Those of you with imperfect memories may not recall, word for word, the article I wrote for SFCV five years ago about the travails of the New York Philharmonic.
It was a screed, timed to precede two concerts by the orchestra at Davies Hall in May 2012, about dysfunction in all its many forms. The villains included clueless and timid boards of directors; the Mehtas (Zubin and Zarin); the ideological and personal clash in the 1990s between Kurt Masur and Deborah Borda, precipitating her departure for Los Angeles; the inadequacies of what was then called Avery Fisher Hall; the technical proficiency but artistic sterility of the Lorin Maazel years (2002–2009); and finally the interpretive facelessness of Alan Gilbert, with the arrival of Matthew VanBesien as the new executive director as a glimmer of hope on the horizon.
So now an update, which started out as a litany of further decline, approaching imminent collapse, that was then suddenly reversed not by a mere glimmer but by a shining beacon of hope.
Since 2012, the orchestra has been stumbling down its road of decline. Gilbert did program a few symbolic niceties at the end of seasons, usually out of the subscription packages and often out of Fisher, now David Geffen Hall. These included semistaged operas or forays into Eurocentric contemporary music, which he conducted stolidly but hardly compellingly. That description also applies to his handling of standard repertory: Gilbert is simply not an exciting conductor, no matter whether your taste runs to analytical precision or diffident sobriety or flashy specialties at the edge of the core repertory or postmodern experimentation.
Attendance continued its slide, although to be fair classical music in general, at least in New York (cf. the Metropolitan Opera), is not a hot ticket these days. The best conducting I heard from Gilbert was a Met Don Giovanni two years ago – at the very end of long run during which everything had settled nicely into place. (Maybe his future should be in opera, as was Zubin Mehta’s in Florence.) The Philharmonic’s financial travails resulted in a continual drawdown of its endowment.
Finally Gilbert announced his withdrawal to pursue freelance opportunities, we were told, followed in short order by VanBesien’s departure (forced out by the board, rumor has it) for the University of Michigan, followed by the resignation of several other key executives. Jaap van Zweden (with little international buzz) was announced as the new music director. VanBesien had not been the board’s first choice, and one wonders how many other conductors were approached before the choice settled on Van Zweden — shades of Riccardo Muti’s famous flouting of the Philharmonic in favor of Chicago. One even wonders, with no evidence, whether VanBesien’s departure was a result of the board’s courting of his eventual successor.
On top of all this, Lincoln Center itself was without a president for months. The center has only loose oversight of the often-fractious independent constituents, including the Philharmonic, but will be needed in the fund-raising push to renovate Geffen Hall. Long delayed, that renovation will need hundreds of millions of dollars, a steep climb — especially since Geffen himself gave $100 million yet got Fisher Hall renamed for himself “in perpetuity,” thus robbing Philharmonic and Lincoln Center fundraisers of that plum naming opportunity. By comparison, David H. Koch gave $100 million to rename the New York State Theater after himself, with a 50-year limit to his claim on the moniker. The Philharmonic will have to spend at least two seasons homeless during the reconstruction.
So things looked grimmer than grim as I contemplated this article. And then, lo, with trumpets blaring, Deborah Borda was announced as the new president and chief executive officer. Joseph W. Polisi of the Juilliard School was not the only Lincoln Center constituent head to have his expectations of the Philharmonic transformed. “I was very concerned,” he told The New York Times. “This certainly made me take a 180-degree turn.”
Anyone who follows orchestral politics in this country knows what Borda has accomplished in the sunny southland. She ushered the Los Angeles Philharmonic into Disney Hall. She chose the Dude to be her music director and helped propel him into international stardom. She raised money hand over fist — helped by the cash cow of the Hollywood Bowl. The New York Philharmonic has no comparable urban or rural summer home. She built up the endowment from $50 million to $276 million, balancing the annual budget every year (now $150 million, the largest in the country) and paying her musicians lavishly. And not incidentally, she helped make new music (the trendy, if you wish, or genuinely exciting postmodern variety, not Gilbert’s European-leaning modernism) an audience draw.
So why did she abandon all that for the quagmire that New York seems to promise? I’ve known her casually over the years, especially when I ran the Lincoln Center Festival and experienced the Masur-Borda clashes close up. But I have no special insights into her decision. Still, one can offer some educated guesses.
She has been in Los Angeles for 17 years, and maybe relishes the challenge of something new in the town where she was born, for a time raised, and later worked. She wants to close the circle on her early, aborted tenure running the New York Philharmonic. She is excited, not daunted, by the hurdles that others feared. Her longtime partner works at Lincoln Center (raising money for the Met Opera, which needs it as much as the Philharmonic). She was successfully wooed by Oscar S. Schafer, who looks like a positive force as chairman of the Philharmonic’s board, and by van Zweden, who — if Borda’s praise for him rings true, and isn’t just public relations boilerplate — instantly enhanced his own stature by allying himself with her. She was maybe offered even more in total annual compensation than the $1.75 million she’s getting in Los Angeles, though I suspect money was not the main factor in her decision. Whatever she’ll earn, it will be considerably more than what she once got as music administrator of the San Francisco Symphony.
So now we wait and see. Borda doesn’t officially start work here until Sept. 15. It will take two or three years for tangible progress in artistic policy and building renovation to manifest itself. “You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” quoth Rahm Emanuel. Deborah Borda now has her biggest challenge and biggest opportunity so far. For the sake of the New York Philharmonic, New York music lovers, and orchestral life in this country, one wishes her only the best.