

After convulsive weeks in which its then-president at one point vowed to dissolve the orchestra rather than bow to pressure, the Vienna Philharmonic made history Feb. 27, 1997, the eve of its departure for Costa Mesa, by rescinding its ban on women. Anna Lelkes, who had played the harp in the orchestra for 23 years as an anonymous adjunct never accorded even a program credit, was declared a member in time for the Vienna Philharmonic’s arrival for shows in Orange County and New York’s Carnegie Hall.

“They were terribly frightened by the possibility of demonstrations by American women’s rights activists,” Lelkes told an Austrian newspaper at the time. “I believe that this pressure was decisive.”

The Vienna Philharmonic returns to Orange County Monday through Wednesday for its first West Coast concerts since that turbulent time. Orchestra leaders say they have entered a new era of fair and full meritocracy for men and women alike. Leaders of the International Alliance for Women in Music and the National Organization for Women, which mustered the pressure in 1997, are not so sure.

This year, five women will be among the 90 touring philharmonic players, but only as substitutes--the barrier-breaking Lelkes retired in 2001. Among the current crop of women, two--a harpist and a violist--are eligible to become full-fledged members of the Vienna Philharmonic in a few years, the others are freelancers.

Five years after the rules changed, more women than ever are playing with the Vienna Philharmonic, but the members, all 142 of them, are men.

How can things be better and worse for women at the Vienna Philharmonic? The answer has to do with the labyrinthine institutional structure of the orchestra and how its members are chosen.

Maybe an analogy would help.

Imagine that, in addition to playing the regular baseball season at full salary, the veteran players on the Los Angeles Dodgers were free to go barnstorming on their own. They could schedule games as they pleased and keep all the gate receipts and money from souvenir sales. But only three-year veterans of the Dodgers would get to be in this barnstorming unit. Maybe some rookies could come along as occasional fill-ins, but not as full-fledged members.

The Vienna Philharmonic is the barnstorming unit that plays 120 concerts a year on tour and at festivals. It runs its own affairs and keeps the cash from its concerts and CD sales. The Vienna State Opera Orchestra is the regular, everyday franchise. It is a government-funded operation that stays put and plays 300 performances a year. Its 155 members include all 142 Vienna Philharmonic barnstormers, plus 13 others who would like to be barnstormers but aren’t considered seasoned enough yet. To join the philharmonic, a player has to serve three years in the Vienna State Opera orchestra--and then be voted in by a majority of the Vienna Philharmonic’s members. Once in, tenure is for life--until the group’s mandatory retirement age of 65.

From 1997 through 2002, according to the philharmonic, 16 positions have come open at the Vienna State Opera. Women have won the auditions for three of them, achieving places in the pipeline for philharmonic membership. One, a harpist, recently dropped out. She resigned voluntarily, philharmonic officials say, unhappy about a pay cut. Another harpist, Charlotte Balzereit, and violist Ursula Plaichinger remain; they will be eligible for Vienna Philharmonic membership in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

“That’s really poor progress,” says Matthea Marquart, president of the New York City NOW chapter. “I can’t tell an orchestra from another country that they should be doing quotas, but they’re going to have to make a better effort to recruit women.”

“You can’t change things overnight or even in a few years,” responds Mary Lou Falcone, a New York publicist for the Vienna Philharmonic. “This process takes time and patience and understanding.”

Are women getting a fair shot in rookie auditions for the Vienna State Opera? When they reach the three-year mark, will this all-male club vote them in?

The philharmonic’s two spokesmen, President Clemens Hellsberg, a violinist, and percussionist Wolfgang Schuster, refused a request for a telephone interview, but agreed to answer some questions in writing and to let Falcone respond to others.

Nothing like American-style affirmative action is going to happen, Falcone said. The philharmonic will not set hiring goals or quotas for women or change its three-year waiting period for membership, which has been the rule since 1973. All spots will be awarded to the musicians who can best achieve the philharmonic’s distinctive style and sound.

Falcone said that Schuster has told her the Vienna State Opera aims to grant auditions to “as many women as possible.” Seiji Ozawa, the longtime Boston Symphony conductor who has built gender-integrated orchestras here and in Japan, will have a vote at auditions starting this fall, when he takes over as music director there.

Auditions follow common practices used in America as well. The judges--a panel of 25 orchestra members and officials of the Vienna State Opera--listen without being able to see the players in the early rounds. But finalists are seen as well as heard.

Before 1997, in the men-only days, some philharmonic members did not try to disguise their sexism.

“The way we make music here is not only a technical ability, but has a lot to do with the soul. The soul does not let itself be separated from the cultural roots that we have here in Central Europe, and it also doesn’t allow itself to be separated from gender,” said one player in a 1996 German radio interview disseminated by the International Alliance for Women in Music to build support for its 1997 protest.

Schuster says that the ban on women fell by a two-thirds majority vote of the membership. And now, the holdouts, mainly members of the philharmonic’s old guard, are coming around--thanks in part to esteem for Plaichinger, the viola player who auditioned successfully last year. Schuster says she has impressed everyone as a substitute performing with the Vienna Philharmonic.

“She is a very nice colleague, and she is accepted as a first-rank musician by all colleagues,” he wrote. “For sure she has contributed to the fact that prejudices against the engagement of women have broken up [among] the older musicians.”

If Plaichinger and harpist Balzereit make it through the pipeline, the Vienna Philharmonic will have taken eight years to induct three women. At that rate, says William Osborne, an American composer living in Germany whose articles about exclusionary practices helped spark the 1997 protests, it will take a generation or more for women in the Vienna Philharmonic to attain even the 5% to 10% representation he says is typical of other elite central European orchestras. The average is 30% in top U.S. orchestras.

“Having five [women] substitutes travel with the orchestra is, absolutely, progress. It is tiny, though, because they are not members,” said Elena Ostleitner, a professor of music sociology at Vienna’s Hochschule fur Musik, a prestigious conservatory. She has been working since 1980 to improve women’s status in the Austrian musical world. “Compared to past years, it is progress, but I will be more happy if gifted young female musicians have the opportunity to belong to this really marvelous orchestra.”

Each season since 1997, the Vienna Philharmonic has returned to Carnegie Hall, and NOW and the International Alliance for Women in Music have put up small informational protests each time. They argue that even though women no longer are banned and some are in the pipeline, the slow pace of inclusion signals tokenism rather than a commitment to equal opportunity.

Still, no protest is planned in Southern California. Alliance leaders say they will send letters urging the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the Vienna Philharmonic’s local presenter, and companies and individuals who underwrite the concerts to encourage more rapid change in the orchestra. They hope American groups that book the Vienna Philharmonic at least will raise the issue.

But it’s not likely. “It really is a nonissue now,” said Robert Harth, executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, which will host three concerts after the three in Costa Mesa. “The Vienna Philharmonic has addressed the issue. We like the direction they’re going in” regarding the inclusion of women.

Dean Corey, executive director of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, also finds complaints about gender problems “kind of a moot point,” given the changes that began five years ago.

By the next decade, it should be clear whether it really is moot. Over the next five to seven years, says Falcone, a third of the orchestra’s chairs--nearly 50 positions--will have to be filled due to retirement, providing plenty of opportunities to improve its gender balance.

Meanwhile, President Hellsberg hopes the public will follow its ears in judging the Vienna Philharmonic. “Our statement is in our music making,” he wrote. “Please let the music speak for us.”

Price, the Culver City pianist, composer and college music teacher who helped guide the 1997 protests as International Alliance for Women in Music president, grants that the music speaks beautifully. But she wants audiences to listen with their eyes open.

“I want people to notice what it looks like on stage [with just a smattering of women], and how unusual that is in the United States, because we are just not used to seeing such exclusivity. I hope they enjoy the music. I would also like them to realize the music could sound just as good with more diversity in the ranks, and it would be much healthier.”

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Vienna Philharmonic, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Monday-Wednesday, 8 p.m. $34-$109. (949) 553-2422.

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Mike Boehm is a Times staff writer.