sgusers4的部落格

Source: The Santa Fe New MexicanSept.新蒲崗迷你倉 06--When the calendar for the 30th-anniversary season of the Santa Fe Symphony and Chorus was released a few months back, something looked amiss. It wasn't the lineup of events, since in its general contours the 2013-2014 season raises no eyebrows: 10 concerts from September through May, all but one of them on Sunday afternoon at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, plus another presentation in the Voyages of Discovery series the symphony gives in conjunction with the Santa Fe Institute. What looked strange was that the group's long-time music director, Steven Smith, would occupy the podium for only two of those concerts, with the rest of the season mostly divvied up among a handful of young conductors who are little known to the general public but who figure on the "names to watch" list of orchestra managements. It looked like an audition year.And that's exactly what it is. Gregory W. Heltman, the orchestra's founder and general director, confirmed to Pasatiempo that Smith's tenure "ended at the end of the most recent season." The parting of ways, he said, was unremarkable: "There's no scandal or anything like that. He had been our music director for 14 seasons, which is an extraordinary tenure; most music directors stay in their positions from five to seven years. This has been a positive artistic collaboration over a decade and a half. He serves as the full-time music director of the Richmond [Virginia] Symphony and of the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, and that created time constraints. This is an opportunity for him to spend the time he needed for those groups."Those facts are true, at least so far as they concern Smith's resume. He began his post in Santa Fe with the 1999-2000 season, at which time he was also working as assistant conductor at the Cleveland Orchestra. His affiliation with the Richmond Symphony dates to April 2010, and his contract there runs through the 2015-2016 season. The Richmond Symphony's website shows that he will conduct 16 performances there during the current season. The Cleveland Chamber Symphony, which he has directed since 2005, offers free concerts of contemporary music. The group has been limping along lately, apparently giving one concert in each of the past two seasons, and it currently is without a home concert hall. "I keep joking that our motto should be, 'We're not dead yet,'" Smith told Donald Rosenberg of Cleveland's The Plain Dealer in June. In the same interview, he expressed hope that the group might present a 10-day modern-music festival at various locations in northern Ohio in late March and early April 2014, although funding had yet to be located.The most unusual thing about Smith's departure from Santa Fe is the gradualness of its rollout. Even being gone, he's not gone. The symphony's website still lists him as the group's conductor, and, in fact, he'll be back in the capacity of guest conductor on Sept. 29 to lead Mozart's Don Giovanni Overture, Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 (with concertmaster David Felberg as soloist), and Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 -- and then he'll come back again on April 13 for Mahler's Symphony No. 7. That final concert (which looks as if it might fall at about the same time as the festival he's dreaming about in Ohio) seems an act of programming pluck of the sort that was largely lacking from Smith's tenure. Of Mahler's nine completed symphonies, the Seventh probably qualifies as the one the general public has embraced the least, for no good reason. I recall Smith expressing serious apprehension two seasons back when he was preparing to conduct in Santa Fe the Second Symphony of Sibelius -- one of the most familiar works in the symphonic repertoire. "We have talked about doing it for some time," he said, "but we have concerns that it may be out of the mainstream for some people." The step from Sibelius' beloved Second (first played in 1902) to Mahler's Seventh (premiered just six years later) is substantial, and one regrets that Smith is waiting until his final engagement to depart from the symphony's devotion to the ultrafamiliar.The Santa Fe Symphony's playlists have not lain entirely within the music director's purview. "Repertoire and programming were never solely his vision," Heltman explained. "They are the responsibility of a programming committee that consisted of seven musicians from the orchestra, me, Steven, the choral director, and two ex-officio members from the board who were supposed to provide the attendees' point of view. I'd get the calendar together, we'd have a broad sense of the budget we had to work with, and we'd kick around ideas and come to a consensus about whether to include something more experimental or unusual." He pointed out that the organization's whole concept of governance is not that of traditional symphony orchestras in which a music director exerts top-down control but instead approximates the more democratic model of such groups as the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra or New York's Orpheus, in which the musicians call most of the shots when it comes to personnel and repertoire.That will extend to the selection of Smith's successor -- who, it seems, will hold the title "principal conductor" rather than "music director," a change in designation that realistically implies the limited power the person will have in forming the group's artistic profile. "The principal conductor will have a strong voice," Heltman said, "not the final arbiter, but a leader of assuring artistic growth and excellence going forward." The selection of this leader will lie largely in the hands of the players, and the process could lead in several directions. "It may be that we find a candidate who is so multidimensional they can lead the various kinds of music we may present, but we're open to the possibility of doing things another way," Heltman said. For example, the group may select one person as principal conductor for the main symphonic programs, while also entering into official relationships with other conductors for pops programming and chorus-and-orchestra repertoire.The process will extend across multiple seasons. "After each is finished rehearsing and conducting their program," Heltman said, "they will be evaluated by the orchestra. If somebody comes out with a strong majority, they'll be invited back for a second appearance in a different sort of repertoire. After the second appearance, those finalists will have another evaluation from the orchestra. The entire process will take two or perhaps three seasons. The last time we went through this process, it took three seasons before we came around to Steven."Of this season's conductors, Smith is obviously not auditioning. Neither (Heltman suggested) is the orchestra's concertmaster Felberg, who on Nov. 2 leads the Vomini storageages of Discovery program postponed from last season, which is supposed to underscore the connection between music and mathematics. Tom Hall, director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society since 1982, seems odd man out in the lineup. Considerably more senior than the others, his work is well known to the organization; he has appeared here in the past leading the group's annual performance of Handel's Messiah, which he will do again on Nov. 24. He returns on May 17 and 18 to lead Brahms' Tragic Overture and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He is officially listed as a candidate, but one imagines that the symphony is eyeing him more as an ancillary conductor for choral repertoire.That leaves Benjamin Rous, Joseph Young, James Feddeck, Robert Trevino, and Case Scaglione, all of whom are definitely in the running. Rous opens the season on Sunday, Sept. 8, at the Lensic. This is the symphony's annual Showcase of the Stars event, which is designed to bring in soloists you might possibly have heard of. In terms of repertoire, this year's go-round is duller than dishwater: Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 (featuring Vadym Kholodenko, the most recent laureate of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition), and popular morsels by Saint-Sa螚s and Sarasate (played by violinist Chee-Yun). Rous, whose background includes work as a violinist in historically informed performance while an undergraduate at Harvard, is currently associate conductor of the Virginia Symphony and prior to that was assistant conductor of the Phoenix Symphony.Young will lead a Christmas pops program on Dec. 15: again, hardly a test for serious technical fettle, but sometimes conductors get assigned to a certain repertoire niche not because they are essentially suited to it but rather because that's where they're getting the offers. A product of the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University, he went on to all the right conducting master classes and spent stints as assistant conductor for the Buffalo Symphony and resident conductor of the Phoenix Symphony.Feddeck takes on a more formidable challenge on Jan. 19: Mozart's pleasant little motet Exsultate, jubilate, but then Bruckner's massive Symphony No. 4 -- again, a piece we hardly expect to hear from the Santa Fe Symphony, a masterwork that will rise or fall on the conductor's ability to infuse it with logic and not let the orchestra wrest away the reins. Feddeck has just ended a term as assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, and in May he was honored with the Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award, a biennial prize awarded by the Solti Foundation U.S.The previous recipient was Scaglione, who is now assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He'll be here on March 23 to lead Borodin's Polovtsian Dances (with the Symphony Chorus assisting), Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 (with soloist Clara-Jumi Kang, winner of the Indianapolis Violin Competition), and Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2.In between Feddeck and Scaglione comes Trevino, associate conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, who has some experience in opera as well as in orchestral music; his program on Feb. 16 will include two pieces that have to do with Abraham Lincoln -- Copland's Lincoln Portrait (with N. Scott Momady narrating) and a suite of John Williams' music for the recent Spielberg film as well as a work by George Walker and Dvorak's Symphony From the New World.All of these contenders hold, or have held, positions as assistant, associate, or resident conductors at various orchestras. This is a standard step in the careers of developing conductors. People who hold these positions -- the titles are generally interchangeable, depending on the hiring organization -- typically conduct youth orchestras, oversee community events, serve as cover conductors (presumably prepared to fill in for a scheduled maestro at moment's notice), and may sometimes get an occasional scheduled date in the orchestra's subscription concerts. These candidates were all invited to Santa Fe thanks to personal recommendations. "If we had sent out an open announcement that we were looking for a conductor," Heltman said, "we would have gotten 500 or 600 applications. Instead, we sought input from people whose opinions we trust -- a musicians' grapevine across the country -- and drew up a list of perhaps 30 or 40 candidates. When you're talking about conductors, their resume can be impressive, but the chemistry may or may not be there. Word of mouth maybe helped provide some indication in advance. Then, of course, it was also to some degree a question of whose availabilities lined up with our schedule."Also on the shortlist are a few names we will probably see in the 2014-2015 season. David Danzmayr is just now beginning as music director of the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus following three years as assistant conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Alondra de la Parra, currently director of the Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra, made her mark through the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas, which she founded when she was 23; it did not survive the economic downturn but attracted a good deal of interest prior to its demise in 2011. Michael Butterman is music director of the Boulder Philharmonic and the Shreveport Symphony as well as resident conductor for the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, but Heltman fears that another appointment he is poised to assume may render him unavailable. (We know he's in the running for the Charleston Symphony's music director position.) The Santa Fe Symphony also lists as a candidate Oriol Sans, who led the ensemble as a guest conductor this past April; one assumes that the appropriate Santa Feans will make the trip south when he appears in Albuquerque conducting the New Mexico Philharmonic on Nov. 16.This is a moment of tremendous opportunity for the Santa Fe Symphony and Chorus. Its musical apparatus is ripe to be shaken up, and the roster of conductors it is trying out is filled with potential. The trick, of course, will be for the orchestra's musicians to be open to a talented young conductor whose own desire to invigorate may surpass their own -- and for that conductor to be willing to settle for a position that falls short of a true music directorship.details--Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra; Benjamin Rous conducts music by Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Saint-Sa螚s & Sarasate with pianist Vadym Kholodenko & violinist Chee-Yun (3 p.m. talk free to ticketholders)--4 p.m. Sunday, Sep. 8--Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.--$22-$76; 988-1234, .ticketssantafe.orgCopyright: ___ (c)2013 The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) Visit The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) at .santafenewmexican.com Distributed by MCT Information Servicesself storage