No one at the Philadelphia Orchestra has said a word, but the Pioneer Press reports that Kathleen van Bergen is the new executive director of the Schubert Club in St. Paul, Minnesota. Van Bergen, 31, has been vice president of artistic planning at the orchestra since 2004, the job that, just below music director, has the most to do with the music programmed and guest artists heard.
Van Bergen, a New Jersey native, was hired by former orchestra president Joseph H. Kluger. Tall, pleasant and quite smart about artists and repertoire, she was widely considered to be too young for the job when she started. Some players have recently tried to oust her, though their reasons have never been clear to me. Since the planning of repertoire and hiring of guest conductors and soloists happens many years in advance, her work here will be in evidence for several seasons to come.
The Schubert Club, by the way, is more than the small society its title suggests. It operates a musical instrument museum, educational programs and a prestigious concert series.
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Philadelphia Orchestra's Artistic Chief Out
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Peter Dobrin has been writing about classical music and the arts for The Inquirer since 1989. He earned an undergraduate degree in performance from the University of Miami, and received a master's degree in music criticism from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.
He’s grateful for news tips, willing to engage in a certain amount of back and forth with readers, but is unfortunately unable to remove old LPs from your basement or post photographs of your cat.
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Comments (2)
How much artistic planning really goes on? I assume that most of the time, you have to program whatever repertoire the guest conductor or soloists is playing at that time. There is always a lot of repetition from season to season. Here are two examples I know of off the top of my head:
Brahms Symphony No.2
October 2002 (02-03 season): Dohnányi
January 2004 (03-04 season): Rattle
October 2005 (05-06 season): Temirkanov
November 2007 (07-08 season): Belohlavek
Brahms Piano Concerto No.2:
September 2002 (02-03 season): Bronfman/Sawallisch
April 2004 (03-04 season): Barto/Eschenbach
October 2006 (06-07 season): Watts/Eschenbach
October 2007 (07-08 season): Andsnes/Vanska
Both are great works, but programming each 4 out of the 5 last seasons is too much.
Posted by Seth | January 6, 2008 9:53 PM
Posted on January 6, 2008 21:53
(Disclaimer: I'm an acquaintance of Ms. van Bergen and her husband from their days in St. Louis.)
From looking at programming in St. Louis over the past few seasons since Robertson took over, initially with Jeremy Geffen as VP of Artistic Planning, I'm guessing that the planning can be as involved as the person in that post wants it to be. Geffen and Robertson together have put together some really off-beat selections covering Robertson's first 3 seasons, before Geffen left for Carnegie Hall. One example: one program put Mark-Anthony Turnage's Three Screaming Popes on the same program as Rhapsody in Blue. Plus, from what I understand, they have exhibited pretty strong control over all the programs, not just Robertson's own, but also the guest conductors' as well.
However, one unintended consequence of this may be playing out now, going back to the one blog post on Belohlavek in Philly a while back. Attendance has dropped frighteningly this season at Powell Hall, and some people blame these programs as "too radical for the Clayton crowd". (Clayton here would be comparable to someplace like Haverford or Chestnut Hill there.) The orchestra is playing well, IMHO, better than it has overall in years, so it's not because of any decline in orchestra quality.
Since Geffen left, the SLSO has hired Peter Czornyj as the VP for Artistic Administration. Czornyj brings a lot of experience from his time in Cleveland in the same post, as well as his past life as a producer for DG recordings by Pinnock and Gardiner, for example. So, maybe programming will shift to a degree to what Dobrin once wrote about Dutoit's programming, as "populist but not pandering". It'll have to be to try to reverse the declines in attendance (another factor is the recent closing of a major stretch of highway in the area). Because of the timing of Czornyj's hiring, his impact will not come into play until next season, 2008-2009. We shall see.
Posted by Geo. | January 9, 2008 2:13 PM
Posted on January 9, 2008 14:13