Tuesday, January 11, 2022

Dausgaard and Seattle: Update

Over at The NY Times, Javier C. Hernandez provides way more detail than the Seattle Symphony released last week about the resignation of music director Thomas Dausgaard. Hoo boy:

  • The music director/orchestra relationship hadn't been going well for quite a while. Dausgaard says the administration "repeatedly tried to silence and intimidate him," which the orchestra denies.
  • The orchestra investigated his grievances in February, 2020.
  • Dausgaard decided to resign on December 25.
  • In November, the orchestra privately decided not to renew his contract. Last week's press release implied that it had always been planned that way. Nope. 
All very interesting and one wonders what is not being said.

2 comments:

David Bratman said...

Wishing now I'd commented what I was thinking after reading the previous post, which was, "There's got to be more to this than what we're being told."

Lisa Hirsch said...

Same here. Elsewhere, a friend remarked that "they're obviously lying in that press release," meaning last week's press release, and boy howdy was he right. I checked at the time to see about their statement that it had always been planned for Dausgaard to leave at the end of his contract and found no evidence of that, either in their press releases or on music writer Thomas May's blog, where he would definitely have reported such a thing.