Going, Going, Gone

Nicola Luisotti

San Francisco Opera web site, July 31, 2018:

San Francisco Opera web site, August 1, 2018:

That's right: Nicola Luisotti's term as Music Director of San Francisco Opera ended on July 31. It's just over two years since he announced his departure, and there is no replacement in sight. As Matthew Shilvock has said on more than one occasion, he's being very careful to get the right person.

As he's not saying, this is also probably one way for the company to save a few bucks, or hundreds of thousands of bucks, at a time of belt-tightening. (Note the eight-production season coming up.) But I also appreciate his care, because Luisotti turned out to be a something of a disappointment as a conductor.

His first appearance in SF, 2005's La Forza del Destino, led everybody to have high hopes; it was a spectacular debut, at least if you were at the first performance, which I believe I was. Since then...he could be inspired, or he could be off form, all in the same run. His talents proved to be largely in Italian opera, but because of his inconsistency, you couldn't count on him from performance to performance or opera to opera. His Otello, seen at the last performance in the run, was mediocre and the principal singers barely engaged with each other, which must have been at least partly his fault.

His Cost fan tutte, of which I also saw the last in the run, was the worst-conducted Mozart at an international company that I've seen. His Lohengrin was competent, but cautious. I remember the Salome as oddly paced, but others liked it and at the time (2009) I wasn't a fan, so maybe you shouldn't trust me.

His Italian opera certainly could be very good, and he was an excellent advocate for La Ciociara, a mediocre work that got a good performance from him. (Maybe he should have conducted more new music at SFO.) He made a couple of excellent hires in principal oboe Mingjia Liu and principal clarinet José González Granero, both of whom joined the orchestra in 2010 and both of whom are great players.

He put his foot in his mouth pretty badly following La Ciociara, when both he and David Gockley spoke ill of 20th and 21st century music, while running the company as though Italian opera were an endangered species ("returning the company to its Italian roots"). That...was not a good look for the ranking leadership of a major opera company. He waved it away in an interview with Joshua Kosman last fall, around when he conducted his last performance as music director, but I wasn't completely convinced. I mean, he could have made the case for staging Lulu or reviving St. Francois, but did he? I suppose we'll never know; it's not as if SFO is releasing the minutes of any talks he had with Gockley.

In the meantime, absent a music director, what happens if there's an opening in the orchestra, through retirement or the decision by a player to join a different performing organization, say, the one across the street? (Who among us has not had nightmares of Kay Stern deciding that Mark Volkert's assistant concertmaster spot looks like a good position to play for the next 15 years?) Last year, as the months went by with no new music director, I actually asked SFO how this would be handled, but I didn't get an answer. 

I will now speculate about how it would be handled: with the contract hire of a temporary player to fill whatever seat opened up, whether a principal or section position, and when a music director is appointed, that person gets to hold auditions for a permanent hire for the job. This is sort of what happened at SFS during their long search for a new principal oboe to replace the late William Bennett, and then for a new associate principal oboe to replace Jonathan Fisher: Christopher Gaudi played each of those positions during the search, and eventually MTT hired a pair of oboists.