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MUSIC SHORTS
Accounting Blip Makes SF Opera No. 1
March 27, 2001
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By Janos Gereben
Accounting Blip Makes SF Opera No. 1
The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that
the San Francisco Opera places the highest in a national survey of
non-profit organizations for total executive compensation. There are only
three US organizations where this total (of top executives' compensation,
benefits, and expense-allowance packages) exceeds 2 percent of the total
income, and SFO comes in at 2.6%.
The reason for the high San Francisco figure, according to the magazine, is
that general director Lotfi Mansouri's retirement package has been
added to his regular compensation package, for a total of $942,098. SFO
public relations director Elizabeth Connell Nielsen confirmed the
figures, but she told Classical Voice that the difference between
Mansouri's salary of $400,000 and the total figure in the organization's
financial report (used in the survey) comes from retirement benefits to be
paid over the next two years, plus all of Mansouri's recent directorial
fees. The accounting procedure inflates the total amount reported for the
year, Connell Nielsen said.
The other two organizations over 2% of total income are the Heritage
Foundation and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People. At the Heritage Foundation, chief executive Edwin J. Feulner
Jr. received a performance bonus of $225,400, according to the survey.
Go East, Not-So-Young Man Much to his horror, Jake Heggie is turning 40 on March 31. His anticipation of the event produced this memorable, exclusive (and exact) quote for the San Francisco Classical Voice: "AAAARRRHHHGGGHH!" This Los Angeles native, who has left his mark on and heart in San Francisco, is doing the Right Coast, burying in work his grief about the passage of time. While making arrangements for future productions of his Dead Man Walking, Heggie is spending time in NYC, getting ready for the April 1 premiere of My Grandmother's Love Letters, for chorus and orchestra, with the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia; the April 18 Merkin Hall premiere of The Starry Night, a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano; and the May 17 premiere of Cut Time (Variations for Piano and Orchestra), commissioned by the Eos Orchestra. Next year, Heggie will be composer-in-residence at the Vail Valley Music Festival, premiering a number of works, including The Deepest Desire, for mezzo, flute, and piano, to new texts by Sister Helen Prejean. He will return to the Bay Area for the premiere of his cello concerto, composed for Emil Miland and commissioned by Michael Morgan's Oakland East Bay Symphony. The composer who brought in Dead Man on schedule and on budget (how many contemporary music dramas were born like that?) is also at work on a new opera, premiering in Houston in 2004. For R&R, Heggie says, "I was just tagging along with Flicka [Frederica von Stade] and Chanticleer for their performances of Anna Madrigal in Atlanta, DC, Boston, NYC, and Columbus, Ohio. That was amazing — I've never heard Flicka sound better, and Chanticleer just blew me away." He's been "staying out of trouble," Heggie reports, by working hard. It's good to know that NYC is free of the havoc he once wreaked on SF.
Villar donations approach $100 million Alberto Villar, announced on Tuesday (March 27) a contribution of $20 million to New York University for an arts scholarship program. Twenty voice, music, dance, composition, film and acting students will receive $40,000 annual stipends from Villar's grant. Last October 8, the New York Times reported his having considered and then declined the idea of a major donation to the San Francisco Opera. The 60-year-old Cuban-born investor has recently made contributions of $14 million to the St. Petersburg Kirov Opera and Ballet, $6 million to the Los Angeles Opera, and $5 million to the Musikverein in Vienna. Last month, Villar announced a gift of $50 million to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
This Phoenix Is Not Rising The London Independent reports that the rebuilding of Venice's La Fenice — destroyed by fire in January 1996 and originally scheduled to reopen in February 1999 — is so thoroughly botched that the new house may not rise for several more years . . . if at all. The city cancelled the contract with the German-Italian consortium Holzmann Romagnoli when it became clear that completion of the project might take another six years. "We have restarted the whole process," Venice mayor Paolo Costa said when the contractor requested another 30 billion lire ($4.6 million) and demanded cancellation of the $22,000 daily fine for not meeting the schedule.
Warmth for MTT Melts Snow The city of Buffalo seems to bear no resentment to Michael Tilson Thomas, either for leaving as music director of its Philharmonic in 1979 or for making himself rare in upstate New York. Returning last week as a guest conductor for only the third time in 22 years, MTT received a hero's welcome, with standing ovations and rave reviews. His program: Stravinsky's Petrouchka and Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. Herman Trotter, writing in the Buffalo News, called the Petrouchka performance "precise, crisp and bright, the music's textures clean and transparent" — an impressive accomplishment for Stravinsky.
New Equation — Balanchine:Stravinsky = Taylor:Crumb It may be a bit distant to remember, but there was a time when Stravinsky was hard on first-time listeners and George Balanchine's many brilliant works set to his music helped the "medicine" go down — and stay in their system forever. Now that the Paul Taylor Dance Company is hosted once again by San Francisco Performances for its longest tour stop anywhere (two weeks at Yerba Buena Center through April 1), Taylor's new work, Fiends Angelical, is noteworthy not only for its dazzling new variation on animalistic-bacchanalian choreography, but also for what it does to "sell" George Crumb. The terse, occasionally grating sound of Crumb's Black Angels may be a piece of cake for new-music enthusiasts, but even three decades after its premiere it poses a challenge for most audiences — except when packaged so compellingly by Taylor. With the Kronos Quartet's brilliant performance playing "in the background," Crumb is being heard by thousands who otherwise may carefully avoid him. While the eclectic intercutting of Bach piano concertos in his Cascade and the pulsating drum interruptions of a peaceful Corelli score for Cloven Kingdom may offend purists, Taylor is providing an undeniably important service for contemporary music by commissioning works from Jan Radzynski for Profiles and Donald York for Syzygy, and — less daringly, to be sure — using dark symphonic tangos in Piazzolla Caldera and Vaughan Williams' music in Eventide, among others in his greatly varied repertory. Here's a rule you can rely on: A choreographer who honors and illuminates music is likely to be a good one. In the case of Taylor, of course, that is just the value and principle at the base upon which are built layers of excellence.
Cyril Awards The Chamber of Commerce's Business Arts Council is awarding its 2001 Cyril Awards (named for the late arts benefactor Cyril Magnin) to mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade and the outgoing San Francisco Symphony board president Nancy Bechtle. The awards luncheon, to be held in the St. Francis Hotel, on May 11, will also honor William Hecht, of Del Monte Foods, as Business Volunteer of the Year; Roger Strauch, and Dan Miller, of the RODA Group, who gave their names (and a large contribution) to the new Berkeley Rep theater facility, and Mark Cavagnero for Arts Business Excellence. (Janos Gereben is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group and technology editor for www.the451.com. You can contact him at janos451@earthlink.net.) ©2001 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved |