Esa-Pekka Salonen slams the door of the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is looking for a musical director, James Conlon leaves the Los Angeles Opera…
The news stunned the musical world on Tuesday March 12: Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen will leave the San Francisco Symphony at the end of the 2024-2025 season. The alliance of this orchestra, including Michael Tilson Thomas, suffering from glioblastoma multiforme (brain cancer) had to abandon the direction, and of this visionary conductor and composer had seemed sealed in concrete in the long term. But even in San Francisco apparently, we have financial constraints, and money from Silicon Valley only minimally infuses this part of the culture.
Two visions
There is nothing musical about the divorce between Salonen and San Francisco, and the musicians are dismayed. In the ménage à trois formed by the presidency of the board of directors, the general management and the musical director, as Madeleine Careau, president and general director of the OSM explained to us during a recent interview, conductor and CEO are on an equal footing. It is therefore the council which decides between the ambitions of some and the constraints put forward by others.
“The board of directors and I do not share the same goals on the future of the institution” declared Esa-Pekka Salonen at San Francisco Chronicle. Board President Priscilla Geeslin did not comment. CEO Matthew Spivey noted that “financial pressures have become impossible to ignore.”
Such hiatuses between the cost of the artistic ambitions of some and the ballast more or less dropped by others are the basics of musical life. They sometimes lead to resounding divorces like this one or, formerly in France, like that between the City of Bordeaux and the conductor Alain Lombard who had raised the city’s orchestra to an exceptional level without spending too much money. Most often, they are resolved in good agreement. When Kent Nagano, then director of the Bavarian Opera, programmed the tetralogy on Ring of Wagner, he wanted to rehearse the four operas in concert versions beforehand. It will have escaped no one’s notice that the costly experiment had stopped, in Montreal, at the first Rhine gold (Nagano had been welcomed, among other places, in Moscow and Bergen to complete it).
Dominoes
The San Francisco post is not the only one to become available. Gustavo Dudamel will leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the end of the 2025-2026 season to take over as director of the New York Philharmonic. Los Angeles is looking for a new headliner, ideally a female chef, who could extend the buzz that the mandate of his Venezuelan icon earned him. Also in Los Angeles, James Conlon announced at the end of the week his departure at the end of the 2025-2026 season from the direction of the Los Angeles Opera after twenty years in this position.
This makes Rafael Payare, “the 4e musketeer” of the region, as musical director of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, the only current pillar in the area. His contract ends in 2025-2026. The question that now seriously arises is whether its Californian status will be “revalued”. Indeed, the Rafael Payare of 2024 is absolutely no longer the one who took the reins of the OSM in 2021 and he would have quite the necessary stature to aspire to one of the two vacant positions. He has since appeared as guest conductor at the head of major American orchestras (he has now conducted the “Big 5”) and, in particular, made an impressive debut in… San Francisco on May 11, 2023, in a concert with Bruce Liu, including the 2e part was devoted to A hero’s lifea spectacular score by Strauss, the recording of which with the OSM was just released last Friday.
We have spoken several times about the “Zubin effect” when talking about Rafael Payare, his style and his enthusiasm in particular. After becoming music director in Montreal, Zubin Mehta was appointed to Los Angeles. Will parallelism be pushed a step further?