NYT: Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark
Premise Checker
NYT June 27, 2004
By ARTHUR LUBOW
On most Tuesday afternoons, Zarin Mehta, president and
executive director of the New York Philharmonic, assembles
his department heads for an ''op-com'' meeting. These
operating committee sessions resemble war updates, often
with discouraging reports from the front. At the April 20
meeting, however, Mehta related a victory.
Two weeks before, Jeremy Geffen, the artistic
administrator, revealed that Bob Hurwitz, president of
Nonesuch Records, was planning to release the BBC Symphony
Orchestra's Proms performance of John Adams's new work,
''On the Transmigration of Souls,'' instead of the New York
Philharmonic's. This news had been greeted with cries of
dismay. The Philharmonic commissioned ''Transmigration'' as
a response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and its
premiere, on Sept. 19, 2003, was the sold-out debut
subscription concert of the orchestra's new music director,
Lorin Maazel. The notion that another orchestra would be
disseminating this New York-identified piece to the world
was unthinkable.
''Bob says the Proms performance of 'Transmigration' costs
20 percent less than ours,'' Geffen had reported glumly at
the April 6 op-com meeting. The Philharmonic had previously
allocated $40,000 to subsidize the recording. Mehta
promised to telephone Hurwitz that afternoon to make sure
that Nonesuch realized this.
Now, two weeks later, Mehta was announcing with a smile
that Nonesuch had reversed itself and would be releasing
the Philharmonic version after all. In the end, the
discrepancy between costs in London and New York came to
$95,000, not $40,000. But when Barbara Haws, the
Philharmonic's archivist, reported this distressing state
of affairs to her husband, William Josephson, he
magnanimously chipped in the extra money.
This is what passes for good news these days at the New
York Philharmonic. A little more than a decade ago,
recording, radio and television contracts were bringing in
about $700,000 annually in revenues. Today that figure
hovers below $150,000. And if the orchestra wants to record
an important new work that it has commissioned from a
famous contemporary composer, it must pass the hat.
After recounting the Adams victory, Mehta shared comparably
blithe tidings from other battlefields. He had met that
morning with Lincoln Center officials about the future of
Avery Fisher Hall. The relationship between the New York
Philharmonic and its landlord, awkward in the best of
times, was strained to the breaking point in June 2003,
when the orchestra announced it would be returning to its
former home, Carnegie Hall. That relocation derailed four
months later. Now the orchestra was asking Lincoln Center
to resume collaboration on a renovation scheme.
''I don't think, frankly, that we're out of the woods yet,
but things are improving,'' Mehta said. The Carnegie Hall
dalliance left bruised feelings; however, after coming so
close to divorce, both sides seemed bent on bettering the
relationship. A first step would be to fix the hall at
Lincoln Center, which has been maligned ever since the
Philharmonic moved there in 1962. The reconstruction could
not begin before the 2008-9 season, at the very earliest.
Yet any doubt that Avery Fisher Hall urgently needed
refurbishing was quickly dispelled by the threadbare
carpet, stained drapes and lumpy chairs of the conference
room in which the administrators were meeting. ''We kept
deferring doing things to this floor, because we said by
2004 this hall would be torn down,'' Mehta said with a
rueful shrug. The Avery Fisher interior will receive a
frugal sprucing-up over the next three years while it
awaits its makeover. As goes the sixth-floor conference
room, so goes the concert hall.
The American orchestra, not just the New York Philharmonic,
is stuck in a holding pattern. All orchestra managers want
to remain faithful to tradition without seeming musty. They
need to attract new audiences without antagonizing the old.
They are running hard in opposite directions and wondering
why they are standing in place.
The op-com agenda shifted to ticket sales for the coming
production of ''Candide,'' two weeks away. The development
director, Coralie Toevs, announced that seats for the three
regular performances were sold out and that few remained
for the gala fourth performance. ''It's up to $950,000, our
highest-grossing spring gala ever,'' she said.
''Candide,'' the Broadway musical written by the
Philharmonic's own lionized music director, the late
Leonard Bernstein, would be headlined by two Broadway
stars, Kristin Chenoweth and Patti LuPone. It would be
semi-staged, as was a Philharmonic production four seasons
earlier of Stephen Sondheim's ''Sweeney Todd.'' That
program also starred LuPone, and it also sold out.
After the mutual congratulations died down, the marketing
director, David Snead, spoke up. He didn't bother to
mention that this year's attendance figures were the worst
in recent memory -- by the end of the season, in part
because of an increase in subscription concerts, the
Philharmonic would have sold only 75 percent of its seats.
He simply remarked that he had been reviewing sales figures
for the current week's program, in which the eminent
British conductor Colin Davis and the mezzo-soprano Anne
Sofie von Otter would perform pieces by Berlioz and
Sibelius.
''This week, we'll be two-thirds full with Berlioz, and
then 'Candide' will sell out for four performances,'' he
said. ''In the future, in this situation, would we consider
keeping it for more than four?''
Everyone pitched in with opinions on particular obstacles,
like the availability of the star performers for extended
runs. There was also a larger question: whether the
Philharmonic should be devoting so much time and energy to
light fare. ''The 'Candide' is going to sell out, but it's
not what we do,'' Geffen said. ''It's a question of
balance. We're putting on what is essentially a Broadway
production with an orchestra staff.''
''I probably shouldn't say 'Candide' over Berlioz,'' Snead
conceded. ''I'm just suggesting that next time we do
something like this, we consider that option of
extending.'' His suggestion was obviously stillborn.
Two weeks later, Avery Fisher Hall would be buzzing with
excitement as the Philharmonic struck up the irresistible
''Candide'' overture. Suitably for Voltaire's tale of a
haplessly cheerful hero, a yellow banner had been inscribed
in bright blue letters: ''optimism?'' For an orchestra
burdened with declines in attendance rates, the evaporation
of outside recording income, a much derided performance
space and the fallout from a thwarted return to Carnegie
Hall, the slogan seemed unintentionally apt. Optimism?
Perhaps. Question mark? Certainly.
The New York Philharmonic, founded in 1842, is the oldest
orchestra in the United States, and one of the oldest in
the world. That vaunted history can be a drag. The smallest
deviation from tradition is agonizingly questioned, and the
tiniest step is heralded as a moonwalk. When Mehta
announced a piece of unsurprising news this month -- that
the orchestra is renewing Maazel's contract -- he
simultaneously divulged that over the same three-year
period he is anointing a couple of well-regarded younger
Americans, David Robertson and Alan Gilbert, each to
present coherent programs for two weeks a season. (He
didn't reveal that he had pursued two additional conductors
of the same generation, Esa Pekka-Salonen of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic and Antonio Pappano of the Royal Opera
House Covent Garden; both were unable to make the
commitment, at least for the first season.) In addition,
for four weeks a season he has engaged the distinguished
Riccardo Muti of La Scala in Milan, whom he tried
unsuccessfully to hire as music director back in 2000. That
painfully public courtship culminated instead in the
appointment of Maazel, a safe, unexciting choice that was
seen as a stopgap but that has evolved into a seven-year
stint.
In the staple repertory of Classical and Romantic work, the
Philharmonic under Maazel has been faulted for sounding
accomplished, not inspired. At one time, a polished
delivery might have been good enough. No longer. For
big-city orchestras across the country, attendance is down
and deficits are up. America's wealthiest and most famous
orchestra will not collapse into bankruptcy, as have the
Florida Philharmonic, the San Jose Symphony and the San
Antonio Symphony. With an endowment of $190 million and an
annual budget of $53 million, the New York Philharmonic is
ending its fiscal year worried, but not crippled, by a
projected $3.3 million deficit. More alarming is the
long-range fear that a generation that is visually
hyperstimulated, musically undereducated and
technologically tempted may avoid the concert hall. The
problem is not the often decried ''graying'' of the
audience (it seems the audience is no grayer than it ever
was) but that people entering middle age are less inclined
to buy symphony tickets than their parents were. ''We are
now seeing the first generation that has grown up with
television as a consistent part of daily life,'' says Henry
Fogel, president of the American Symphony Orchestra League.
''The question facing the music world today is, How do you
change the presentation without dumbing down or screwing up
the art?''
Created at the end of the 18th century, the symphony
orchestra came to full flower in the 19th. The core of its
repertory is more than a century old. The formal attire of
its musicians on stage carries a heavy whiff of bygone
gentility. But a great orchestra on the right night playing
even the most overexposed Beethoven concerto or Brahms
symphony can penetrate the workaday fog with something that
sounds bracingly fresh and new. ''A museum just has to put
the Rembrandt on the wall and keep it clean and well lit,''
says Peter Pastreich, who was executive director of the San
Francisco Symphony for 22 years. ''We have to recreate the
masterpiece every time. People can't appreciate the music
by reading the score, and it's not the same to listen on a
stereo. If we don't do it, it's not there.''
But even Beethoven didn't turn out a masterpiece every
other day. Like other major American orchestras, the New
York Philharmonic performs about 180 concerts a year. So
unremitting a schedule fosters competence over creativity.
For the musicians, the frequent performances are something
to celebrate. In 1964, the New York Philharmonic was the
first orchestra to provide its musicians with a 52-week
contract. Today, with a base salary of about $100,000, nine
weeks of paid vacation, enviably complete medical benefits
and a pension that kicks in at age 70 1/2 (even if they
continue to perform), the Philharmonic musicians are living
the unionist's dream. On the management side, however, this
rich contract means that $20 million, or almost 38 percent
of the annual budget, is earmarked for fixed musicians'
costs. ''When the overhead is so huge, it forces
institutions to be more conservative,'' says Catherine
Maciariello, program officer for the performing arts at the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ''It takes away the ability to
try and fail and try and fail again.'' Besides imposing a
fixed financial burden, the musicians' contract is rigidly
enforced. Only when an orchestra is on the brink of
collapse, as has happened in Detroit and St. Louis, are
people willing to be flexible. One explanation for the
Philharmonic's slowness to innovate is its relative
financial well-being.
Boxed in by budgetary pressures, orchestra administrators
can't correct institutional weaknesses. If you were trying
to design a marketing system that attracts the most
settled, unadventurous, conventional concertgoers, you
might come up with one that requires them to plunk down a
large sum for performances way off in the future. In other
words, you might invent the subscription model. In its day,
it worked brilliantly. As recently as the late 1960's, the
Philharmonic had to make a conscious effort to hold back
some seats for last-minute sale, because the orchestra
could easily sell out its season with subscriptions.
''People subscribed year after year,'' Mehta says. ''They
came and sat down in the same seats, and they greeted their
friends. It was a time when people said, 'It's the New York
Philharmonic, and we're going.' Everybody had a record
player, and they bought classical records. Everybody had a
piano in their living room. That's not going to come
back.'' Even people who like going to symphony concerts
hesitate to commit themselves nearly a year in advance. To
accommodate them, the Philharmonic subscription packages
today contain as few as three or four concerts, with
complete freedom to exchange tickets. ''Almost everybody
has an exchange program,'' says Snead, the marketing
director. ''A subscription is really a frequent-purchase
reward program.''
Despite these concessions, there is a historical drop in
the percentage of tickets sold by subscription -- 63
percent of Avery Fisher Hall today, compared with 85
percent 20 years ago -- and those subscriptions that are
purchased are for fewer concerts and are bought later and
later in the year. Nevertheless, orchestra managements
cling to the old paradigm, having nothing to substitute for
it. Because of the high costs of advertising, a single
ticket costs about 35 cents on the dollar to sell, while
marketing a subscription ticket eats up only a dime. And
even though the exchange program permits customers to trade
in and out of series, they have at least committed
themselves to attend a certain number of concerts. ''For us
to say that we are going to say goodbye to that 62 percent
or 63 percent -- it's not on the market,'' Mehta says. But
what if the subscription customer is saying goodbye to him?
''Orchestras are selling shorter and shorter subscriptions,
and it is costing more and more to sell them,'' says
Maciariello of the Mellon Foundation. ''It's happening de
facto.''
Slated for demolition when the Philharmonic decamped to
Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall instead survived, thanks to a
campaign led by the violinist Isaac Stern. Its warm,
resonant acoustics have mocked the absconding orchestra
ever since. In recent years, Carnegie has opened two
smaller halls in addition to its main hall, Isaac Stern
Auditorium, and has expanded its presentations to include
world music, jazz and pop. ''Why can't the Philharmonic be
as creative?'' critics ask. Easy. The Philharmonic is not a
concert hall; it's an orchestra.
When the Philharmonic contemplated a return to Carnegie
Hall, it was primarily hoping to avoid the huge expense,
temporary dislocation and ultimate uncertainty of replacing
Avery Fisher Hall with a new building. Another part of the
appeal was eliminating the chief competition. Carnegie is,
and would continue to be, host to the world's premier
orchestras. ''In terms of merging with Carnegie, one thing
we knew for sure is that any given night we were not
competing with another orchestra,'' says the Philharmonic
general manager, Bill Thomas. ''We were expecting that the
best orchestras would come to Carnegie, and the second tier
would come here to Avery Fisher. That was the crass
thinking, although we didn't come right out and say so.''
Surprised by a news leak, the board chairmen of the two
institutions prematurely announced an imminent merger last
June. At that point, the boards had determined that
Carnegie Hall could physically accommodate the
Philharmonic, but they had not begun to consider whether
the institutions' programs could be made to mesh. The talks
broke down over specific impasses: Would the Philharmonic
be willing to reduce its subscription concerts, from the
current figure of 125 to a number in the 90's, and make up
the difference by performing elsewhere or in smaller
groups? Would Carnegie guarantee use of Stern Auditorium
for all of the orchestra's rehearsals? These were sticky
issues, on which Carnegie's management wouldn't budge. But
the deal breaker was more fundamental. The Philharmonic is
arguably the country's most accomplished orchestra.
Carnegie is the country's most praised hall. If the two
could have fused to create something new, that might have
generated the excitement that the Philharmonic badly needs.
But classical musicians tend to be risk-averse, and those
at the Philharmonic, who typically stay for life, seem
especially so. Branching out often into neighboring
communities is repugnant to the players. ''Are you sending
the Yankees to Newark?'' asks Glenn Dicterow, the
Philharmonic concertmaster. Splitting the orchestra into
smaller ensembles to play smaller halls is resisted. ''If
we do too much of that, we forget how to play as a unit,''
Dicterow observes. Even the perceived paucity of self-park
garages near Carnegie Hall provoked the orchestra's New
Jersey contingent to write a memo. If the musicians were
going to move to Carnegie, it would be on their terms. ''In
combining two institutions like that, the Philharmonic
would have to be the driving force,'' says Fiona Simon, a
violinist and chairwoman of the orchestra committee. Maazel
agrees: ''I don't think that anyone thought of it as
anything other than the return of the prodigal son, one of
America's great orchestras going back to the old hall. If
the orchestra would be one more piece in the puzzle, to be
moved around at the will of the people running Carnegie
Hall, that would be the end of its autonomy and its
dignity.''
Once everyone realized that instead of a reassuring step
back, the plan would actually require a ground-shifting
departure, it collapsed.
Instead of radical change, tinkering.
At an open
rehearsal on Feb. 12, the Philharmonic tried an experiment
championed by Benjamin Rosen, a board member and the former
chairman of the Compaq computer company. A large screen
loomed over the stage. Four cameras followed the action.
Like a jinni, Zarin Mehta, who was standing invisibly at
the rear of the stage, materialized on the screen. ''We are
doing something special today to see if future Philharmonic
concerts can be made more enjoyable through visual
information,'' he told those attending.
As Maazel walked to the podium and began conducting
Wagner's ''Prelude and Liebestod'' from ''Tristan und
Isolde,'' he was displayed far larger than life. The
drawn-out, yearning chords of ''Tristan'' were said to
cause female listeners in Wagner's day to swoon, but under
Maazel's direction, the music evoked a voluptuous flower
dried and pressed into a Victorian spinster's scrapbook.
Yet there was the maestro, his face contorted with feeling
and, projected 15 feet high, impossible to avoid. As the
concert progressed, the camera operators zoomed in on
different sections of the orchestra. Instead of your own
eye wandering, the video director's eye wandered for you;
in the guise of getting you more involved, it made you an
even less active participant.
Most of the musicians gave the experiment scathing reviews.
''It was terribly distracting to turn your head and see the
conductor, and then look up and see him on screen,''
Dicterow says. ''And the guys in back were seeing him in
reverse. I was losing my place in standard repertoire.''
According to questionnaires, the audience liked the
experiment better than the orchestra did. ''One-quarter
didn't want a change, and 75 percent wanted to see
something like that,'' says Rosen, who contributed some
$50,000 for the trial. ''That was with a terrible camera
presentation. Despite that, I think it was electric.'' When
I mention the musicians' displeasure, he says: ''Generally,
musicians don't want anything changed from what's normal.
This is a test. You see what's wrong and go back. It's an
iterative process.'' The Philharmonic plans to retest the
concept with less obtrusive screens.
Orchestras across the country are fumbling for ways to make
the concert experience more ''intimate'' and ''emotional,''
which is what, according to surveys and focus groups,
audiences crave. In a Los Angeles Philharmonic series
called ''First Nights,'' the English dramatic troupe
Complicite had an actor dress up as Berlioz for a
multimedia performance of the ''Symphonie Fantastique.'' In
Pittsburgh, a series called ''Symphony With a Splash''
permits audience members to chat with musicians over drinks
before the concert. (In Baltimore, it's ''Symphony With a
Twist.'') The Atlanta Symphony precedes most contemporary
works with a videotape of the composer discussing the
piece. In Chicago, a ''Music Plus'' program melds dancers
or film into the concert.
The New York Philharmonic has been in the rear guard when
it comes to these adjustments. (For example, Philadelphia
first tried a two-screen video system at the old Academy of
Music back in 1996.) ''There is a New York smugness --
nothing else can be as good as we are,'' says one industry
veteran. ''And there is an innate conservatism in the
institution of the New York Philharmonic, in the board, in
Zarin. Unless the direction comes from the top -- either
the music director or the executive director -- to really
experiment, it won't happen.''
At the end of May, the New York Philharmonic tried out an
experimental device called a Concert Companion, which has
been championed by Roland Valliere, the former executive
director of the Kansas City Symphony. The Concert Companion
is a hand-held, wireless, personal digital assistant, or
P.D.A., that provides live visuals (a close-up of the
conductor) and pedagogical prompts (''the first theme
returns, played by the woodwinds'') on different channels.
Valliere hopes that the Concert Companion will entice
people who find a concert boring or baffling but also not
alienate contented patrons. ''Basically, we're looking at
well-educated baby boomers who are interested in attending
concerts but don't have the knowledge and don't know how to
get it,'' Valliere says.
The Concert Companion is inspired by two of the most
successful recent innovations in the culture business,
museum audioguides and opera supertitles. (The titles that
the Concert Companion emulates are the Metropolitan
Opera's, which appear on the seat in front of a spectator
who chooses whether to activate them.) At the May 27 test,
the video image of Maazel on the miniature screen was so
tiny that he seemed more remote than usual. What was the
point? But the play-by-play commentary to Charles Ives's
''Three Places in New England'' provided a benefit, at a
cost: it elucidated subtleties in the score while
diminishing your sense of immersion in the music.
The only proven way that a symphony orchestra playing a
classical repertory can fill the hall is also the most
traditional. The Toscanini Solution, you might call it,
after the Philharmonic's legendary maestro. Audiences flock
to a music director who has established a reputation for
exciting musicmaking. Unfortunately, there are no
Toscaninis available.
After Bernstein stepped down in 1969, the Philharmonic did
an about-face and hired his antithesis: Pierre Boulez, a
champion of avant-garde music, a stickler for detail, a
Frenchman. When it was time to search again, the goal
seemed to be someone more like Bernstein -- Zubin Mehta,
Zarin's older brother, who offered Bernstein's geniality,
if not his charisma. Zubin Mehta arrived in 1978 and stayed
13 years. It was too long. By the end of his tenure, the
orchestra was playing sloppily.
In recent years, the Philharmonic has had a checkered
record of landing the music directors it wants. In 1990,
while nudging out Zubin Mehta, it set its heart on Claudio
Abbado, who at the time was the music director of the
Vienna State Opera. Depending on who is telling the story,
either the Philharmonic board delayed in making a firm
offer or Abbado was holding out for the Berlin
Philharmonic. In any event, at the last minute Abbado
decided in favor of Berlin, resulting in a frantic search
and the surprise selection of Kurt Masur from Leipzig. A
decade later, Riccardo Muti led the orchestra on a similar
dance with a similar denouement, followed by another
scramble -- this one ending with the selection of Maazel.
Scheduled fortuitously for two weeks as a guest conductor
at just the right moment, Maazel, as Stanley Drucker, the
principal clarinet, puts it, ''blew us away.'' Before Mehta
or the board had a chance to do so, the orchestra sent an
unofficial delegation to ask Maazel if he would be
interested in the job. Although the board makes the
decision, Paul Guenther, its chairman, placed several
musicians on the selection committee: the board wants the
orchestra to be happy.
Had the Philharmonic been more hospitable to guest
conductors, the pool of candidates would have been better
stocked. Over the years, however, the musicians have tended
to reject conductors they don't like, some of whom they are
judging solely by reputation. Such promising young
conductors as David Robertson, Alan Gilbert and Antonio
Pappano made their debuts with the Philharmonic several
years later than at other first-tier American orchestras.
Other conductors (including Christoph Eschenbach, Mariss
Jansons and Michael Tilson Thomas), the Philharmonic
players just don't care for. ''Our experience is, we see
someone and we disapprove, and 10 or 15 years pass, and we
say, 'Let's give them another chance,''' Newton Mansfield,
a violinist, remarks.
Within the Philharmonic, Maazel is extremely popular.
Whenever I inquired why, I was told that he is a peerless
professional. ''We have never seen him come to the stage
without being absolutely prepared,'' Fiona Simon says. ''He
learns the material on his own time, not on ours, and he
expects the same of us. His conducting skills are
amazing.'' Guenther offers complementary reasons to be
delighted with Maazel: ''He's as smart as anyone I've ever
met. He's easy to work with. His conducting style is warmer
than I thought -- I enjoy watching him conduct. He's
wonderful dealing with patrons. He always shows up for
cocktail parties, here and on the road. His wife is
delightful.''
All of those qualities are pleasant in a colleague. But
what do they contribute to the music at a concert? Under
Bernstein, who was the Philharmonic's most successful
postwar music director, the players were famously
obstreperous; the conductor himself, schmoozing and
chain-smoking, broke all the rules of rehearsal. But the
concerts were often thrilling. ''Does the appearance of
Maazel onstage excite people the way Bernstein did?''
Mansfield asks. ''I don't know. It's not the emotional type
of experience that you might have with someone else, but
from an orchestral standpoint, it's very satisfying. We
feel pretty secure about the quality of the performance.''
Like the orchestra, Maazel seems to value industriousness
and competence as primary goals -- as ends, not means.
''They have an approach to the work ethic as well as to
musicmaking that is very similar to mine,'' he says of his
Philharmonic musicians. ''They don't talk much. They go out
there and do it. I'm very much a doer.'' In a city that
loves celebrities, Bernstein, an ebullient extrovert who
had conquered Broadway, was a natural New Yorker. Unlike
Masur, Maazel is an American -- but as a prodigy conductor
since childhood, he spent much of his career in Europe.
Here in New York, he has failed to register as a local
personality.
When people talk about a music director today who has
raised the profile of classical music in a city, the first
name (often the only name) mentioned is Michael Tilson
Thomas in San Francisco. Known by his initials, M.T.T. has
helped give the San Francisco Symphony its reputation as a
champion of contemporary music and American composers. He
has made his symphony hip. The New York Philharmonic
doesn't need to be hip, but it requires some institutional
personality. It is not getting a recognizable identity from
its maestro.
Maazel has been working hard on a score for an opera of
Orwell's ''1984,'' scheduled to open at Covent Garden in
London next May. He concedes that this distraction has
prevented him from doing much for the orchestra when he is
off the podium. ''I've been very low key so far in saying,
'This is the course of music over the next decade,''' he
acknowledges. ''I can do that with the best of them, and I
have. I think the season after next will show more of the
public side.'' Mehta deprecates the importance of having a
music director with an oversize metropolitan presence. ''I
think we make far too much about this
being-in-the-community aspect,'' he says. ''Masur lived
here and had a house here. Was he considered a New Yorker?
I think he will always be treated as a foreigner. Lorin
lives here; his kids go to school here. Is he out there
like Tilson Thomas? No.''
Now 74, Maazel was originally seen as an interim four-year
appointment. ''We looked at it as a transition, and it
evolved into more than that,'' Guenther says. The
Philharmonic never devoted much energy in the early years
to scouting for a successor, and by the late years, it was
too late. ''We had no choice but to renew Lorin Maazel,''
says William McDonough, a board member who heads the search
committee. ''The move to Carnegie Hall and a new music
director was not anything you wanted to put together. We
had to show some stability here.'' He says he believes that
after Maazel completes the 2008-9 season, the next music
director will be a relatively young conductor. ''What I am
hoping people will focus on is not, 'Ugh, Maazel again for
three years, and some of Muti,' but that we are willing to
name two other names,'' McDonough says. ''And I hope it
will read as, 'They are looking for the exciting names for
the future.'''
The Philharmonic is keeping its music director, but
anticipates replacing him with a thrilling young one at the
end of the decade. It is staying in its tired hall, but
intends, also at the end of the decade, to renovate
thoroughly. It is trying out visual and other technological
enhancements, but cautiously.
Progress? Measured. Excitement? Postponed.
Arthur Lubow is a contributing writer for the magazine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/magazine/27PHILHARMONIC.htm