VoiceBox #5KALW 91.7 FM

Click here to hear the fifth broadcast of my public radio series about the art of singing, VoiceBox. The show originally aired on Friday June 26, 2009.

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The Full MontySF WEEKLY

Familiarity with Monty Python's movies doesn't breed fondness for Spamalot

If you grew up in the U.K. in the 1980s as I did, you grew up immersed in the world of Monty Python. At the age of 11, my friends and I would spend entire weekends glued to the telly, watching videotapes of the cult British comedy troupe's movies and network reruns of its sketch comedy show, Monty Python's Flying Circus. By 14, we were having regular "Python-Offs," competing against each other to see who could do the most convincing re-enactments of various pieces of the Python canon. Poking fun at the establishment and packed with explosive incongruities, labyrinthine digressions, and flagrant non sequiturs, the material appealed to our growing taste for the absurd. We never got bored of regurgitating such Flying Circus staples as "The Ministry of Silly Walks," "The Argument Sketch," and "The Lumberjack Song."

Just at the point in history when the name of Monty Python might have drawn a quizzical look from the average teenager rather than a compulsive urge to parrot the famous "Parrot Sketch," Python member Eric Idle took it upon himself a few years ago to reignite interest in the troupe's comedy through the creation of a Broadway musical. "Lovingly ripped off" — as the publicity materials trumpet — from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Pythons' popular 1975 feature film that spoofs the legends surrounding King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, Monty Python's Spamalot has been a critical and commercial success since its inception in 2005. Directed by Mike Nichols, the original New York production won three Tony Awards and garnered a whopping $18 million in advance ticket sales prior to its Broadway opening.

Monty Python nostalgia has doubtless been a major driving force behind the show's box office bravura. But although the San Francisco run of the touring production starring John O'Hurley (best known for his role as J. Peterman on Seinfeld) as King Arthur has happily helped me to scratch my longstanding Python itch, I can't help but wonder whether familiarity with the source material of such spoof-driven stage adaptations as Spamalot might ultimately be more of a hindrance than a help to audience members' enjoyment.

Like the film upon which it is based, Spamalot, which Idle composed with his longtime writing partner, John Du Prez, tells the story of King Arthur's quest to find the Holy Grail. The entire show plays like a compilation of Python greatest hits. All manner of gambits from The Holy Grail, such as the clapping of coconut shells to suggest the clip-clop of the knights' trusty steeds as they travel on their quest, the "Bring Out Your Dead" sketch that makes fun of bubonic plague outbreaks, and the now-legendary "Knights who say 'Ni'" episode find their way into the stage production, to the delight of audiences. The musical also directly or indirectly references material from other Python sources, including a sing-along version of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" from Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) and a nod to such memorable Flying Circus skits as "The Ministry of Silly Walks" and, naturally, "Spam." (The musical takes its title from the Holy Grail line, "We eat ham and jam and Spam a lot.")

Some of the sections culled directly from the movie — such as the quintessentially quotable scene in which Arthur and his knights, standing outside a castle, face a tirade of verbal abuse from an extremely smug French guard ("Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!") — work well onstage. Matthew Greer delivers the lines with perfect timing and the requisite outrrrrageous French accent. The knights also imbue the scene with bombastic physical comedy when they move their heads up, down, and sideways along the battlement crenellations.

However, the audience's deep familiarity with The Holy Grail also impedes the success of its musical offspring. O'Hurley is a daftly likable King Arthur, but much less memorable than Graham Chapman. And the film's most brilliantly satirical scene, in which a couple of cynical Marxist peasants fail to be impressed by Arthur's far-fetched story of how he came to be king ("Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony"), falls flat onstage owing to cockeyed comic timing and ropey British accents.

Contrastingly, Spamalot derives its greatest strengths from moments that either reinterpret original Python material for the theater, or depart entirely from the source. The show's opening number improbably but beautifully combines two skits — "The Fish-Slapping Dance" and "Finland" — to create a zany song-and-dance number. Set against a faux-Scandinavian backdrop reminiscent of Solvang, California, and involving a bunch of jolly villagers waving oversize rubber carp and extolling the delights of Finland, the "Fisch-Schlapping Song" pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the show. Meanwhile, Spamalot's smattering of freshly written numbers, such as the Andrew Lloyd Webber parody "The Song That Goes Like This" (dramatically delivered by Merle Dandridge as the Lady of the Lake and, the night I saw the show, ensemble player Erik Hayden as Sir Galahad), the torch song "Find Your Grail" (performed with actual torches held aloft), and the tacky yet hilarious "You Won't Succeed on Broadway" (the musical's response to The Producers' "Springtime for Hitler") engage us more viscerally than the parts which attempt to regurgitate now-classic Python sketches and songs.

Part of the reason for Monty Python's enduring success over the decades is the incongruity between the theatricality of the humor and the naturalistic demands of the screen medium. Much of this delicious inappropriateness is lost when the already stagey material is transferred to the stage. It is only when Idle and his collaborators break loose of the Pythons' TV and film legacy and focus fully on creating live theater that Spamalot finds its grail.

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VoiceBox #4KALW 91.7 FM

Click here to hear the fourth broadcast of my public radio series about the art of singing, VoiceBox. The show originally aired on Friday June 19, 2009.

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VoiceBox #3KALW 91.7 FM

Click here to hear the third broadcast of my public radio series about the art of singing, VoiceBox. The show originally aired on Friday June 12, 2009.

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Ear TrumpetSF WEEKLY

In Krapp's Last Tape, an old writer listens to his younger self

Alongside the deadly crime of uttering the word "Macbeth" within earshot of any actor, director, or stage manager involved in staging the legendarily cursed Scottish Play, external noise might be the contemporary theater scene's last taboo. Performers have been known to stop midsentence at the sound of an intrusive ringtone; it takes only the honking horn of an angry cabbie outside to ruin the pathos of a tragic death scene inside, while crinkling candy wrappers and hacking coughs can sometimes cause brawls in the stalls.

So it's strange to go to a play and find yourself intrigued rather than irritated by the various bursts of white noise coming from beyond the proscenium. The Cutting Ball Theater Company might mount its production of Krapp's Last Tape in one of the most sonically challenged spaces in San Francisco: the Exit Theatreplex' black box annex, located on a particularly noisy block of Taylor Street. But the intermittent interjections of wailing police sirens and raving Tenderloin residents weirdly enhance the experience of engaging with Samuel Beckett's terse drama.

Depicting a lonely old man's attempt to make sense of his memories by listening to an audio recording he made of himself 30 years previously, Krapp's Last Tape focuses strongly on the way we listen, the relationship between hearing and memory, and the primacy of sound in the waning moments of our time on Earth. Just as the end of human life usually announces its arrival through a gradual shutting down of the body's physical capabilities — beginning, in many cases, with the loss of mobility before progressing through reduced eyesight and hearing loss — so Beckett's plays more or less mark a slow fade toward oblivion, each one inching closer to the grave than the last.

Running at just 45 minutes and featuring only one actor and a series of prerecorded monologues, Krapp's Last Tape, published in 1958, presages the desolate tautness of many of Beckett's subsequent works both in terms of its turning away from the full-length, dialogue-based, multicharacter format of plays like Endgame (1957) and Waiting for Godot (1952) and its preoccupation with the incorporeal. Krapp's Last Tape looms large over such works as Not I (1972), in which a disembodied mouth spews a stream of gibberish and half-remembered memories at a shadowy "Auditor" on a blackened stage; Rockaby (1980), in which an elderly woman rocks herself to her final rest to the sound of her recorded voice; and Breath (1969), which lasts 25 seconds and involves nothing but the sound of someone breathing in and breathing out. In other words, Krapp's Last Tape is the first in a long line of Beckett plays to focus on listening as a conduit to the past and metaphor for the disintegrating, disembodied self.

Hampered by a pronounced gait, the curmudgeonly 69-year-old drunkard and failed writer at the center of Krapp's Last Tape has all but lost the physical agility he once had. Krapp's clownlike close encounter with a discarded banana skin in the opening beat of the play signifies the decrepit state of his body. His eyesight is about to go, too — he has to peer closely at every object he picks up to decipher its identity. Krapp is, in essence, a creature reduced to relying on the more basic senses. We see him pick up a banana and fondle it lasciviously before popping it in his mouth. Most pervasively of all, the character spends the better part of his time sitting still in the middle of a darkened stage, cocking his ears intently to the sound of his voice.

In Cutting Ball artistic director Rob Melrose's sensitive production, the ears, not the eyes, serve as pathways to the soul. The most radical innovation Melrose has made is the use of two different actors — Paul Gerrior as the 69-year-old Krapp and David Sinaiko as the recorded voice of the 39-year-old Krapp — to deliver Beckett's text. Their voices are extremely different. While Gerrior possesses a sonorous, Richard Burtonlike baritone that belies his character's advanced age and frail demeanor, Sinaiko's higher-pitched tenor is reedy and almost lyrical. The vocal contrast creates a strong distancing effect, since the voice of the man standing before us onstage bears so little resemblance to that of his younger self that he appears to be completely divorced from his past. Melrose's aural conceit thus compounds Krapp's inability to comprehend the thoughts and feelings of his youth as he listens to the recording.

Even the play's visual imagery suggests the world of sound, such as the boxes of audiotapes that starkly evoke roadkill when Krapp topples them off the desk. The centerpiece of the set is a large, old-fashioned tape recorder, which he fiddles with at various stages of the drama. From the hiss of the ribbons spinning across the spools to the metallic clicking of the buttons on the machine, the anachronistic technology serves as a sharp reminder to the iTunes generation of the remoteness of the past. Reminiscent of silent-era movie slapstick, Krapp's banana skin stunt (albeit unconvincingly executed by Gerrior the night I saw the show — but then again, it was a preview performance) similarly harks back to a "prehistoric" time in cinema history, when sound and image did not go hand in hand.

As the play unfolds and Krapp's day turns to night, we find our attention turning increasingly away from the visual and toward the aural. Scripted sounds such as the pop of a cork and clink of a glass offstage carry as much weight as the business happening before our eyes. Before we know it, and without realizing it, our ears tune into — and graciously accept — the unscripted noises emanating from the Tenderloin street outside the theater. For once, the noisy drunkards of the real world harmonize perfectly with those of Beckett's imagination.

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VoiceBox #2KALW 91.7 FM

Click here to hear the second broadcast of my public radio series about the art of singing, VoiceBox. The show originally aired on Friday June 5, 2009.

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American IdyllSYMPHONY MAGAZINE

Music Director searches conducted in open view aren't new. But orchestras are increasingly using them to connect with their communities, some taking their cues from reality TV.

Joana Carneiro didn’t appear even remotely frazzled as she strode across the U.C. Berkeley campus on a rainy mid-December morning in search of a cup of coffee. The 32-year-old Portuguese conductor should have been exhausted. It had, after all, been a grueling week. As the last of six guest conductors summoned to the Bay Area by the Berkeley Symphony with the aim of finding a successor to the internationally renowned Kent Nagano—whose departure from the position of music director following three decades of service the orchestra had announced in January 2007—Carneiro was kept busy from the moment she deplaned. Over the course of seven days, the conductor led five rehearsals and two performances, gave one pre-concert talk, attended several receptions and countless breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, underwent a formal interview, and appeared on a local radio show.

Yet far from yearning for a few hours of well-earned sleep on the flight back to her home in Lisbon, Carneiro seemed to take a week’s worth of heavy scrutiny at the hands of the Berkeley community in stride. Dressed in black slacks and a sweater with her straight, shoulder-length dark hair clipped neatly back from her face, the conductor looked as relaxed and alert over coffee on the final morning of her Bay Area sojourn as she did while conducting a program of Beethoven, Adams, and Lindberg for an audience of 2,000 the night before. “I’m not worried about being evaluated. Every time a conductor gets up on the podium it’s an evaluation; there are reviews in the media and audience feedback forms. This process is no different,” says Carneiro, who served as assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 2006 to 2008 through the League of American Orchestras’ American Conducting Fellows program. “There were many interviews, meetings, lunches, and dinners, but they all felt like a conversation,” she says.

That a music director search process might be viewed as a “conversation” between many different stakeholders is a concept that orchestras have taken a long time to embrace. The active inclusion of instrumentalists in scouting out new music director talent is now common practice among many orchestras, both in this country and abroad. But despite the much-publicized efforts of institutions such as the Berlin Philharmonic to involve their musicians in music director appointments in recent years, the world’s bigger orchestras continue to observe relatively closeted hiring traditions.

The situation at hundreds of smaller U.S. institutions couldn’t be more different. Instead of leaving the business of engaging an orchestra’s central figure to a mysterious group of internal custodians, orchestras in such diverse parts of the country as Eugene, Oregon; Fairfax, Virginia; and Augusta, Georgia are increasingly looking for ways to make the hiring process as transparent and inclusive as possible. More than that: Some organizations are even going as far as to view the conductor search as show biz.

Buzz and Buy-In

Fueled by the confluence of Web 2.0 and the popularity of reality TV, a number of U.S. orchestras are emphasizing the competitive nature of the search process in an attempt to heighten audience buy-in and create media buzz. Developed in collaboration with an advertising agency, the Reno Philharmonic’s recently completed search featured an American Idol-inspired “Last Conductor Standing” strategy that gave concertgoers a vote on which of the five shortlisted guest conductors should win the music director job. By following a link to the Reno News & Review website, ticketholders could watch video footage of each finalist in action, and—above a slogan that reads, “Who will prevail? Your vote counts!”—click on another link to cast a ballot. “We wanted to make as much of the search process as we could by playing up the competitive aspect and tying it in with popular culture,” says Reno Philharmonic Executive Director Tim Young. “The engagement is terrific. People are really excited about what’s going on.”

In addition to using audience surveys, orchestras such as the Fairfax Symphony   Orchestra (which conducted a music director search during the 2008-09 season) generate interest by reaching out to constituents through YouTube videos depicting guest-conductor performances posted on the orchestras’ websites. Other orchestras are putting a competitive spin on the music director search through bold communications campaigns with dramatic wording and images. The splashy homepage of the Augusta Symphony’s website features large pictures of outgoing Music Director Donald Portnoy and the four conductor candidates accompanied by the teaser: “After Donald Portnoy’s Grand Finale, who will be maestro? Who’s your favorite? We want to know. Email Us.” The homepage of the Richmond Symphony website similarly hopes to turn heads with its attention-grabbing “Our New Musical Director Search Begins” headline. Meanwhile, the Saint Joseph Symphony in Missouri referred to its shortlisted conductors as “finalists” rather than the less competitive-sounding “candidates.”

Unsurprisingly, this interactive, high-stakes approach to communicating details about the conductor search to the general public has been garnering a great deal of media attention for orchestras. Media outlets seem to respond particularly strongly to the American Idol-like nature of some orchestras’ campaigns, even co-opting phrases from the hit reality-TV show in their copy. “It’s not quite San Antonio Symphony Idol,” wrote Deborah Martin in the San Antonio Express-News. “But patrons will have a chance to weigh in on next season’s guest conductors.” In the Charlotte Observer, reporter Steven Brown played up the competitive nature of the selection process by rechristening the local orchestra’s search for a new music director as “So You Think You Can Conduct?” and peppering his text with words like “contest,” “climax,” “vying,” and “tryout.”

Orchestra personnel are understandably excited about the level of media interest. “We’ve garnered three articles about each of the candidates—a preview feature, a concert review, and lastly a follow-up story that segues into what’s going to happen next,” says Jonathan Martin, president and executive director of the Charlotte Symphony in North Carolina, which currently is in the middle of a music director search. “The exciting thing is the amount of publicity we got and the interest all the buzz sparked in our community,” says Rhonda Hunsinger, executive director of the South Carolina Philharmonic, which conducted a music director search for two years, eventually deciding on Morihiko Nakahara in April 2008. “We talked to the local radio and TV stations and convinced them that this was the top arts story of the season, and they all embraced it,” Hunsinger continues. “We got live TV and Internet coverage, not to mention newspaper articles prior to each candidate’s visit. We had several reviews following every concert. Critics attended rehearsals and wrote feature stories. While the candidates were in town, we were careful to have them interact with the media. A few days after the last concert, we selected Morihiko Nakahara as our new music director and secretly brought him into town. We planned an event around the announcement and gave the state newspaper a front-page, above-the-fold exclusive.”

Even those orchestras less driven to create a publicity campaign around the search process are striving to use it as a way to reach out and interact with audiences. The La Crosse Symphony in Wisconsin—which began its music director search in the fall of 2007 and recently selected six finalists—keeps concertgoers informed about its music director search by publishing an online newsletter every six weeks. Orchestras also routinely use Web-based and paper audience surveys to get feedback about guest conductor appearances. The Charlotte Symphony reports unprecedented levels of audience engagement as a result of soliciting concertgoers’ opinions through surveys. “The amount of return has been extraordinary,” Martin says. “We get hundreds of responses on each of the guest conductor concert weekends.” According to Berkeley Symphony Executive Director James Kleinmann, around 10 to 15 percent of Berkeley Symphony audiences complete post-concert surveys online. But the range of responses testifies to the impassioned engagement of ticket-buyers in the selection process. “During the performance of each piece, with her face as well as with her body, the conductor expressed feeling for the music as well as appreciation for the musicians, and the musicians responded,” wrote a concertgoer in response to one of Berkeley Symphony’s guest conductors. Another audience member wrote: “If I were a member of the orchestra, I would have not noticed any indications of dynamics. The scores must have indicated fortissimo but the conductor’s gestures didn’t seem to. Range of conducting gestures seemed limited.”

Pros and Cons

“Before we launched our music director search, a lot of people in the area knew there was an orchestra here, but they didn’t really know,” says South Carolina’s Hunsinger. “We got the media involved early and as a result, community awareness has risen and people are asking a lot of questions.” Kleinmann believes that the Berkeley Symphony’s search has played a major role in uniting the many disparate parts of the orchestra’s constituency. “The most exciting thing that’s come out of the search has been the emergence of community and leadership,” Kleinmann says. “In what could have been a vacuum created by Kent Nagano’s departure, I am amazed at how everyone, from funders to board members to audiences, has come together to demonstrate how the orchestra impacts their lives. This transcends the business of choosing who the next music director will be.”

Many orchestras are also quick to point out the financial advantages that have emerged from taking a more open approach to the music director search. Some groups are reporting increased or steady ticket sales—no small feat during a recession. And the bump can last after the search is over: According to Hunsinger, the South Carolina Philharmonic has almost sold out every concert so far this season since hiring Nakahara. The Richmond Symphony reports box-office sales that are similar to last season. But the orchestra’s director of marketing and communications, Bob Halbruner, notes: “If there was no economic downturn, we would expect to see a spike in ticket sales.” The excitement generated by the newly visible music director search process has also helped some orchestras with their fund-raising activities. Borrowing an idea from the Eugene Symphony, the South Carolina Philharmonic raised $60,000 by inviting donors to a private party at $1,000 a ticket in honor of each of the orchestra’s guest conductor candidates. The donors received “insider” information on the search process, including an invitation to the press conference announcing the selection of the new music director.

Such highly publicized music director hiring practices are not without their drawbacks. Some organizations are concerned about the implications of placing too great an emphasis on audience participation during the selection period. “We haven’t resolved yet to what extent the audience will have input in the process,” says Jim Gallagher, chairman of the music director search committee at La Crosse Symphony. “We’re not going to have an audience ballot. Apart from the fact that giving concertgoers votes would be a logistical nightmare, we don’t want this to end up being a popularity contest with people voting for the wrong reasons.”

All the excitement about the winner doesn’t really change the fact that the candidates were originally selected to fill a job opening and that the non-winning candidates will still be looking for a job. Some of them may have to get out there and do it again and again. So sensitivity is key when it comes to figuring out just how far to take media and audience involvement. David Fisk, executive director of the Richmond Symphony, says: “We genuinely find it useful to get audience feedback about such things as a conductor’s chemistry with the players and audience. But this isn’t the same as giving concertgoers a vote; it’s giving them a voice in the process to help inform our decision.” When we spoke this winter, San Francisco Chronicle classical music critic Joshua Kosman shared similar reservations about seeking inspiration from reality TV in the appointment of new music directors. “The audience’s enthusiasm is nice, but audiences don’t always know what’s best,” he says.

Then there’s the problem of sustaining the level of engagement in the months and years following the media hoopla. The Reno Philharmonic is hoping to leverage information gathered about its audiences during the search process to find new ways to involve concertgoers in the future. “The energy and excitement of the search process is going to be hard to continue in exactly the same way,” says Young. “But it’s up to us to look for new ways to involve the community.”

Not all regional orchestras see the hiring of a new music director as a giant publicity opportunity. The Utah Symphony, for one, eschews the idea of a public search. According to a November article in the Deseret News, William H. Nelson, the chairman of Utah’s search committee, took exception to the way in which the orchestra handled its previous music director search, just over a decade ago. “We don’t want the guest conductors to appear as if they’re auditioning,” Nelson is quoted as saying of the latest conductor hiring process. “They are of the stature that they don’t want to be perceived as wanting a job.” The Berkeley Symphony, for all its interest in reaching out to audiences, is similarly keen to play down the competitive aspect of the search. Candidates like the New York-based conductor Paul Haas may have viewed the entire week in Berkeley—“every interaction, from meetings to rehearsals,” he says—as part of an audition process, but the selection committee shunned the term, instead choosing to frame the search as a concert season featuring six guest conductors, rather than a contest aimed at securing Nagano’s successor. 

Eyeballing the Guests

Even for orchestras intent on steering clear of the American Idol model, practical realities nevertheless encourage a highly transparent and inclusive approach. Unlike their more prominent counterparts, smaller orchestras don’t have the luxury of auditioning potential music directors on the quiet. The country’s largest-budget orchestras present upwards of 200 performances annually, many of them led by guest conductors, and it’s relatively easy for these institutions to assess visiting maestros without announcing that they might be on the lookout for someone to fill the top artistic position. Maintaining face is key. “If an orchestra lets it be known that it’s interested in conductor X but conductor X doesn’t show, it can’t look good for the orchestra,” says the San Francisco Chronicle’s Kosman. “Similarly, the top conductors can’t afford to be seen looking for a job in public.” But for smaller orchestras, the logistics of bringing in a slew of guest conductors makes the search process practically impossible to disguise.  “For an orchestra of our size it’s difficult to do a covert search,” says Richmond Symphony’s Fisk. “We have a limited 38-week season, and under normal circumstances our regular music director and assistant conductor dominate the schedule. Suddenly having a season full of nothing but guest conductors makes it pretty obvious that we’re looking for a successor.”

The average music director search panel might consist of a mixture of orchestral musicians, staff, board members, and even one or two major donors and external stakeholders, allowing smaller groups to maintain a high level of interaction with their close-knit communities. “Management is interested in what we have to say,” says Berkeley Symphony viola player Darcy Rindt. “There’s a strong sense of everyone being in this process together.” The Charlotte Symphony’s Martin believes that reaching out to the orchestra’s many different constituencies will lead the search committee to make a better-informed decision. “We’re not running a popularity contest,” he says. “Weighing lots of criteria based on feedback from donors, audience members, musicians, and others can only help us get the right result.”

This desire on the part of orchestras to engage with the outside world speaks to a heightened awareness of the evolving role and responsibilities of a music director working in the U.S. today. These days, waving a baton is considered to be only part of the job; being an arts advocate in the community is also extremely important. The Berkeley Symphony, for instance, currently works with the city’s eleven public elementary schools. The orchestra required all guest conductor finalists to write essays outlining their approach to civic engagement as part of the application process. Meanwhile, in La Crosse, Wisconsin (population 50,000), the orchestra’s music director is regarded as a prominent local figure.  “In a city this small, the orchestra’s music director is the artistic leader of the community,” says Gallagher. “The search for a new leader is a big event, and we want to involve the various stakeholders in the process as much as we possibly can.”

The effort to be as inclusive as possible, coupled with the logistical challenges of parachuting in a cavalcade of guest conductors during the average orchestra’s limited season, has turned the music director search at many institutions into a highly formal, complex, and costly business. Orchestras typically spend two to three years, and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, diligently transitioning between maestros. The process involves such tasks as assembling a cross-functional search committee; drawing up a detailed job description and procedural guidelines; reaching out to suitable candidates; vetting anywhere between 100 and 300 applications; following up on references; digesting applicant essays, videos, and audio recordings; creating a shortlist; flying finalists in to spend a week or two with the orchestra; nailing down concert repertoire; organizing and publicizing meetings, events, and performances during each conductor’s stay; providing feedback systems for all stakeholders; soliciting media coverage; and announcing the final decision. The selection panels of some orchestras, such as the South Carolina Philharmonic and Reno Philharmonic, even traveled around the country visiting shortlisted candidates before inviting them back to home base. Others, such as the La Crosse Symphony, hired a consultant to help guide the orchestra through the process.

The open approach to procuring the right music director may be time-consuming, resource-heavy, and fraught with challenges—from complex scheduling logistics to losing worthy candidates to other jobs during the typically long vetting period. Yet the difficult process seems to make sense for many orchestras. “The appointment of a music director is such an important decision,” says Kosman. “It has a huge bearing on what your orchestra is going to become in years to come. The decision-makers must have the information they need to make the right choice.”

Sometimes, however, even the best intentions and most diligently run searches can go awry, as the story of one orchestra interviewed for this article shows. The orchestra in question approached the appointment of a new music director with dedication and rigor. But the selection panel, ignoring negative feedback from its core constituents, began negotiations with one finalist on the basis of his reputation. “The conductor had the right profile but the players didn’t like him,” a search committee member confides. “When the panel traveled to meet him for primary negotiations, he didn’t seem at all excited about the job.” Fortunately, the committee eventually came to its senses and hired a different conductor, one who clicked perfectly with the orchestra and helped re-energize ticket sales and fund raising.

“I don’t know if there’s a right way or wrong way to conduct a music director search,” says the Charlotte Symphony’s Martin, who, as a former general manager of The Cleveland Orchestra, has glimpsed the pros and cons of both “open” and “closed” methodologies and describes himself as a “convert” to the open way because of the opportunities it provides to build community and generate buzz. “You need a process that works for your orchestra and your city.” Ultimately, though, the success of any music director search seems to hinge on one crucial factor: the personal connection between a candidate and an orchestra. That ephemeral feeling of “rightness” cannot be quantified or ascertained from a resumé, but orchestras and audiences know it straight away when they see it. As Carneiro put it over coffee that December morning: “If it’s a good fit, it’s fantastic.”

As it happens, the fit between the Berkeley Symphony and Carneiro appears to be just right. On January 15, just four weeks after the Portuguese conductor’s appearance on the podium at U.C. Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, the Berkeley Symphony board announced Carneiro’s appointment as Nagano’s successor. “Her interaction with the musicians, and the level to which she brought them in four rehearsals, was remarkable,” says Berkeley Symphony board President Kathleen G. Henschel. “She made just the right match with all the constituents.”

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