Hard choices,
sound policies
rescued the
Philharmonic
There's one thing you don't hear from the Rhode Island Philharmonic these days, and that's the sour notes of backstage grousing. The era when bickering within the ranks often drowned out the music seems a thing of the past.
The band is now playing better than anyone had thought possible. Music director Larry Rachleff seems as though he can do no wrong.
Rachleff has been turning in consistently solid, often inspired performances. He appears to have pulled off the unthinkable.
But let's not forget that he's the right man arriving on the scene at the right time. Not to take away from his conducting skills, but Larry hasn't had to spend a lot of time in the trenches. He's been handed an orchestra that can get the job done.
This is not a group of players who have been whipped into shape by a gifted leader. It's a whole different troupe of musicians these days, most of them imports from Boston with stellar credentials.
The string sections now boast the likes of violinist Alexey Shabalin, once a member of Yuri Bashmet's renowned Moscow Soloists. Cellist Mihail Jojatu, the Philharmonic's assistant principal, was just hired by the Boston Symphony, one of the most coveted gigs around.
From my perch in the loge, the Philharmonic is a far different outfit than the one I began covering 30 years ago. Back then it was mostly Sunday players who could count on life memberships, no matter how lackluster their performances. The orchestra was there to serve the local music community, not the art form.
Rachleff may be delivering memorable programs, but it was his predecessors, Alvaro Cassuto and Andrew Massey, who made the hard choices, made the big changes at the Philharmonic, even though you'd never know it from the headlines. Cassuto and Massey, and to some extent Zuohuang Chen, were the conductors who did the grunt work. They had to buck this community's allegiance to the status quo, weed out the dead wood, and go head-to-head with the union and confrontational managers.
So much of their time was eaten up with the thankless task of trying to turn the Philharmonic into a professional entity that they didn't have a whole lot of energy left for making music. And when they did get down to the business at hand, relations between the players, management and conductor were so strained, morale was so bad, that the orchestra didn't have its heart in what it was doing.
Sure, Cassuto sometimes came across as haughty and insensitive. But imagine the position in which he found himself. Imagine being handed an orchestra that had suffered from decades of neglect and told to whip it into shape -- but don't go ruffling feathers.
We all knew that half the orchestra had to go, that standards were going to have to be ratcheted up more notches than we were willing to consider. But we weren't willing to pay the price. In the end, Cassuto realized he couldn't work under those conditions, and he quit.
Ma
s
sey, then Chen
Enter Andrew Massey, who'd been an assistant to Lorin Maazel in Cleveland and was on the conducting staff in San Francisco. Massey had his quirks, like everyone else. But this was a guy who made a major commitment to the organization. He was the only conductor actually to move here, something the Philharmonic board felt was important at the time. Massey and his family bought a house in East Greenwich, and he acted as though he cared.
On the podium, he was a crack technician who pushed the players by programming difficult Strauss tone poems and some of the more enigmatic Mahler and Sibelius symphonies.
But he was being forever distracted by battles with management. When several percussionists locked horns with management over the cost of transporting and renting instruments, Massey offered to make up the disputed amount -- thousands of dollars -- out of his own pocket so as not to disrupt rehearsals.
Poor, mild-mannered Zuohuang Chen, the Chinese-born conductor who took over for Massey, walked into this political quagmire and found himself up to his eyeballs in controversy before making a note of music. Chen ended up going back to China, preferring to face the Kafka-esque intrigues of a Communist regime rather than tough it out in Rhode Island.
What subscribers want
Fast-forward a few years, and you find an orcherstra that has gotten its act together. As quality has gone up, the Philharmonic has been able to attract such talent as Shabalin and Jojatu, and manager David Wax, who for years ran the acclaimed Houston Symphony, which is in another league. The argument over preserving an orchestra with community ties has long faded. Subscribers want good music.
And on that score, Rachleff has done a terrific job. But we all tend to look at change as a series of isolated events, and forget that a string of largely unsung music directors before him helped make these improvements possible.
So when Rachleff steps up on the Vets Auditorium stage Saturday to lead the orchestra in Hindemith's
Mathis der Mahler
and the Beethoven Violin Concerto, we ought to remember the likes of Cassuto, Massey, and Chen, conductors whose talents were often not appreciated because of extra-musical issues, but who have helped make the Philharmonic what it is today.
They sowed the seeds that are now bearing fruit.
Channing Gray and other Journal
arts writers share the At Large column.
Reach him by e-mail at cgray@projo.com.
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