No One's Fault, But Everyone's Problem

Sorry for the light blogging this week - it's been a very busy time at work, both on and off stage, and I haven't had much of a chance to sit down and collect my thoughts. But as I was browsing through various gloom-and-doom reports from the limited corner of the press that still bothers to cover orchestras, I was struck by how different the perspective of an observer can be from the perspective of those of us who work in the music business, and how the observer's perspective is frequently the only one that gets reported and therefore sets the public tone for the organization that's being reported on. (I suspect that the people who work for AIG could tell you a thing or two about this.)

Just for instance, I keep pretty close track of press coverage of the Philadelphia Orchestra, partly because it's the orchestra I grew up listening to and I studied with three of its musicians as a teenager, partly because I have a number of friends who play in it currently, and partly because the Philadelphia Inquirer is one of the few US papers left to still employ full-time arts writers assigned to a specific beat like the orchestra. Now, at the moment, the PhilOrch is in a tough spot - they're between music directors, between CEOs, only just appointed a new board president, and they're being walloped with the same fiscal two-by-four that everyone else in the industry is feeling.

The music director issue is a tricky one, because Philly's search for a new chief conductor has now dragged on for long enough that everyone is getting somewhat antsy about it, and even though the orchestra has placed famed Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit in a temporary leadership position, the lack of a permanent leader is becoming distracting. And in recent months, the music critic at the Inquirer has begun openly campaigning for one specific conductor to be given the job, even going so far as to say that "the search is over," and that it's only a matter of time before the orchestra realizes it.

But here's the thing: the orchestra, while it had high hopes for the critic's anointed winner, wasn't actually terribly impressed with his work on the podium as a guest conductor. (No, I'm not guessing about this, just in case you're wondering.) But the newspaper keeps putting his name on the top of the search list, so there he stays, the frontrunner. And it's not the first time this has happened in Philly, either - another of the critic's favorite guest conductors was said (by the critic) to be a strong candidate for the top job, and again, it was a conductor who the orchestra found eminently forgettable. And while a music director is hired by the board of directors, not by a vote of the musicians, no savvy board would ever consider the self-defeating proposition of hiring an artistic leader the musicians had no interest in following.

So what is the critic's role in this situation? I don't mean to imply that the Inquirer critic (whose writing I quite like) is behaving badly here, although I know that many members of the orchestra believe he is. He's in an impossible situation: major orchestras treat music director searches the way the federal government treats missile launch codes, and the press is given zero indication of what anyone inside the organization thinks about any given candidate. For that matter, most orchestras won't even acknowledge that a given conductor is a candidate when asked directly. So what can the poor beat writer do other than speculate?

The problem is that the speculation almost always turns out to be wrong. Back in 2002, the Star Tribune published more than a few articles in which it was strongly implied that conductors Yakov Kreizberg and Roberto Abbado were the frontrunners to succeed Eiji Oue as our music director. This, I'm guessing, was based on the fact that at the time, both gentlemen were guest conducting us fairly regularly, which is not generally an indication of anything. Meanwhile, Osmo Vänskä's first appearance with us, while it garnered good reviews, passed without any real notice in the press regarding whether he might or might not be a candidate, which is stunning to me. My mother happened to be in town for that first Osmo concert, and I distinctly remember saying to her as soon as it was over, "No one's saying anything outright, but I think you might have just seen our next music director." I have it on good authority that members of our board who were in attendance that night also felt an immediate spark between conductor and orchestra, so clearly, you didn't have to be on stage to know that something was up.

I don't really have a larger point to make here, and I don't mean to imply that music critics are lacking perspective or integrity. Most of them are knowledgeable people and good writers trying very hard to cover an industry that resists serious journalism the way oil resists water. But as I read story after story detailing the various troubles that arts groups are finding themselves in at the moment, I find myself constantly wondering which of the details presented as fact are actually correct, and which are the ones that are lacking a key bit of context, framing an issue incorrectly, or are just flatly inaccurate. And then I wonder what the consequences of those inaccuracies will turn out to be. Scary thought...