When Esa-Pekka Salonen recently announced that he would step down as music director of the San Francisco Symphony next year, he didn't say it was to spend more time with his family. He told the truth.
In his statement, which Salonen circulated the same day the San Francisco Symphony unveiled its 2024-25 season, the orchestra's music director was blunt and said: “I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution.” than the Board of Directors.” The governors do.” It was because of that vision that a couple of days earlier, Salonen was announced along with Nile Rodgers as this year's winners of the Polar Music Prize, the annual Swedish award given to the most important and inventive musicians, in any field, of our days.
Salonen's vision and invention seemed to be precisely the reason San Francisco wanted him in the first place. No musician at his level has the potential to take advantage of Silicon Valley. When it comes to transformative technology, Salonen has long been a kid in an Apple candy store. Plus, if any great conductor could wrest millions of dollars of pocket change from arts-unfriendly tech companies, Salonen seemed like the one.
Signing Salonen in 2018 was a considerable coup. At age 60 he had become one of the most sought-after directors and composers. His 17-year tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic had shown the world the potential wonders available to a 21st-century orchestra. But Salonen had just emerged from a more daunting musical direction at the London Philharmonic Orchestra, where he had given fabulous concerts but didn't have the resources to pursue the kind of expansive projects he did in Los Angeles.
That was San Francisco's bait. “My ideas about an orchestra as an institution,” he told the New York Times in 2018, “my ideas about technology and music, my ideas about repertoire and how I would like to position the orchestra within the community, they just resonated.”
San Francisco clearly promised Salonen his wish list. That included creating a “think tank” of younger artists from many walks of musical and technological life: artificial intelligence and robotics entrepreneur Carol Reiley, composer Nico Muhly, avant-garde flutist Claire Chase, bassist jazz Esperanza Spalding, the film composer Nicholas Britell, the soprano Julia Bullock, the pop composer and guitarist Bryce Dessner and the unclassifiable Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto.
COVID-19 hit. There was no first Salonen season in San Francisco for 2020-21 aside from Muhly's imaginative “Throughline” online experiment. The orchestra closed and, like all orchestras, lost a lot of money. Additionally, the pandemic hit San Francisco harder than many other major cities, with the exodus of wealthy tech workers to any rural haven for remote work.
Still, Salonen remained one of the most resourceful directors during the lost season and bounced back in San Francisco with his vision intact and growing. He began major annual June operatic performances with Peter Sellars and a dazzling program at the orchestra's experimental SoundBox, the modern black venue attached to Davies Symphony Hall, which proved a hit with young concert-goers.
Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the San Francisco Symphony and soloists Michelle DeYoung and Gerald Finley in Béla Bartók's “Bluebeard's Castle” at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.
(Brandon Patoc)
There have been problems, some possibly exaggerated. Davies is not a great venue acoustically, but on my recent visit, Salonen conducted the most astonishing sonically rendition of Bartók's “Bluebeard's Castle” I have ever heard. I was warned that the nearby Civic Center BART station has become unsafe. I didn't find it unpleasant. In fact, the orchestra has reported an increase in attendance at Salonen concerts over pre-pandemic levels. The endowment has also grown. At $315 million, it is among the highest for any American orchestra. (The much larger LA Phil reported a $350 million donation a year ago.)
It doesn't matter, the board of directors and management are crying with sadness. Claiming that financial projections don't look good, the board has embarked on a series of cuts affecting SoundBox, eliminating creative partners, canceling international tours, reducing commissions, etc. The board now portrays the San Francisco Symphony as a survivor who has given up on an experimental treatment and needs a cautious caretaker.
Boards! We can't live with them and we certainly can't live without them. By its very nature, it is about money. They keep the institution running. They raise funds. When boards are great, they recognize artistic vision and make miracles happen. But that may take some time, because by their very nature, they operate by committee.
What has changed over the years is that many boards of directors have become increasingly corporate, increasingly powerful, and increasingly clueless. Salonen, without a doubt, thinks like an Angeleno. He was musical director of the LA Phil in 1999, when Deborah Borda was hired as its executive director. The orchestra was in millions of dollars in losses and Borda had a reputation for being fiscally tough.
Although this has become legendary in the world of orchestral leadership, it is obviously worth repeating. Borda welcomed Salonen's big ideas. He realized the tremendous promise of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, then under construction. He cut costs where it didn't matter, like selling the previous executive's pretentious antiques and furnishing his office with Ikea. Otherwise, he spent as if there was a real tomorrow, convincing the board of directors that the orchestra and the institution must have the resources to show the public what they could do if they were to prosper. The rest is history.
However, times are changing. The imperious and visionary director of the LA Phil, Ernest Fleischmann, who hired Salonen against the wisdom of some board members who doubted an inexperienced young conductor specializing in contemporary music, did what he wanted, to hell with the board . He also refused to bow to pressure from the Music Center board, the county Board of Supervisors, this newspaper, LA Phil subscribers and the public when the Disney Hall fundraiser failed and the whole thing looked like some kind of avant-garde project. useless Pollyanna of a vain architect. The rest – here we go again – is history.
The important question is whether that kind of resistance is possible against today's powerful modern boards. San Francisco's board is reportedly contemplating a re-signing of Davies to the tune of up to $250 million. Salonen's much more radical and less expensive goal had been to implement Gehry's proposal to transform two old warehouses on Treasure Island into indoor and outdoor concert halls, with acoustics by Yasuhisa Toyota. That could have led to Treasure Island becoming an artistic island, not to mention the treasure the board could then collect from Silicon Valley tastemakers.
The fact that Salonen denounced the lack of knowledge of the San Francisco Symphony is a wake-up call not only for the future of orchestras but of all American arts institutions, including his former orchestra here in Los Angeles. Boards of directors tend to be made up of highly successful people who are not always in the habit of listening to others, especially those who want to risk their money.
Indeed, much of the LA Phil's success can be attributed to farsighted, even utopian, artistic and administrative leaders. But in a strange and worryingly unprecedented turn of events, the LA Phil board of directors is searching for an executive director and music director, with little transparency about the process.
We may want to remember that each LA Phil music director has been selected not by committees or boards of directors, but by autocratic executive directors who have a kind of knowledge that the board (or even the orchestra itself) does not have. Fleischmann brought us Salonen. Borda persecuted Gustavo Dudamel. Dorothy Chandler took a big risk with Zubin Mehta. William Andrews Clark in the 1930s caught Otto Klemperer. None of them would have passed the test of a committee.
The LA Phil board of directors will surely interview potential executive directors without wanting to know who they would want as music director. That's assuming, of course, that the board doesn't decide to find its own musical director. At least we have history on our side.
In another curious turn of events, Salonen is scheduled to bring his orchestra to Disney Hall on Friday night to perform John Adams' magnificent symphony “Naïve and Sentimental Music.” It was commissioned by the LA Phil, and Salonen conducted the premiere in 1999, at the acoustically challenged Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I hope the San Francisco board members come to Los Angeles to hear what his orchestra sounds like in a Toyota room and see how valuable touring can be. When LA Phil board members heard Salonen conduct Stravinsky on a tour of Paris in 1996, they suddenly came together to build Disney.
Unless the San Francisco Symphony somehow convinces Salonen to stay, something the musicians are pushing for, the board has one good option and one only. Find another director with big ideas, probably someone young and exciting. Make the same promises he made to Salonen. And save them.
