Photos by Kristen Loken
On Monday, his 75th birthday, Zarin Mehta was named co-executive director of Sonoma's Donald and Maureen Green Music Center, an appointment announced two days later.
Bombai-born Mehta, brother of the conductor Zubin Mehta, switched from a career as chartered accountant in Montreal to a distinguished three-decade long run as a major music executive, culminating in a 12-year tenure as president of the New York Philharmonic.
Previously, he served as managing director of the Montreal Symphony (1981-1990), CEO of the Ravinia Festival (1990-2000), and started his New York position in 2000 as executive director, becoming president four years later.
Announcement of Mehta's appointment also included news of two additional performance venues — in addition to the main Joan and Sanford I. Weill Hall — the 250-seat Schroeder Hall, featuring a Brombaugh tracker organ, expected to open in 2014, and the MasterCard Performing Arts Pavilion, an open-air space, scheduled to be completed in 2015.
Mehta, says the announcement, "will build and further develop public and young people’s educational programs and partnerships, including ongoing work with The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall in New York." He will also oversee the year-round MasterCard Performance Series, an international program of orchestras, ensembles, and artists, including San Francisco Symphony and Santa Rosa Symphony presentations.
Indicating the Mehta announcement's importance, news of the Sonoma appointment came jointly from the Center's own associate director of communications, Jessica Anderson, and two public relations firms, Eric Latzky Culture | Communications of New York, and the local Shirk Media of former S.F. Symphony Director of Public Relations Jean Shirk.
Robin Pogrebin's article in The New York Times called Mehta's position "executive director, [a title] which he will share with Larry Furukawa-Schlereth, the university’s chief financial officer."
Until recently, Furukawa-Schlereth shared responsibility for the "artistic vision" now attributed to Mehta, with Artistic Director Emmanuel Morlet, who left the Center a few weeks ago without an announcement.
Pogrebin's account establishes the background of the appointment and poses questions:
When Sanford I. Weill bought a 360-acre estate in California wine country three years ago, the area had plenty of attractions — gourmet cuisine, fine hotels, a beautiful climate — everything but a major concert hall for the culturally inclined Mr. Weill. Fund-raising problems and the economic downturn had stalled the completion of the nearby Green Music Center’s auditorium at Sonoma State University.So in 2011, Mr. Weill, the former Citigroup chief executive and longtime chairman of Carnegie Hall, and his wife, Joan, donated $12 million to finish the hall, and Mr. Weill became chairman of the center. Now he is bringing in his own man to run it, putting up the money to hire Zarin Mehta, the former president of the New York Philharmonic.
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The Weills will pay 80 percent of Mr. Mehta’s $300,000 annual salary to the university, which will cover the rest — an unconventional arrangement for an arts organization. What’s also unusual is that Mr. Mehta does not plan to move to California.
These and other factors raise questions about just how the whole thing is actually going to work. It’s unclear whether Mr. Mehta can run the center from afar; whether the center’s current operating budget of about $9 million will continue to cover the cost of top-tier talent (the Philharmonic’s budget is $72 million by comparison); and whether Mr. Zarin and Mr. Furukawa-Schlereth will comfortably share power.
Among those following Mehta's administration in New York closely, there is acknowledgment of a "perfectly competent" performance in a very challenging position; allowing that the state of the economy is partially responsible for the dropping of the orchestra's endowment from $212 million to $170 million during the past decade; and general praise for Mehta's championing of music director Alan Gilbert, a relatively young (46) American (and New Yorker) in a position often occupied in the past by elderly Europeans. (Zubin Mehta, 1978-1991, being an exception since the long-ago days of Leonard Bernstein.)
About Zarin Mehta being "Weill's own man," the picture is not entirely clear. Weill was chairman of Carnegie Hall when he and Mehta (along with Philharmonic board chair Paul B. Guenther) were all supporting the plan to have the Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall merge, but the deal fell through in a sudden, dramatic fashion. As a decade ago, the inside story is still not known.