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IN Music News THIS WEEK:
A Maestra for SF Opera
No Maestro for SFS Youth Orchestra
Three Maestri for Pittsburgh
Barenboim Cancels West Coast Tour
Looking for an Opera Production?
Slack Advertised as 'Diva'
Montréal Strike Near
James Conlon
Sara Jobin
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By Janos Gereben
New Maestro for LA Opera
When Kent Nagano ends his tenure as Los Angeles Opera's music director in 2006, James Conlon will succeed him,
according to an announcement on Monday by Plácido Domingo, the company's general director. Conlon's three-year contract
begins on July 1, 2006, when Nagano takes over as music director of Munich's Bavarian State Opera and of the Orchestre symphonique
de Montréal. (That's the year the Los Angeles Philharmonic may make a change too as Esa-Pekka Salonen's contract also
expires.)
The Los Angeles announcement came after Nagano's last appearance leading Ariadne auf Naxos; the remaining two performances
will be led by his assistant conductor, Laurent Pillot. Conlon is an American conductor with an extensive European career,
but practically no West Coast experience. Los Angeles' relatively light schedule is perfect for Conlon, who resigned from major
positions in Europe to return to the US and to lighten his workload.
In a 2002 interview in Cincinnati, Conlon said the reason for his quitting work in Europe, including prestigious positions in Paris
and Cologne, was to "come home," meaning New York, with his wife, soprano Jennifer Ringo, and be able to spend more time
with his two young daughters. Last year, he was named to succeed Christoph Eschenbach in 2005 as music director of the
Ravinia Festival (a position for which candidates included Robert Spano, Marin Alsop and Leonard Slatkin,
among others.
Born in New York (March 18, 1950) and educated at Juilliard, Conlon conducted Boris Godunov in Spoleto at age 21, made his
NY Philharmonic and Met debuts just a few years later, and then built a career almost exclusively in Europe for the past couple of
decades. With major positions in Cologne, Rotterdam and Paris, Conlon has maintained US connections at summer events, including
Cincinnati's May Festival since 1979.
In that Cincinnati interview, Conlon spoke about the "EuroTrash" controversy in opera, and blamed some directors with big egos and
lazy journalists for more heat than light in the discussion. Directors can make a name for themselves faster and easier with a
"non-standard production" (regardless of how the work is being served, if at all), Conlon said, but reviewers are also at fault:
"It's easier to write about the staging of an opera than about the music," he said. "So you have six-seven paragraphs about what
the audience sees, and
then maybe something about the music." It's understandable, he allowed, because describing music in words is hard. Writing about
the action (the more bizarre, the better) doesn't pose the same obstacles as saying that "this phrase was like that, the harmonic
progression was interpreted in a novel way," and so on.
It wasn't a straightforward case of blaming the messenger for bad news, but Conlon did point at the problem of how even opposition
to regietheater can turn into significant publicity for something you wouldn't want to promote in any way. Conlon's own experience
with the genre goes back many years,
having made his Cologne Opera debut in 1989 in Harry Kupfer's production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a year before
becoming chief director of the company.
A Maestra for SF Opera San Francisco Opera, at age 81, is about to have the first woman conductor in a mainstage subscription performance. Sara Jobin will make her debut on November 7, conducting Tosca, then The Flying Dutchman, on Dec. 1. Other performances of those two operas will be conducted by Jobin's mentor, SFO music director Donald Runnicles. Jobin's local history goes back about a decade: she conducted the Peninsula Symphony in programs where the music ran from Mancini to Elgar to Stravinsky; she was the accompanist for a South Valley Opera production of Don Giovanni (which featured such young singers as Cynthia Clayton, Lori Ann Phillips, Julie Ness, and Mel Ulrich); she's been heading the Tassajara Symphony, been active in San Ramon Valley educational programs (Frederica von Stade helped her raise funds); and worked in a multitude of positions on the SFO musical staff. Last year, Jobin conducted the SFO Orchestra in a quirky Opera Center triple bill of Jack Beeson's Dr. Heidegger's Fountain of Youth, Ernst Toch's Edgar & Emily, and William Walton's The Bear, receiving excellent reviews for her work. She was one of the participants on a "Women in Opera" panel, along with Sandra Bernhard, Carla Lucero and Pauline Oliveros. Jobin's female predecessors at SFO included Kathryn Cathcart, who conducted student and family matinees of La Traviata in the Opera House, and others who led Showcase performances, and four appearing on the podium for Spring Opera: Fiora Contino, Paulette Houpt-Nolen, Judith Somogi, and Thea Musgrave.
No Maestro for SFS Youth Orchestra Edwin Outwater will step down as music director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra at the end of the current season, continuing as the orchestra's resident conductor, assisting Michael Tilson Thomas. The announcement on Monday, by Symphony Executive Director Brent Assink, said one reason for the change is to enable Outwater to accept guest conducting offers.
Three Maestri for Pittsburgh A long search to find a successor to Mariss Jansons as music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony ended last week when the orchestra hired a trio of conductors: Andrew Davis, 60, as artistic adviser, Yan Pascal Tortelier, 57, as principal guest conductor, and Marek Janowski, 65, as guest conductor in an endowed chair. Each conductor signed a three- year contract that begins next season. "We reached the conclusion that a different artistic model was needed at this time for this orchestra," search committee chair Thomas Todd told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "The PSO established a list of qualifications necessary for the next music director and decided that person might not exist... to meet the job or to provide the time for the job at this time." Jansons, who left at the end of last season, earned about $1 million annually as music director. After several years of financial tumult, the PSO recently announced it had emerged from a deficit. "It seems in the 21st century, with the demands on conductors and on orchestras to form relationships with the community, raise money and fill the seats, that there are a lot of challenges for the leadership of the orchestra," said violist Paul Silver, a member of the committee. "We hope that having several people at the helm will give us more flexibility and the potential for more creativity and connections with Pittsburgh," hinting that the orchestra may not returned to the traditional concept of a single music director.
Barenboim Cancels West Coast Tour Daniel Barenboim has canceled his October 17 San Francisco Symphony recital in Davies Hall. Herniated disks have forced the pianist to cancel his entire West Coast tour. The concerts will not be rescheduled.
Looking for an Opera Production? San Francisco Opera is putting costly productions in expensive storage to good use. The company now has a Webpage for rentals, at www.sfopera.com/oc_rentals.asp. In case you're not a big company with money to spend, you can still look at the photos from past productions at that address.
Slack Advertised as 'Diva' Soprano Karen Slack, a 2002 Merola Program participant and current Adler Fellow, has become a "diva" on the cabaret circuit. Slack, a winner of the Leontyne Price Competition and a Metropolitan Opera finalist, is featured as the "opera diva," along "Broadway diva" Barbara Cook and "jazz diva" Ann Hampton Callaway in a new San Francisco non-profit concert series, created by Marilyn Levinson. Slack led off the series on Sunday, in Greenbrae. Cook, with her usual accompanist, Wally Harper, will perform in Davies Hall on November 14; and the jazz evening is scheduled for Dec. 12 in the Marines Memorial, on Sutter Street. See www.bayareacabaret.org.
Montréal Strike Near Musicians of l'Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal have authorized their negotiation committee to declare a strike at any time, and refused to attend two rehearsals on Sunday. Four mediation sessions this week and next have been scheduled. For the past season, the musicians had agreed to renew their contract at the previous pay scale, in a gesture aimed to help the organization give priority to its search for a new artistic director. Having selected Kent Nagano, the administration then turned its attention to the contract, but the musicians — ranking 34th in pay scale among North American orchestras, and having their wages frozen for seven years — appear unwilling to make further concessions. On Monday, the Symphony appointed former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard as its chairman on Monday. Bouchard, 65, was nominated unanimously by the board following a general meeting. The former premier, who led Quebec from 1996 to 2001, will succeed Jacques Laurent. Bouchard is expected to take a leading role in the current labor negotiations.
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the
Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janosg@gmail.com.)
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