Douglas McLennan (of ArtsJournal) has published a couple of articles at Post Alley about the debacle at the Seattle Symphony. After the second was published, the orchestra finally responded and there are some corrections appended to that article, but honestly it does not look good for the current administration. The extreme turnover in the administration and on the Board of Directors are very bad.
One takeaway: the current executive director, Krishna Thiagarajan, apparently didn't have a particularly good record at his previous posts. The Board hired him for this job anyway - men get to fail upward a lot - and then failed to take action despite issues with him.
Another takeaway: Simon Woods, the previous executive director, put together an excellent team of administrator and did a good job at the orchestra, where he was clearly a good fit. The LA Phil then hired him; he didn't work out there and within two years was replaced by Chad Smith, who, with Gail Samuel, was one of two highly capable and strong internal candidates. (Samuel is now the president and CEO of the Boston Symphony.)
I really feel for Woods, who hired Dausgaard and, I think, Ludovic Morlot, and who went from a job where he was successful to one that didn't work out.
Updated 2/11/2022: Woods didn't hire Morlot; see the comments.
3 comments:
Timelines are a bit complicated to trace, but AFAICT, Simon Woods got hired in November 2010 as Seattle Symphony president & CEO. Ludovic Morlot was announced as Seattle music director in June 2010. Thus Woods didn't hire Morlot. (Woods definitely hired Dausgaard.) Plus, a passage in the 1st McLennan article used the word "toxic" to describe the Woods-Morlot relationship. In retrospect, I wonder if that was in part why Woods left Seattle for LA, although LA unfortunately flamed out for Woods pretty quickly. That's a "whole 'nother story", to be sure, for separate discussion. McLennan is clearly biased against Thiagarajan, which isn't the same thing as being wrong about Thiagarajan if the facts fit that perspective. However, the tone about Thiagarajan in McLennan's articles is pretty obvious.
Back to the Dausgaard question: the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra clearly solved their conductor problem this week with the announcement of Ryan Wigglesworth as TD's successor. At least that process looks smoother/much less bumpy and with less drama than Seattle, granted that less drama than Seattle is a very low bar to clear. The situation with a BBC orchestra vs. a private US orchestra is certainly very different, in terms of the politics, the funding and the organization. And if there was a meltdown or fizzing out of the Dausgaard and BBC SSO relationship, it was certainly much quieter than Seattle, again not difficult to achieve by comparison. Fingers crossed that Seattle works out its issues, and finds a music director willing to navigate the mine field there.
I'm going to update the post to say that Woods didn't hire Morlot.
Here's a different timeline, though.
Woods left Seattle for LA in January, 2018, but the announcement that Morlot would leave Seattle in 2019 came in May, 2017. So Woods knew the outer limit of his need to deal with Morlot.
LA is a bigger and more important organization than Seattle, surely a major reason for Woods to take that job.
Good catch; my bad on missing the timing of Morlot's announced Seattle Symphony departure, so mea culpa there. In hindsight, maybe Woods now wishes that he'd held on a bit longer in Seattle, although that means that he would have inherited the pandemic situation. I would hope that a working relationship between Woods and Dausgaard in Seattle would have been less toxic, but we'll never know, to be sure.
I forgot to mention a bit of a side note earlier, which might be just as well to post about it here. An orchestra acquaintance here was previously in Seattle, and referred to TD in casual conversation not as "Maestro" or even by his last name, but simply as "Thomas". That speaks to a fair degree of collegiality between TD and the musicians at the time. Of course, this was before the pandemic, FWIW.
I also understand from the acquaintance, going back to Morlot, that Morlot was really all about the music, and was not into the fund-raising and schmoozing with donors aspects of being a music director in the USA. In hindsight, and maybe over-reading too much into that, maybe this was part of the strain in the Woods-Morlot dynamic in Seattle.
PS: I saw that you discreetly commented on Chicago Classical Review on the CSO music director search article. I'm on Johnson's blacklist there, AFAICT, so nothing that I try to say there will see public view there. That indeed is a "whole 'nother story", on another US orchestra looking for a music director.
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