[Dixielandjazz] The continuing saga of Marin Alsop

[Steve barbone]

CAVEAT: Following article is Off Topic for many, Long, etc., so read or
delete as your mood strikes. On the positive side, it contains much wisdom
about the BUSINESS of music which can (and should IMO) be applied to OKOM.

E.G. Building audiences; Leading an orchestra (or band); Differentiating
your music from that of your competitors; Making Art Pay; Dealing with the
negativity of musicians who were themselves a part of a failing enterprise;
Succeeding on your own personal terms;

It is easy, for some musicians, to dislike MS. Alsop. However, IMO, she is
the epitome of gutsy success.

Cheers,
Steve 

Best Wishes on Your Job. Now Get Out.

By DANIEL J. WAKIN - October 9, 2005 - NY Times

HER cues were continual and precise, signaled by the circle of a thumb and
forefinger in her left hand and a quick widening of her creased eyes. Her
baton arm beat high and crisply from the shoulder. She dispensed brisk
compliments and one-liners.

"Were we rushing?" a violist asked. "I'd say that's generally an important
ingredient here," the conductor, Marin Alsop, replied dryly during a recent
rehearsal of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at the Woodruff Arts Center.

To sit amid an orchestra facing Ms. Alsop as she conducts is not to see and
hear a woman or a figure of controversy but to see and hear, simply, a
confident conductor who radiates authority.

It is off the stage that the labels begin: pioneer (she is the first female
music director of a major American orchestra); protégée (she is a disciple
of Leonard Bernstein); great communicator (she is a master speaker from the
stage and charming with donors); and most recently "genius" (she is a
recipient of a 2005 MacArthur Fellowship).

How about unwanted boss?

Ms. Alsop, who will conduct subscription concerts at the New York
Philharmonic beginning on Friday, is used to bearing the mantle of being a
woman in one of the most male-dominated of professions: conducting.

With the announcement in July that she was to become music director of the
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007, after having been seriously considered
for top jobs at the Ravinia Festival and the Atlanta Symphony, she
unquestionably became the nation's best-known and most accomplished female
conductor. 

But the costs were high.

In a public outcry of a kind that is rare in the field, the Baltimore
musicians made it known that they wanted no part of Ms. Alsop. Their wishes
had been ignored in the search process, they said, and they also questioned
her musical depth, presumably on the basis of her seven guest appearances
with the orchestra.

A letter to the board chairman from a board member who opposed Ms. Alsop
said the players had found that she had "not produced inspired and nuanced
performances of standard classical repertory," The Washington Post reported.
The players cited " 'dull,' even 'substandard,' performances" the letter
said, adding that Ms. Alsop "does not hear problems" or ignores them, and
that she had shown a "lack of depth as a musician."

Ms. Alsop did not immediately respond to the concerns, but a few days later,
when the appointment was formally announced, she met with reporters and said
she was putting the matter behind her. It was "nothing personal," she said.

Late last month at a hotel lounge here, accompanied by a mist of banal tunes
from a cocktail pianist, Ms. Alsop spoke candidly about the stress the
rejection had generated, and described her plan to win over the musicians
and audiences. Wearing a red brocaded silk top and casual black pants, she
spoke in matter-of-fact, cogent sentences, often pausing to think before
responding, and with moments of deadpan humor.

"It was a very trying and stressful experience in many ways," she said. "To
be perfectly honest, my initial reaction, when it all started, was to run:
'Gosh, who needs this?' "

She described a candid private meeting with the whole orchestra at Meyerhoff
Symphony Hall, the orchestra's home, before she appeared at a news
conference on July 20. She wanted to look the musicians in the eye, she
said, before signing the contract. She told the players she needed to get
over her own hard feelings.

"Obviously, you do, too, and we need to meet in the middle," she said she
told them. By her account, she made it clear to them that she had already
been hesitating about taking the job, given the orchestra's large debt and
poor attendance. At the same time, she praised the players as part of a
gifted and deeply musical orchestra.

"I also told them that I didn't think they knew who I was," she said. She
suspects that the musicians may have had the impression that she was a
lightweight, because she sometimes turns around and speaks directly to the
audience from the podium and she has conducted programs of less serious
works in Baltimore.

When asked to respond to the criticisms in the board member's letter, Ms.
Alsop took the high road. "There's really no response," she said.
"Everybody's entitled to their opinion," she added, saying she always hoped
to grow as an artist. But she could not resist a tiny zinger: "I'm sure the
board member has tremendous musical knowledge."

"Listen, being music director is not a popularity contest," she said. "It's
nice to be beloved, but highly unusual. My main goal is to make great
music."

The orchestra committee responded with a public statement saying the
musicians were ready to work with her.

Among the reasons the Baltimore Symphony went to Ms. Alsop were her
reputation as an audience builder and what it described as her star quality.
And her appointment had immediate results. To begin with, the flap itself
became big news. Rarely has an American orchestra's name been so frequently
mentioned in the news media.

On a more practical level, Baltimore now has a chance to make recordings
after a long drought. Naxos, Ms. Alsop's label, is planning to record her
and the orchestra playing the late Dvorak symphonies, said Klaus Heymann,
the Naxos founder and chairman. And a European tour is on the table.

Ms. Alsop said her goals were to find ways to connect with the community and
put more people in Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, where the orchestra draws about
60 percent of capacity on average. In contrast, attendance is booming at the
orchestra's recently opened hall at the Music Center at Strathmore in North
Bethesda, Md. 

She said she was thinking of a free concert at the beginning of the season,
a "meet and greet event" for audiences, with snippets of coming programs.
She wants more collaboration with local arts organizations. She also wants
to find a way to make the orchestra's summer season more inviting and a way
to differentiate the orchestra from its neighbors, the illustrious
Philadelphia Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington.

One way is through programming. She said she would bring in her highly
successful gospel-jazz adaptation of Handel's "Messiah" and is planning a
multimedia performance of music by Philip Glass, a Baltimore native whose
music has rarely been played by the orchestra.

At 48, Ms. Alsop arrives at this destination after 10 years as music
director of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and stints at the Eugene
Symphony in Oregon and the Long Island Philharmonic. She directs the
midlevel Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in England, has released a slew of
recordings and appears as guest conductor at many major orchestras.

Yet she refuses to pass judgment on her own career or to acknowledge that
she hopes one day to take over one of the Big Five orchestras.

"I don't really indulge in that kind of assessment or really ever think
about where it is I've ended up or want to be," she said. "For me, success
is all about fulfillment. To me, building an orchestra, building a
relationship with a community that feels like it values my contribution -
that to me feels like success."

She is accomplished not just at music but also at drawing audiences,
charming donors and understanding the orchestra business, all vital parts of
the music director's job. And reviews have been positive. Richard Dyer of
The Boston Globe said her appearance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at
Tanglewood in August offered "honest, heartfelt and exciting music-making."
It was a resonant moment: in 1988 and 1989 she was a Tanglewood conducting
fellow under the tutelage of her hero, Bernstein.

Ms. Alsop is often praised for her sense of pacing and architecture and for
her ability to hold together difficult contemporary scores. But there is a
lingering strain of criticism about the depth of her music-making. The
critic of The Baltimore Sun, Tim Smith, who has followed her performances
there, was lukewarm in the summer, writing that her concerts "offered a mix
of strongly defined and not-quite-distinctive interpretations."

Joshua MacCluer, who played principal trumpet under her for two years in
Colorado and is now in the St. Louis Symphony, said, "She's not a real
inspirational musician, if you ask me." But he praised her conducting
abilities.

Mr. Heymann of Naxos, the figure behind her recording career, did not go
beyond calling her music-making "healthy and sound," but he added, "Being a
really good, sound musician is the best thing you can say about any
musician." 

Ms. Alsop, a daughter of musicians, grew up in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., where her
family moved when she was 5. She dropped out of Yale after two years and
transferred to the Juilliard School to study violin. Juilliard rejected her
from its conducting program, she said, so she studied conducting privately
and formed Concordia, a chamber orchestra, to hone her craft. The Bernstein
family backed her, even sponsoring fund-raisers.

Her big-time-orchestra laboratory was the Colorado Symphony, which she led
from 1993 to 2003. (She is now conductor emeritus.) It was a considerable
challenge: the orchestra had just emerged from bankruptcy when she arrived.
Compounding the difficulty, a committee of musicians held much of the power
music directors normally have.

During her tenure, the budget grew and the quality of the orchestra
improved. She also helped attract loyal donors, the pillars of any American
symphony. 

"She's absolutely dynamic," said Douglas W. Adams, the orchestra's
president. "She's a nonstop idea factory, on all kinds of things, which is
sometimes a challenge for the staff to keep up with her." But she
occasionally failed to follow through with some of those ideas, he added.

It is not unusual for musicians to gripe about their music director,
particularly after a long marriage. Some of the Colorado players say that
Ms. Alsop did not handle the musicians with delicacy and that she singled
some out for criticism unfairly. "If there's a little crack on something,
she can see it and respond to it, and I'm not sure that's the best thing to
do," said Pamela Endsley, the Colorado Symphony's principal flutist and a
39-year veteran of the orchestra with whom Ms. Alsop has jousted in the
past.

Ms. Endsley added that Ms. Alsop's position with the orchestra was
complicated by her personal relationship with one of its members, which Ms.
Endsley said had inhibited open discussion at players' meetings and created
the appearance of favoritism, although for others in the orchestra there was
no issue. Patrick Tillery, the associate principal trumpet player, said,
"Sure, there's going to be friction." he added, "It's only natural." Ms.
Alsop said the relationship had predated her appointment and had no bearing
on how she performed her job. She scoffed at the suggestion of favoritism,
and Mr. Adams said he had never heard any complaints. But when musicians in
Baltimore called around to find out about their new boss, they received some
negative comments from the musicians.

Ms. Alsop acknowledged that she had made mistakes early in her tenure in
Colorado, but said that she had learned lessons - something the players
agree with.

"When I was younger, I didn't understand the value of positive
reinforcement," she said. "I had to refocus things, because I realized that
by expressing pleasure with things people were doing - it was really an
important dimension." She added that dissatisfaction with her own
performance might at times have been perceived by the players as criticism.

Then there was the Ping-Pong table incident.

Early in Ms. Alsop's tenure, Mr. MacCluer, the trumpeter, installed a table
downstairs for the brass players. She called him in, ordered the table
removed and told him to sit up straight in rehearsal. He told her the table
had actually helped smooth out some personality differences.

"I listened to him and thought, maybe he has a point," she said. She
relented, and even entered a Ping-Pong tournament, losing the first match.

"But it was close," she said. "I didn't get a rematch."

Ms. Alsop enjoys broad popularity in Britain. She was voted artist of the
year in 2003 by the readers of Gramophone magazine.

"People see her as a really good thing, not just because she's a woman in a
man's world, but because she's very bright and very funny," said Richard
Morrison, the chief music critic of The Times of London. "British musicians
like that humor."

She is well liked by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, with which she is
recording the Brahms symphonies, and by the London Symphony Orchestra.
London players are not known for tolerating conductors they do not like, Mr.
Morrison said.

"Over here, people are absolutely amazed at the fuss they made in
Baltimore," he added. "If they have a question about musicianship, the
Baltimore players either have a very elevated sense of their self-importance
or haven't worked with her enough."

Ms. Alsop has given much thought to the issue of gender and conducting. She
has shaped her style to avoid being seen as too feminine. She trained
herself, for instance, to look squarely at the brass players when calling
for a big outburst; she said she had previously tended to "apologize" by
looking away. 

She coaches female conductors in ways a man could not, pointing out, for
example, that if a man holds the baton with outstretched pinkie, it can look
sensitive; if a woman does so, some may see it as frilly.

But what interests Ms. Alsop more is talking about the music she is
conducting, this week including Brahms's First Symphony.

"Pulse is the No. 1 thing I think about," she said. In the opening of the
Brahms First, with its insistent timpani beats, she matches the pulse to
that of her body at rest. "If you're excited or had a coffee, you're in big
trouble," she said.

Betraying the influence of Bernstein, a master teller of stories, Ms. Alsop
said every piece of music has an internal story of its in own. In the case
of the Brahms, it is the composer's long-delayed effort to write a symphony
in the shadow of Beethoven.

" 'Here I am,' " Brahms is declaring, Ms. Alsop said. " 'I'm not afraid. It
has been a struggle.' That's what I hear in the chromatic string writing and
wind writing. It's his journey to not only make his presence known but to
make an overt tribute to Beethoven."

When it was suggested that Brahms's declaration could apply to her career,
Ms. Alsop seemed taken aback. But she acknowledged the possibility with a
caveat. "Don't make me sound pompous!" she said.