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RECITAL
Restricted Palette
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Familiar and New
RECITAL
The Swedish Gabriel
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Stepping Out
MUSIC NEWS
New Gold Rush for S.F. Civic Center
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Responses to Our 10/25/05 Question of the Week
By Michelle Dulak Thomson
San Francisco Symphony
Gidon Kremer
Kurt Masur
(10/28/05)
By Alexander Kahn
Hilary Hahn
Natalie Zhu
(10/29/05)
By Aaron Einbond
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
(10/24/05)
By Heuwell Tircuit
Håkan Hardenberger
Aleksander Madzar
(10/25/05)
By David Bratman
San Francisco Symphony Chamber Players
(10/30/05)
By Janos Gereben
Mickey Butts, Executive Director/Publisher
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Americans have been reading a lot these days about the "buck stop." What the public is actually absorbing from all this buck-stops-here rhetoric is another question. We'll see the real upshot at the next elections. The issue of where responsibility ultimately rests, while hardly an exclusively political issue, comes into sharp relief at the federal government level. But even at the local level, individual voters too often indulge in the comfortable dodge of not feeling responsible, when in fact, at the level of us plain folks, that's where the buck really stops.
When it gets down to cultural institutions, other considerations arise. You dislike some of the San Francisco Opera's offerings, you vote by not attending or withholding your contribution. But the prime mover, the person responsible for your disappointment, gets off the hook. If a production is "controversial," or elements of it — the design, the staging, the acting — don't work, the director, designer, or simply "the production" is blamed. The public does not lay it at the door of the company chief the way it does so readily when it's the football coach or baseball manager. Especially if a wall has been constructed around the general director.
In the good old Kurt Herbert Adler days, the general director assumed full responsibility for the artistic quality of the product. He participated in, and some said "interfered," at every level of production and at every stage, from conception to performance. His predecessor and mentor, however, the company's first director, Gaetano Merola, was just the opposite. Merola was so focused on the singing and musical aspects of performance that from 1923 to 1953, he was content to let his in-house producer, Armando Agnini, put the operas on the stage. Traditional, out of the box productions were the norm, and taken for granted.
Adler's successor, the late Terence McEwen, did assert responsibility, making his feelings known to the directors and designers along the way, before the opening nights were reached. The fourth general manager, Lotfi Mansouri, was perhaps less critical of those whom he brought in, as well as more supportive and less "participatory," but that wasn't so clear-cut. He took fewer chances in his hires.
The current and outgoing general director, Pamela Rosenberg, who brought the most controversial productions in the company's history, took an avowedly different position. She flat-out asserted that the designers and directors had what amounted to artistic license and that she was not about to interfere in production. The consequences of no supervision were not only egregious errors in staging, directorial blunders, some poor acting, and designs that ranged from the ugly to the merely distracting. There were also cost overruns and needless extravagances running into tens of thousands of dollars. The current Norma is only the latest instance — to date.
Regardless of how one felt about Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise (2002) as an operatic work or company achievement, the production here was wasteful in a grandiose way. For one of the sets of expensive costumes created for the large chorus, only a few garments and helmet masks needed to have been constructed. When the chorus was positioned in three-tier apartment-like structures, only the choristers standing in the front, just a few, could be seen through the scrim. The others might as well have been wearing T-shirts and jeans. Then for a scene near the end, the entombment of St. Francis, an expensive motorized thrust stage element was constructed to extend a segment attached to the apron, and it cost many thousands. It was pointless.
For Il barbiere di Siviglia (2003-2004), Rosenberg's favored designer, Hans Dieter Schaal, the designer of the Messiaen, this time came up with a complete house weighing something like 35 tons. That necessitated an expensive reconstruction of the stage-rotating apparatus, which was not originally rated as able to move such weight. Furthermore, her director, Johannes Schaaf, insisted that for the rehearsal sessions in the Zellerbach rehearsal stage across the street, a second house be built, not just a simple mock-up. At no point did Rosenberg say, "No, we can't do that."
San Francisco opera lovers, patrons, subscribers, fans, and observers must be curious about the future. How will the next general director function? Will he supervise designers and directors and take full artistic responsibility for the product? Thus far, they know only that the general director-designate, David Gockley, now 61, scheduled to take over on January 1, 2006, had a successful career at the helm of the Houston Opera for 33 years.
His record of producing 33 world premieres and a number of nontraditional operas should allay fears that the San Francisco Opera will retreat into conventional repertory. Gockley also kept the Houston Opera in the black. He led a $72 million campaign for its new opera house and has had that company broadcasting its seasons nationally over NPR since 1999. In 2002, the broadcasts were also heard over New York's WQXR and via the European Broadcast Union, and since 2003 over the Australian Broadcasting Corporation network, as well. In short, he knows how to run an American company.
Gockley has already relocated here part-time, and when he's not back in Houston running that company, he's learning and preparing here in San Francisco. Last week, he was asked the all-important "buck stop" question: How does he work with his designers and directors? What's the quality control?
"I hire people whose taste I trust," he said, and then laid out his procedure and policy. "Then you have certain conversations about the direction that something is going to take. You have the sketches and a model and you get taken through it, and that is an opportunity to do an edit. And there are edits that might be conceptual, staging-related or budget-related that need to be dealt with at that stage. Then you 'put it out to bid,' and there may be further changes that may be called for by virtue of that."
"I have never had too much trouble getting a team to conform to a budget. First of all, I have given them budgets that are unrealistically low and they must not go over an unrealistic amount. Everyone comes to town and you start staging and someone involved with that might say, 'You need to come and see this,' and I come in and see it as soon as I can. And I see a run-through in a rehearsal room before it gets to the stage. When it gets to the stage, it comes to a chaotic state again with the technical elements and other parts of the stage setting. The piano dress rehearsal is the next real reconciliation point. By then, pretty much everything has got to be as the company would want it to be. I am protecting the audience and also the company."
"The same thing exists for new pieces, from scenario to original draft of the libretto to the early musical excerpts."
The noted American stage director Francesca Zambello had only the highest praise for Gockley as a colleague and collaborator. Zambello, who made her directorial debut at the Houston Opera in 1984 after early experience at the San Francisco Opera, has directed operas in many of the world's leading companies. Speaking with SFCV, she cited her experience doing 10 productions for him in Houston: "I've done the most shows for him of any director except for Hughes Gall (former general director of the Paris Opera). They are my two favorites. David is a very active general director in terms of the relationship with the outside creative team. Some people just hire you, but then say get on with it. [Gockley] is involved with the conceptual process, and gives continual feedback.
"Where I value his partnership most is in the final rehearsal process, the check weeks. He has a sharp eye. He pushes me to do things better and in the final rehearsals you need to say, ‘How can I take something from being to good to being great.' He can help in this, much more than can a theatrical producer. He does that very well because of his background in so much music theater as well as opera. He's also a fine fundraiser and administrator.
She singled out his effectiveness working in the creative process with him, and especially in the world premieres. She cited Rachel Portman's The Little Prince and an opera in Spanish, Daniel Catán's and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Florenzia in the Amazon, which she directed in its Houston Opera world premiere (2001) with subsequent performances in Seattle and Los Angeles. "David is very involved in the dramaturgical evolution of these [new works], in the story-boarding of it. We even went to Colombia together to visit Marquez."
So there it is — where the buck will stop after David Gockley takes over direction of the San Francisco Opera. In fact, his is not the ultimate desk. It's always a question of who chose the boss and who is responsible for his or her being in that office. I've always said that if you're unhappy with a journalist, a critic let's say, look to his boss, the editor who hired him. In this case, a search committee headed by George Hume selected Gockley. In the present situation, the current top officers of the board responsible for Pamela Rosenberg and her decisions are Franklin P. ("Pitch") Johnson, chairman of the board, Karl O. Mills, president, and the chief executive officer — what do you know? — Pamela Rosenberg.
Those responsible for the selection of Pamela Rosenberg, who began her general directorship in August 2001, were Johnson, Reid Dennis, and William W. Godward, the latter two respectively board chairman and president at that time. Johnson, for one, has backed her to the hilt, making very large contributions, reportedly in seven figures, to bail out the Opera's finances. Recently, as first step in the final apotheosis of Rosenberg, the Opera board's top level awarded her the Opera's gold medal. And then, to complete the transfiguration and send-off, on October 17, Johnson, Dennis, and Mills presided over a great gala dinner for 250 and entertainment on the Opera House Stage in her honor. To the end, they are determinedly sticking by their decision and commitment. That's where the buck really stops.
The change after January 1 will be thorough. Likely we will soon no longer see the empty seats in quantity at Opera performances, an anomaly that is anything but a tradition in the Bay Area. People here may not have held the decisionmaker(s) responsible, but they have voted.
(Robert P. Commanday, founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)
©2005 Robert Commanday, all rights reserved
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From September 1, 1998 to September 13, 2005, SFCV has published, in addition to the Music News, feature pieces and weekly editorials, 2182 reviews of Bay Area performances by: 52 symphony orchestras (459 reviews), 89 chamber groups (267), 36 new music ensembles and programs (234), 39 opera companies (306), 29 choral groups (133), 15 music festivals (101), 33 early music ensembles (170), 24 chamber orchestras (88), 6 musical theater groups (14), world music (14), recitals (374), youth music (10), other (12).
Michelle Dulak Thomson, Editor
Richard Thomas, Associate Editor
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