They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (9 page)

Lincoln Center Global (LCG) is the name of our consulting practice. A gifted staff member, formerly a Broadway producer and a Harvard Business School (HBS) graduate, Kara Medoff Barnett, led this unprecedented initiative. She performed with distinction. We decided to start small; our first client would be China. Soon afterward, the Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Mitsui & Co., Brown University, the New Orleans Musicians Village, and a performing arts
and education center in the Phoenix metropolitan area called Consolari joined the city of Tianjin as LCG clients.

Overall, this major alteration of Lincoln Center’s economic model took time to conceive and to implement, but the framework for its creation started on day one of year one. So did the notion of expanding the board of directors. I also set in motion task forces of trustees and executives from firms like McKinsey and UBS to help me think through how best to acquire federal and state funds to pay for redevelopment and how to maximize rental income from the venues that Lincoln Center owned and operated.

Even higher on my list of priorities was puzzling out what would be contained in the package of incentives that could move constituents from spectator seats to the playing field of redevelopment. What might convert them from opponents or passive bystanders to active participants?

That analytical challenge was sitting out there just waiting to be seized when reality intruded in June 2002. It came in the surprising form of a labor strike by the musicians of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra.

I
WAS STARTLED
by this sudden development. The Mostly Mozart Festival was a well-known Lincoln Center creation. Its featured ensemble in this widely emulated summer production has always been the Mostly Mozart Orchestra, which consisted of fine freelance musicians who were the best paid in the country. Their demand was not related to pay, or fringe benefits, or working conditions. Rather, they insisted on an outsized role in any decision about the possible dismissal of an existing player deemed by the music director to be performing below par and in the selection of new musicians to fill any vacancies. It appeared that the union players of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra intended to send management a message. But what was it?

Until recently, the Mostly Mozart Orchestra had been conducted by Gerard Schwarz, whose tenure lasted seventeen years. I knew Schwarz very well. In 1978, while I was executive director of the 92nd Street Y, Omus Hirshbein, the resident impresario and my close colleague, created and then nurtured the Y Chamber Symphony. We asked Schwarz to be its maestro. He performed very ably in that role, and as far as I
could tell from a distance, he was also successful as the conductor of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra, particularly in his first decade on the job. However, by the time I arrived at Lincoln Center in 2002, Gerry’s contract had not been renewed, and for the summer of 2001 the orchestra played with a series of guest conductors. The musicians anxiously awaited the decision of Jane Moss, Lincoln Center’s vice president for programs, about who his successor would be.

Anxiety was mixed with trepidation. The critical reviews of the orchestra in Gerry’s last years had not been favorable, and the orchestra’s audience had begun to erode significantly. Early in its history, the festival ran for seven weeks. Reduced demand for tickets contracted its season to six, then five, and then four weeks. Concern was expressed about whether Moss intended not only to further shorten the already truncated season, but also to dilute the centrality of the orchestra in the festival’s offerings. As an arts presenter, Moss was adept at bringing to Lincoln Center all kinds of excellent chamber ensembles, early music groups, chamber symphonies, vocal artists, and even modern dance troupes to enhance the festival. There were rumors, some of which reached the press, that the orchestra might simply disappear.

The message, then, seemed to be that the musicians of the orchestra wished to protect each other against dismissal and intended to exert control over the selection of future personnel. To me and to Moss, that meant any new conductor’s authority would be diminished even before he or she could raise a baton. This demand seemed untenable. We both examined carefully the contracts of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and other leading American ensembles with their musicians. In some, there was language about management’s obligation to consult with musicians on vacancies or seek the advice of players in a given section of the orchestra. But none of the provisions came even close to the assertion of authority these freelance musicians were insisting upon for the Mostly Mozart Orchestra.

In June 2002 I had been exclusively on the payroll of Lincoln Center for a little more than one month. If the union members thought that a brand-new president might buckle under the pressure of a media frenzy, a disappointed audience, and the cost of a labor action that could not be offset by earned revenue, they had good reason. The chair of the Lincoln Center board, Beverly Sills, advised me to settle on the
union’s terms if necessary. Just conjure up some face-saving language for management, she advised. The issue at stake was obscure; no one really understood it, she opined. Why start off your tenure as president by alienating musicians, audiences, and union supporters, including most of the members of the New York City Council?

I held firm. The media pressure did not trouble me. Lincoln Center’s board of directors, while not demonstrably supportive, seemed to be willing to cut the new guy some managerial slack. Whatever the resulting budget deficit, I was certain it could be closed by some more fund-raising hustle. Most important, Jane Moss needed and deserved my support. She was being unfairly scapegoated by elements of the press and reviled by the musicians. I was convinced that her strong track record and excellent intentions for the future of the Mostly Mozart Festival and for its orchestra fully merited my support. Moss needed the running room to rebuild and renew this festival. Being pushed around by musicians understandably concerned about their own future was no way to start that process.

We both wanted our soon-to-be-named music director to enjoy the full prerogatives of a maestro. The musicians of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra needed to be reshaped into a proud, energetic, fully engaged ensemble. That would take time and money. Scheduling extra rehearsals. Retaining world-renowned feature guest artists. Programming crowd pleasers and challenging repertoire. Encouraging the orchestra to learn from brilliant guest conductors. None of this could happen with a new maestro hobbled by a labor agreement that clouded the issue of who was in charge.

After several weeks of frenzied activity, including union demonstrations around Lincoln Center’s campus, it became clear that neither the media nor the public were very sympathetic to the musicians’ case. Two days after what was to have been the start of the season, the musicians in effect capitulated. They asked us to commence the Mostly Mozart Festival orchestral concerts about one week late. By then, opportunities for single ticket sales had diminished, and some important guest artists had changed their plans. By then, the opportunity for a buoyant opening had come and gone. We held fast to our position. The festival would carry on that summer, but without any Mostly Mozart Orchestra offerings. We were sure that the union musicians would be
a lot more careful in the future about attempting to interfere with the prerogatives of management.

The rest is contemporary history. Jane Moss announced the appointment of the French maestro Louis Langrée. He is a conductor with a special flair for the music of Mozart. Engaging, energetic, and upbeat, he is a nonconfrontational leader possessed of a light personal touch, and he proved to be an inspired choice. As we had promised him and ourselves, Lincoln Center invested more time, energy, and resources in the festival than ever before.

Langrée developed a close working relationship with Moss. He was handpicked after Jane saw him perform in Europe. From the beginning, he was well received by the musicians. They rehearsed much more together. Langrée instilled in them a sense of pride and musicianship. He maintained very high standards. They responded by playing well, not only for him but
for
guest conductors who were going places: Yannick Nézet-Séguin (soon thereafter, selected to conduct the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and to become the maestro of the Philadelphia Orchestra), Osmo Vanska (conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra), and Pablo Heras-Casado (also bound to conduct at the Met and to become the music director of the St. Luke’s Orchestra). They played
with
special guest artists who were at the pinnacle of their careers: Stephanie Blythe, Susanna Phillips, Renee Fleming, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Emanuel Ax, Leif Ove-Andsnes, Pierre Laurent-Aimard, Yo-Yo Ma, Alisa Weilerstein, and Martin Frost, among many others. And they performed not only the classical repertory, but also works
of
living composers, like Golijov, Adams, and Saariaho.

After some of the concerts in Avery Fisher Hall, a 2,700-seat venue, Moss would invite solo artists or trios and quartets to perform at 10:30 p.m. in the 240-seat, nightclub-like setting of the Kaplan Penthouse overlooking the Hudson River. In that candlelit, romantic venue, the age of the audience plummeted; hemlines rose; backpacks were unloaded; and music acquired spellbinding intimacy, proximity, and immediacy.

While the orchestra remained the centerpiece of the festival, it was surrounded by innovation. For the first time in its history, the Mostly Mozart Festival offered staged operas, among them
Don Giovanni
and
Le Nozze di Figaro
, both performed by the Budapest Festival Orchestra, conducted and directed by Ivan Fischer;
The Flowering Tree
, a
new opera by John Adams, directed by Peter Sellars; Mozart’s
Laide
, also directed by Sellars;
Il Re Pastore
, directed by Mark Lamos; and a revival of Jonathan Miller’s
Cosi fan Tutte
.

Contemporaneous with such offerings were performances by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, the Tallis Scholars, Gidon Kremer’s Kremerara Baltica, the Leipzig String Quartet, the Emerson String Quartet, and the International Contemporary Ensemble.

A mainstay of the festival has been the Mark Morris Dance Company. It has performed
L’Allegro Il Penseroso ed il Moderato
,
Dido Aeneas
, and as a world premiere,
Mozart Dances
, among other pieces.

These are all expensive initiatives and actions. They required even more ambitious fund-raising. I enjoyed taking the lead in rallying the staff and board to acquire for Lincoln Center new and generous supporters.

What Jane Moss accomplished with the Mostly Mozart Festival was and remains astounding. She built on the basic idea of celebrating Mozart’s brilliance, but construed that undertaking broadly and imaginatively. Who influenced Mozart, and which composers and musicians were most influenced by him? How is his work reflected in the music, the visual art, and the literature of his time? To what extent was Mozart the product of his own environment and extensive travel, and in what degree did he transcend them? How does Mozart’s work influence today’s musicians and composers? What mixture of nature and nurture accounts for his genius? These are some of the probing and fascinating questions that animated Moss’s brilliant programming choices.

In working closely with Louis Langrée, classicism and innovation were viewed as entirely compatible. Mozart’s music was enhanced and its essence revealed, not negated or superseded, by incorporating the music of other composers, dead and alive, into the festival. Adding different performing groups and programming elements into the festival also enlivened this summer tradition.

The ubiquity, consistency, and constancy of elaborate praise for the Mostly Mozart Festival was gratifying. While each critic was partial to his or her favorite features of this four-week cornucopia of events, what they seemed to share was respect. They held in high regard the fact that it was ideas that animated the festival, well-articulated points of view. One might take issue with some of them, but their worthiness as organizing principles was undeniable.

Peter Davies at
New York Magazine
, Justin Davidson at
Newsday
, Alex Ross at the
New Yorker
, and that
New York Times
cadre of critics—Anthony Tommasini, Allan Kozinn, James R. Oestreich, Alastair Macaulay, Steve Smith, and Zachary Wolfe, among others—wrote admiringly about what Langrée and Moss were accomplishing. Striking a theme that found echoes in all of their commentary, on August 5, 2004, the
New York Times
concert review read:

What a difference a director makes.

Youthful, limber, technically accomplished, full of ideas and seemingly tireless, Mr. Langrée has revitalized the Festival’s orchestra . . . just two summers after the players went out on strike.

As a result of Lincoln Center’s capital campaign, Jane received a special honor. The position she held became the Ehrenkranz Artistic Director of Lincoln Center. Louis Langrée was similarly recognized; he became the Renée and Robert Belfer Music Director of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra. These are the first positions ever to be endowed at Lincoln Center. In recognition of the publicly and critically acclaimed artistic reawakening of this beloved festival, these tributes were greeted with enthusiasm by colleagues, commentators, and audience members.

In the late summer of 2013 many of those musicians who had participated in that job action eleven years earlier asked to see me for lunch. They were joined by those who had accepted positions with the Mostly Mozart Orchestra after 2002. They offered me modest tokens of appreciation and genuine words of thanks. I told them how proud I was of what they had accomplished together. In return they recognized that without my energetic commitment, none of them could have enjoyed the artistic camaraderie and the critical praise that was now theirs to treasure.