West Coast’s Music Lessons Lost on N.Y., Philadelphia

The Great East Coast Music Director Sweepstakes is nearing an end. The Philadelphia Orchestra recently announced the appointment of Christoph Eschenbach, who takes over there in 2003. Monday, the New York Philharmonic settled on Lorin Maazel for a four-year term beginning in 2002. And James Levine is widely rumored to be the Boston Symphony’s choice, although a spokesperson for the orchestra says no decision has been made and no announcement is imminent.

The search at each of these venerable institutions has been long and difficult. The unprecedented situation of three major orchestras fishing from the same pool of conductors has meant a steady stream of embarrassing news leaks. So it should come as something of a relief that the Philadelphia and New York posts are filled.

Through most of the ‘90s, those orchestras have each been saddled to aging, competent, occasionally compelling but more frequently dull and Old World German taskmasters. Both Kurt Masur in New York and Wolfgang Sawallisch have maintained technical excellence in the ensembles they command, but they are not noted for their lively artistic vision.

The orchestras finally felt that new blood and new vitality was needed; neither renewed its conductor’s contract beyond the first two years of the new century. Indeed, there can be little question that New York and Philadelphia will be better off with their new music directors than they are now.

But, even so, the process that resulted in the selection of two distinguished conductors offers little encouragement about the leadership and vision of these important musical institutions. Worse, it creates some uneasy precedents for the musical world at large: Eschenbach and Maazel were both hired in a cold panic.

Philadelphia had once hoped to lure Simon Rattle to its top job. But Rattle, who has conducted the Philadelphians often and spectacularly, accepted an offer from the Berlin Philharmonic instead. Levine had recent success conducting the orchestra, and his name started to surface as a possibility. Other conductors in the running were Riccardo Chailly, the music director of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and two younger men--the underwhelming Roberto Abbado and the overwhelming David Robertson. But given that New York was checking out Eschenbach, and Boston had shown some interest in him as well, Philadelphia preempted the contest by persuading the German conductor to come to the City of Brotherly Love.

Eschenbach is a brilliant, dynamic musician; he has a broad range of musical and artistic interests and a with-it image. He worked wonders as music director of the Houston Symphony. A busy fellow, he now holds posts in Hamburg, Chicago and Paris. He could be just the high-energy jolt the sleepy Philadelphians need, the perfect conductor accouterment for a new Postmodern concert hall the orchestra will step into in December.

Then again, the players, audience and critics might respond to Eschenbach as they did five years ago, which was the last time he conducted in Philadelphia. Making a lukewarm impression, he did not return. Indeed, until recently he was so far off the orchestra’s radar screen that the management is now in the awkward position of trying to find a date next season for its next music director to actually appear in front of an ensemble that may not be too happy about being confronted with a boss it does not know.

Eschenbach will probably win over the musicians in time--the players in Houston were fanatically devoted to him--but the fact remains that a major orchestra is taking its future on an arranged marriage of two terrific partners who may or may not be compatible. And that sends a message to the larger classical music community that one of its noble institutions is struggling to define itself.

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The New York Philharmonic did get to sample Maazel, but just. His name hadn’t come up on the search committee’s radar screen, one suspects, in part because he’s too expensive. As music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, between 1988 and 1996, he negotiated the first million-dollar salary for a conductor in the U.S. The British press has reported his salary at the Bavarian Radio Orchestra in Munich, where he is currently employed, at $3.8 million, almost twice the top salary in the U.S. now (according to Forbes, Levine holds the record, getting $1.9 million at the Metropolitan Opera).

The two programs he led with the New York Philharmonic last fall were his first with the orchestra in 23 years, and after they were over he reportedly threw his hat in the music director ring. He had won the players over by telling them that they were too good to need a full rehearsal schedule. In a program of excerpts from Wagner’s “Ring,� the brass section was said to be deafening--a good way to lobby brass players is to let them blow their hearts out. And finally there is talk that he may have impressed the New York Philharmonic Board of Directors with the help of some well-timed photo ops with classical music’s most generous donor, Alberto Vilar.

A week before Maazel’s appointment, Vilar announced a $5-million gift toward a new conducting competition with his and Maazel’s name on it. Around the same time, Vilar underwrote a New York Philharmonic performance of Verdi’s Requiem next season. Vilar claims that his donation is unrelated to Maazel’s appointment. But Vilar and Maazel have been described as friends and business associates, and Vilar is known to support his friends. (Los Angeles Opera became a significant recipient of his largess once Placido Domingo, with whom he is also close, became artistic director of the company.)

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With next season announced as a gala farewell to Masur, the orchestra faced a looming deadline, along with increasing scrutiny from a critical local press, impatient with the seeming inability of the most visible orchestra in America to find a suitable candidate. Riccardo Muti turned the orchestra down last summer. Mariss Jansons, the Russian music director of the Baltimore Symphony, was liked by the players in the past, but at a specially arranged public tryout, he was less impressive. A few weeks later, it was Eschenbach’s turn. Word is that the orchestra didn’t particularly like him, but that he was still in the running until Philadelphia struck.

Then, two weeks ago, the Washington Post broke the story that the New York Philharmonic had made an agreement with Maazel. Zarin Mehta, the orchestra’s managing director, strenuously denied the report, emphasizing that he still had other conductors he wanted to consider, which hardly indicates a unanimous vote of confidence.

Just as in Philadelphia, the New Yorkers don’t really know their new music director. Two concerts in 23 years don’t constitute a history, and besides, the New York Philharmonic has a habit of falling in love with a conductor one year, and out of love the next, as it did with Jansons. Will Maazel, who is a superb technician but a willful interpreter, be next?

An even more unsettling aspect of Maazel’s hire, however, is his probable salary. He broke the U.S. million-dollar barrier; why not now $2 million?

Such a salary might not be a hardship for the New York Philharmonic, especially if Vilar’s checkbook is at the ready. But once the ante is raised, every other orchestra in the land will feel it at contract time. Would Levine go to Boston, which nearly everyone agrees would be a wonderful match, for less than Maazel gets in New York? Other conductors will also demand parity, and the orchestra world simply can’t afford it.

It didn’t have to be this way: the embarrassing frenzy, salary problems that rival sports leagues’, all the artistic question marks.

The West Coast, as it turns out, could have shown the East Coast the way, had it paid attention. With Esa-Pekka Salonen and Michael Tilson Thomas, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, respectively, managed to ally themselves with lively, future-oriented maestros. And they created stable, happy orchestras that now rival the best anywhere.

The difference is vision. In L.A. and San Francisco, the orchestras developed relationships with Salonen and Tilson Thomas, inviting them as guests year after year, long before deciding to hire them as music directors. Half a century ago, the New York Philharmonic carefully nurtured Leonard Bernstein as its assistant conductor before it hired him for the big job.

But this time around, neither New York nor Philadelphia had the foresight to do the same. Let’s hope now that their new music directors will supply the vision that the institutions lack. Eschenbach and Maazel have their work cut out for them.