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      Minnesota Orchestra Names Thomas Sondergard as Music Director

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      The Danish conductor succeeds Osmo Vänskä, who led the ensemble through the most tumultuous period in its history.The Minnesota Orchestra, after the departure of a longtime leader who shepherded the ensemble through the most tumultuous period in its history, announced on Thursday that the Danish conductor Thomas Sondergard would become its next music director.Sondergard, who has conducted the orchestra several times in the past year, currently leads the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and will continue to do so. In Minnesota, he succeeds Osmo Vänskä, who led the group for about 19 years — including during a lockout that was one of the most bitter labor disputes in classical music in recent history.A former principal conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Sondergard first conducted the Minnesota Orchestra in December, leading Richard Strauss’s tone poem “Ein Heldenleben,” among other pieces.“It was just a beautiful, open-minded, warm, interested first meeting with the ensemble,” Sondergard, 52, said in an interview. “I just felt instantly that there was a connection.”Sondergard brings an anti-authoritative spirit to an orchestra that, perhaps more than most, values a democratic approach, following a contentious period between musicians and orchestra leadership about a decade ago. In Scotland, he said, he has sought to encourage a collaborative ethos among musicians by asking them to rehearse — and sometimes perform — without a conductor during one week of the year; instead, the concertmaster steps in when a leader is required.“Musicians have long educations and loads of ideas about how music-making can be done,” Sondergard said. “They aren’t puppets.”In a news release announcing the appointment, R. Douglas Wright, the orchestra’s principal trombone, said that in the performance of “Ein Heldenleben,” Sondergard “trusted the musicians to do our job in a way that gave us great freedom.”The chair of the orchestra’s board of directors, Joseph T. Green, said he believed Sondergard would prove to be a “powerful advocate” for the musicians.A timpanist who joined the Royal Danish Orchestra in 1992, Sondergard has served as guest conductor for ensembles around the world, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony. In April, Sondergard returned to the Minnesota Orchestra to conduct Debussy’s “La Mer” and Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements.”Sondergard starts as music director designate in the 2022-23 season before formally stepping into the position in fall 2023; he’ll adopt the group’s missions, including helping the company weather the ongoing effects of the pandemic shutdown and diversifying both the ranks of the orchestra and of the composers whose music it plays. More

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      Goodman Theater Names Susan V. Booth as Artistic Director

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      Booth, who currently leads the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, will succeed Robert Falls, who is retiring after 35 years leading the Chicago mainstay.Susan V. Booth, the artistic director of the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, has been named the next artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, a dominant force in that city’s vibrant theater scene and one of the most influential regional nonprofits in the country.Booth, 59, who will assume the position in October, will be the first woman to lead the Goodman, which was founded in 1922. She succeeds Robert Falls, who announced last September that he would be stepping down after 35 years at the helm.The Goodman, which has an annual budget of $22 million and a staff of roughly 200, won the 1992 Tony Award for excellence in regional theater. Under Falls, it staged more than 150 world or American premieres, while also helping to transform Chicago from a theater scene known primarily for actors to one recognized as a seedbed for directors with artistic visions “too massive to be contained in a storefront theater,” as Chris Jones, the theater critic for The Chicago Tribune, wrote last year.The move will be something of a homecoming for Booth, who went to graduate school at Northwestern University, directed at theaters across the city and served as the Goodman’s director of new play development from 1993 to 2001. Her husband even proposed to her on the catwalk over the Goodman’s main stage on her last day on the job.In a telephone interview, Booth said she looked forward to diving back into Chicago’s rich theater scene, which she described as marked by a muscular, democratic and “radically diverse aesthetic.”“It was always a really fluid ecosystem, where artists would bounce between punky first-year start-ups in the backs of bars to the Goodman stage,” she said. “That fluidity meant that if there was a hierarchy, it had to do with your chops. It was glorious.”Her arrival at the Goodman comes at a time of widespread turnover in leadership in Chicago theater, because of retirement and upheavals around diversity and inclusion. She said one of her first tasks would be to figure out “where Chicago is now,” both artistically and civically, to determine how best to reach the widest audiences possible.She said she also wanted to work with the theater’s artistic collective to continue the Goodman’s tradition of “treating classics as if they were new plays” and giving prominent placement to challenging new works.“I love me a classic, and I have no interest in relegating that work to other theaters,” she said. “But I love the level playing field that’s created when you produce new work.”Booth led the Alliance in Atlanta for 21 years, where she doubled the operating budget (currently $20 million) and endowment, and led it to a 2007 Tony Award for regional excellence. The theater presented more than 85 world premieres, including six musicals that later went to Broadway, including “The Prom” and “The Color Purple.”It also worked to develop relationships with young playwrights, while cultivating new voices through programs like the Spelman Leadership Fellowship, a partnership with Spelman College in Atlanta aimed at addressing the lack of diversity in theater leadership.Asked about a signature project, she cited a staging of “Native Guard,” the former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey’s poem cycle exploring both her family history and the history of Black Civil War troops, which was staged originally at the Alliance and then later at the Atlanta History Center, amid its Civil War collections.“The theatricalization of it was as much about how the audience engaged with the work as about the source narrative,” she said. “It was a community event.”It was “theater designed to catalyze dialogue, to evoke action,” she added. “That mattered to me a lot.”The Goodman’s 2022-23 season, programmed by Falls, includes the world premieres of Rebecca Gilman’s play “Swing State,” about a Wisconsin community split by political polarization (one of two productions to be directed by Falls), and Christina Anderson’s “the ripple, the wave that carried me home,” about a family fighting for the integration of a swimming pool in Kansas in the 1960s. There will also be a 30th-anniversary production of “The Who’s Tommy,” directed by Des McAnuff.As for her own programming, Booth said she wanted the Goodman to be part of the ripe political and social debates of the moment, without losing sight of the pure pleasure of theater.“I don’t know a theater community in the country that isn’t creating the odd joy-bomb,” she said. More

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      Baltimore Symphony’s New Conductor Breaks a Racial Barrier

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      Jonathon Heyward is the first person of color to be the orchestra’s music director in its 106-year history.For decades, the 25 largest orchestras in the United States have been led almost exclusively by white men.That is going to change. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announced on Thursday that it had chosen Jonathon Heyward, a rising African American conductor, as its next music director. He will begin a five-year contract in Baltimore at the start of the 2023-24 season.Heyward, 29, who grew up in Charleston, S.C., the son of an African American father and a white mother, will be the first person of color to lead the orchestra in its 106-year history. In an interview, he said that he would work to expand the audience for classical music by bolstering education efforts and promoting underrepresented artists.“This art form is for everyone,” he said.Heyward will succeed Marin Alsop, the first female music director of a top-tier American orchestra, whose tenure in Baltimore ended last year. His appointment comes amid a broader reckoning in classical music over severe gender and racial disparities.The choice to hire Heyward is a milestone for Baltimore, where Black residents make up more than 60 percent of the population.“We are inspired by his artistry, passion and vision for the B.S.O., as well as for what his appointment means for budding musicians who will see themselves better reflected in such a position of artistic prominence,” Mark Hanson, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.Heyward, who is the chief conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie in Germany, has garnered a reputation as a sensitive and charismatic conductor. His appointment comes at a challenging time for orchestras, with many ensembles, including Baltimore’s, struggling to win back arts patrons because of the pandemic — a crisis that has exacerbated long-term declines in ticket sales and forced arts groups to look for new ways to reach audiences, including through livestreaming.The Baltimore Symphony recently announced that it would cut 10 concerts from its coming season at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, its longtime home, amid tepid ticket sales. Attendance in Baltimore during the 2021-22 season averaged at 40 percent of capacity, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Heyward said that he was confident audiences would eventually return, and added that he would work to make the orchestra more relatable by programming a wider variety of works, featuring a greater diversity of performers and moving some concerts away from traditional venues.“It’s simply a knack of being able to really understand what the community needs and listening to what the community needs and then being able to get them in the door,” he said.Although Heyward has been based in Europe for much of his career, he has started to appear more frequently in the United States. Last spring, he led several concerts in Baltimore, including the orchestra’s first performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15, as well as a benefit concert for Ukraine. He is scheduled to appear with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center in early August, leading a program that features the violinist Joshua Bell.In 2017, when Heyward was 25, he was widely praised for a series of performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, when he substituted at the last minute for an ill conductor. That program included a premiere by the composer Tania León, as well as works by Stravinsky, Glinka and Leonard Bernstein.“He knew when to lead and when to follow, effortlessly balancing his roles as a natural showman and sensitive collaborator in service to the music,” the critic Rick Schultz wrote in The Los Angeles Times.The conducting field has long struggled with a lack of diversity. In recent years, there has been only one Black music director in the top tier of American orchestras, and just a handful of leaders have been Latino or of Asian descent.With turnover expected soon at several major orchestras, there are signs of change. This season, Nathalie Stutzmann takes the podium at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She will be only the second woman to lead a top-tier American orchestra.Heyward will also be among the Baltimore Symphony’s youngest leaders. He began studying cello at 10. A graduate of the Boston Conservatory, he later served as an assistant conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in England, under its longtime music director, Mark Elder.Heyward said that his own experience of falling in love with classical music had convinced him of its enduring appeal.“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston, South Carolina, with no music education background, with no musicians in the family, can be enamored and amazed by this, by the best art form there is — classical music — then I think anyone can,” he said. “I plan on trying to prove that in many, many ways.” More

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      Bidding Farewell to His Theatrical Flock

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      In a 34-year run at New York Theater Workshop, James C. Nicola held that directors and writers are equal partners — and helped send “Rent” and “Hadestown” to Broadway.The Tony Awards ceremony had just wrapped up at Radio City Music Hall, and it was time for the parties. But for one honoree, James C. Nicola, the longtime artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, there would be no stop-off for toasts at the Plaza Hotel or after-midnight carousing at Tavern on the Green.Instead, he headed to a nearby parking garage, and settled behind the wheel of a rental van for the 40-minute ride back to the dorms at Adelphi University on Long Island, where he’d be sleeping that night. As far as he was concerned, there was no other choice: He had pickup duty at 10 a.m. for a group of young artists arriving by train for one of the summer workshops that have been a hallmark of his 34-year tenure at one of Off Broadway’s most beloved theaters.It’s not those gatherings that led the Tony committee to give Nicola a special honor. Or at least not fully. It’s also that his 199-seat East Village theater spawned the Tony-winning best musicals “Rent,” “Once” and “Hadestown.” That the recent hot-button plays “What the Constitution Means to Me”and “Slave Play” ran there. And that the theater’s support made a crucial difference to the careers of such writers as Tony Kushner, Lisa Kron and Doug Wright; the directors Rachel Chavkin, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Sam Gold; and many others.Nicola, center, with fellow Tony honorees Eileen Rivera and Ashruf “Osh” Ghanimah at the Tony Honors cocktail party in early June.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Tony came as a bonus after Nicola announced last year that he was stepping down, the first of the very long-serving artistic leaders of major nonprofit New York theaters to do so. And while he acknowledged that the theater-world reckoning over the whiteness of its leadership persuaded him it was time to leave, he departed on July 10 with what seems to be an unblemished record.At 72, his gait has slowed. But his ice-blue eyes still blaze when he gets animated about his affection for anagrams or who might star with Daniel Radcliffe later this year in “Merrily We Roll Along,” part of the last Workshop season he programmed. (The freelance director Patricia McGregor, a Black woman who has had an ongoing connection to the theater, is succeeding him in the top job.)Nicola spent five years working as a casting associate at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater). Comparisons with Papp and the far-larger Public are inevitably imprecise. But in his own less grandiose, more self-effacing way, Nicola is among the handful of artistic directors to make the biggest artistic impact on the New York theater world since — a magnet for iconoclastic talents who also helped develop a passel of shows with enormous commercial appeal.Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” was part of New York Theater Workshop’s 1995-96 season, a pivotal time for the theater. The cast included, from left: Jesse L. Martin, Adam Pascal, Wilson Heredia, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Rodney Hicks and Anthony Rapp.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicola at the theater in 1997. A son of the 1960s, he once imagined he’d be a Baptist minister.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore personally, he is one of the last of his kind: a son of the ’60s who imagined he’d be a Baptist minister and made a brick-and-mortar building into a flock and a chosen family.In a video acceptance speech for the Tony, Nicola put it this way: “Our community has aspired to be a sanctuary for a certain species of artist — theatermakers who embrace their divinity, who understand their sacred obligation to lead and inspire us.”And in one of several recent conversations that included breaks between work-in-progress readings at Adelphi and lunch at a favorite Hell’s Kitchen diner, he stood firm in his conviction that idealism is the fuel that kept him going, and that bringing people together to be challenged is the goal.“Nothing makes me angrier than to be called a gatekeeper,” he said.He added: “Nothing makes me happier than to be mad when I leave the theater.”RACHEL CHAVKIN HAD BEEN inviting Nicola and his then-associate artistic director, Linda Chapman, to take in her work since she was an M.F.A. student at Columbia University. After seeing “Three Pianos,” a rambunctious reimagining of Franz Schubert as the center of a drunken posse of musicians and fans, Nicola asked Chavkin and Alec Duffy, one of her collaborators on the show, to his denlike office on the second floor of the East Village building that abuts the theater.“I think he opened by saying ‘I think that’s one of the best pieces of theater I’ve ever seen,’” she recalled in a recent phone call. “Our jaws dropped.”Programming “Three Pianos” into the Workshop’s 2010-11 season was a career-changer for Chavkin, who, while continuing to do avant-garde work with the troupe known as the TEAM, also helped to shape the boundary-busting Broadway musicals “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” and “Hadestown.” (She is co-directing at the Workshop again next season, while aiming another musical, “Lempicka,” for Broadway.)Like Chavkin, the now Tony-winning director Sam Gold earned his union card directing at the Workshop, in 2007. He still recalls Nicola’s support when he wanted to hire a scenic designer with opera-world credits to build what would be an ambitious set for Betty Shamieh’s play “The Black Eyed.”“It’s the kind of thing that a director on their first job doesn’t get to do,” Gold said. “Jim would say, ‘I don’t want to limit your imagination.’”And the commitment went beyond a single show — part of Nicola’s belief that directors are equal partners with playwrights in an American theater system that tends to privilege the latter.David Oyelowo, left, and Daniel Craig in Sam Gold’s 2016 production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Over the years,” Gold said, “I’ve had very few people genuinely see me as an artist — who can relate one show to another, as someone with a lifelong project.”Whitney White, who was Gold’s assistant on the 2016 Workshop production of “Othello” that starred Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, speaks of Nicola as a presence in her life, not just a champion of her work. (White directed Aleshea Harris’s play “On Sugarland” at the Workshop this spring.)“I’ve spoken to him about men and love and theater and everything,” she said. “It’s a fully furnished table.”That’s not easy to find, even in nonprofit theaters that don’t have to obsess over the bottom line. “It’s a different style of artistic directorship — that you’re in community, in dialogue, not just a blip,” she added.NICOLA GREW UP OUTSIDE HARTFORD, Conn., gay and closeted, the oldest of four brothers in a middle-class family. In high school and then for a while at Tufts University, he took private singing lessons, imagining a career in opera or choral music. A year studying abroad took him to the Royal Court Theater in London, where he got interested in directing.Eventually, it helped lead him to the writing of the British experimentalist Caryl Churchill, a Royal Court favorite, whose work he helped champion at the New York Shakespeare Festival and at Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C., where he had a one-year directing fellowship that turned into seven more years as a producing associate.What became New York Theater Workshop had been presenting work around Manhattan for nearly a decade when Nicola raised his hand for the top job. In conversations with Stephen Graham, its founder and current board member, he learned that the theater, which was already funding fellowships for directors, was hungry to have a bigger public profile.“They wanted to change the form,” Nicola said. “What better could I hear?”Under Nicola, the theater staged Churchill’s work eight times, more than any other writer. But no figure is more associated with his tenure than the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove. After seeing his work in Europe, Nicola brought him to direct in the United States for the first time, adapting Eugene O’Neill’s unfinished play “More Stately Mansions,” in 1997.Two years later, his deconstruction of the Tennessee Williams classic “A Streetcar Named Desire” — Blanche, Stanley and Stella each spend stage time in the bathtub — heralded the van Hove/Workshop alliance as one of the most exciting (and divisive) destinations in New York theater.During Nicola’s reign the theater presented eight van Hove productions, capped in 2015 with “Lazarus,” a rock musical with a book by Enda Walsh and songs, new and old, by David Bowie, who was secretly battling cancer during its creation and died during its run.Ivo van Hove has directed eight productions at the Workshop, including the 2015 production of David Bowie and Enda Walsh’s “Lazarus,” with Michael C. Hall and Sophia Anne Caruso.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe circumstances had echoes of “Rent” — a show the theater began developing four years into Nicola’s tenure that had its final dress rehearsal at the Workshop on Jan. 25, 1996. That night its creator, Jonathan Larson, suddenly died of an aortic aneurysm.The “Rent” story — 12 years on Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize, productions all over the world — is show business canon. Royalties from that and other Broadway transfers helped boost the theater’s annual budget from $400,000 to $10 million in the Nicola era. But as he talked about “Rent” and “Lazarus,” Nicola hinted at the ways they might have turned out had tragedy not struck, their creators wrested from the process of art-making too soon.“Lazarus,” which was sped into production and where only van Hove knew of Bowie’s precarious health, was among the most challenging experiences of Nicola’s time at the Workshop. But he pinpoints his darkest days to 2006, when a planned staging of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” a solo play about an American demonstrator for Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, was pulled.Kushner and Harold Pinter, among others, accused the theater of capitulating to political pressure; the theater maintained it was only delaying the production, which originated at the Royal Court in London. Nicola had to return from Italy to defuse the situation, which he called a “misunderstanding that was threatening to the very heart of the institution.” (“Rachel Corrie” ended up running at another theater.)More recently, debates over representation in the theater world have encouraged in him a greater self-awareness. He pointed to Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” which was championed by his theater and by notable white male critics. He later came to learn that many Black women felt otherwise.“There are impulses that I have that feel like good and positive ones, and then learn that my response is not universal,” Nicola said.“It’s really good to think about the risks and possible outcomes,” he added, “but also not be intimidated by not being able to predict. To not retreat, not get cautious or conservative.”FINISH A 34-YEAR TERM running a major theater and the hosannas will come fast and furious.Besides the Tony, Nicola was celebrated at the Workshop’s annual gala, which had a diner theme in honor of his affection for humble food. There were speeches and a musical performance from some original “Rent” cast members, a drag queen and, for a finale, four veteran stage actresses enacting a “scene” from “The Golden Girls,” a Nicola favorite.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger,” Nicola said, reflecting on his career. Erik Tanner for The New York TimesWeeks later, several hundred friends and associates surprised him at the theater with a reading of Moss Hart’s backstage comedy “Light Up the Sky,” the last play he had directed at Arena Stage, with a cast that included the playwrights Lucas Hnath, Dael Orlandersmith and Kron; the performer Penny Arcade; and the producers Jeffrey Seller and Jordan Roth. (“I have lived this play my entire adult life,” a grateful Nicola said later.)Uptown and downtown, artful and kitschy — it’s an increasingly illusory divide that Nicola, who soaked up the work of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, has managed to happily bridge, personally and professionally.“He’ll be talking one minute about [the French director] Ariane Mnouchkine and the next he’ll be doing an Ethel Merman impression,” said Wright, whose Grand Guignol-ish Marquis de Sade play, “Quills,” was, along with “Rent,” in the 1995-96 season that brought a new level of starshine to the theater.Nicola proudly cops to being a musical-theater show queen, quoting “Funny Girl” in his gala acceptance speech and later pointing to a lyric from (shocking!) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” as explaining his mission: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”The “director in me” decided he needed a ritual way to bring closure to his time at the theater. So he and friends rode the Circle Line on the Fourth of July. “When I board the boat I will be leaving my old life and when I get off it, I will be entering my new life,” he said beforehand.As to what’s next, all he can propose is “opening myself up to new adventures.”In the meantime, he’s taken to writing letters of thanks, sending them into the world without knowing who will (or won’t) respond.One went to the theater department at Tufts.Another to the Little Theater of Manchester, Conn., where he appeared onstage as the Mock Turtle in “Alice in Wonderland,” and was first dazzled by the art of telling a story to an audience in public.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger — that there were many other possibilities,” he said. “To that 12- or 13-year-old boy, this is everything he aspired to. It happened.” More

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      The Academy Museum Names Jacqueline Stewart as New Leader

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      The film historian and preservationist specializes in Black cinema and silent movies. She had been serving as the institution’s chief artistic and programming officer.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Wednesday named Jacqueline Stewart, a film scholar who worked to make the long-delayed project a reality, as its new director and president.The museum’s former leader, Bill Kramer, was appointed chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that oversees the Oscars, last month. As the museum’s chief artistic and programming officer, Stewart worked closely with Kramer to bring the institution over the finish line amid pandemic challenges, and bring it up to date with social movements, like #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo, that exposed inequities in the film industry.Stewart, a film historian and preservationist with a specialty in Black cinema and silent films, is a professor in the cinema and media studies department at the University of Chicago. In 2019, she became the first Black host on the cable channel Turner Classic Movies when she stepped in to introduce the programming series Silent Sunday Nights. She is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, which advises the Librarian of Congress on the National Film Registry, and founded an organization on Chicago’s South Side that preserves and screens footage of everyday life there.At the museum, which opened in Los Angeles last year, Stewart has helped steer exhibitions, screenings and workshops; she has also hosted a new podcast under the museum’s banner that delved into key social and cultural moments in Oscars history.In a news release announcing the appointment, Stewart said she looked forward to working with the museum board and staff and with the academy itself:“Our ambition in opening the Academy Museum was to give Los Angeles and the world an unprecedented institution for understanding and appreciating the history and culture of cinema, in all its artistic glory and all its power to influence and reflect society,” she said in the release. “I feel deeply honored to have been chosen for this new role.” More

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      in Television

      Vince McMahon Steps Down From W.W.E. Amid Misconduct Investigation

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      Vince McMahon, a longtime executive for World Wrestling Entertainment who led professional wrestling from a sideshow curiosity into a mainstream phenomenon, has stepped down as chairman and chief executive while the company’s board investigates allegations of misconduct against him, the company said on Friday.Stephanie McMahon, his daughter, will take over as interim chief executive and chairwoman, the company said in a statement. Mr. McMahon will remain involved with W.W.E.’s creative content and “remains committed to cooperating with the review underway,” the company said.“I have pledged my complete cooperation to the investigation by the Special Committee, and I will do everything possible to support the investigation,” Mr. McMahon said in a statement. “I have also pledged to accept the findings and outcome of the investigation, whatever they are.”Mr. McMahon briefly appeared on “Friday Night SmackDown” at the beginning of the show. He stepped into the ring to applause.“I’m here simply to remind you of the four words we just saw,” Mr. McMahon told the crowd, referring to the W.W.E. signature at the beginning of the broadcast. “Those four words are ‘then, now, forever,’ and the most important word is ‘together.’ Welcome to SmackDown.”Mr. McMahon then dropped a microphone and stepped out of the ring, high-fiving fans as he left.On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. McMahon agreed to pay a secret $3 million settlement to an employee with whom he was said to have had an affair, and that the board had been investigating since April. The investigation unearthed other nondisclosure agreements involving claims of misconduct by Mr. McMahon, The Journal reported.A lawyer for Mr. McMahon told The Journal that the employee had not made any claims of harassment against Mr. McMahon and that he used personal funds to pay the settlement.Far from an anonymous executive, Mr. McMahon is among the most recognizable faces of professional wrestling, adopting a swagger-filled public persona who is often at the center of the on-screen action. Since taking over his father’s wrestling company in 1982, Mr. McMahon has presided over its ascent into a cultural giant, with more than $1 billion in revenue in 2021. W.W.E’s programs are aired in 30 languages and are distributed through NBCUniversal and Fox Sports, among others.The company said it had hired independent legal counsel to conduct the investigation, and would also work with an independent organization to review the company’s compliance program, human resources function and overall culture.Jesus Jiménez More

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      in Music

      New York Philharmonic Chooses Arts Veteran as Leader

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      Gary Ginstling, executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, will replace Deborah Borda as the orchestra’s president and chief executive next year.Come this fall, the New York Philharmonic will have a transformed home, when David Geffen Hall reopens after a $550 million renovation. In the not-so-distant future, the orchestra will also get a new music director to replace its departing conductor.On Friday, the orchestra announced another change: Gary Ginstling, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, will next year replace Deborah Borda, a revered, dynamic figure at the Philharmonic, as its president and chief executive.The appointment signals the start of a new era for the Philharmonic, America’s oldest symphony orchestra, which is working to attract new audiences as it recovers from the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic. While the orchestra seems to have weathered the worst of the crisis, the pandemic has brought fresh urgency to questions about changing audience habits and expanding into the digital sphere.Ginstling, who will join the Philharmonic this fall as executive director before succeeding Borda next year, said he wanted to seize on the momentum of the Geffen Hall renovation.“This is a singular moment in time when the orchestra is coming out of a really difficult period,” he said in an interview. “This new home is going to be really transformational for the musicians, for the public, for orchestras everywhere and for the city. There’s a chance for the Philharmonic to make the most of this moment and set itself up for long-term success.”The appointment marks a generational shift at the Philharmonic. Ginstling, 56, will take the reins from Borda, 72, who led the Philharmonic in the 1990s and returned in 2017 to shepherd the long-delayed renovation of Geffen Hall. The return of Borda, one of the nation’s most successful arts administrators, who in the interim helped transform the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of the country’s premier ensembles — moving it into a new home, stabilizing its shaky finances and appointing Gustavo Dudamel as its music director — was considered a coup for the orchestra, which at the time was struggling with deficits and fund-raising troubles.Borda said that with the hall reopening and the orchestra on firmer financial footing after the long pandemic shutdown, she felt it was time to step aside. She will leave her post on June 30, 2023, but stay on as an adviser to Ginstling and the Philharmonic’s board, assisting with fund-raising and other matters.Deborah Borda at the Philharmonic’s opening concert of the season in September 2021 at Alice Tully Hall.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times“Those of us in my generation, we’ve done our best, but it’s time to really support and introduce a new generation of leadership who will bring new ideas about everything,” she said in an interview. “This was the right time.”Borda began working with the board last year to find a successor. They were looking for a leader who could help guide the institution in a time of momentous transitions. After interviewing five candidates, the Philharmonic in May offered the job to Ginstling, who has managed orchestras in Cleveland, Indianapolis and Washington D.C.“We wanted somebody who had the experience, but who was also young enough to have a long runway,” Peter W. May, co-chairman of the Philharmonic’s board, said in an interview. “He also impressed us in the way he’s done outreach in the community.”After joining the National Symphony Orchestra in 2017, Ginstling experimented with new ways of reaching audiences, including by holding concerts in a 6,000-seat arena designed for rock music. He was credited with helping drive up ticket sales, subscriptions and donations. He worked closely with Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the National Symphony, whose contract there was recently extended through the end of the 2026-2027 season.In New York, Ginstling will face familiar challenges. Even before the pandemic, managing orchestras was difficult. Labor costs have risen. Ticket sales have declined as the old model of selling season subscriptions has died out. Robust fund-raising has become essential, as donations make up an ever larger share of orchestra budgets.The pandemic put new strains on the Philharmonic, which was forced to cancel its 2020-21 season, lay off staff and slash its musicians’ salaries by 25 percent. (The Philharmonic announced this week that it would soon reverse those cuts.)For all its devastation, the pandemic also brought an opportunity, allowing the orchestra to speed up the renovation schedule by a year and a half (the hall is now set to open on Oct. 7). Over the past year, the orchestra has been without a permanent home, roving among several different theaters, many of them smaller than Geffen.Ginstling, a clarinetist who has degrees from Yale, Juilliard and the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he would continue the Philharmonic’s efforts to present a diverse roster of composers and conductors.“If we are in a post-Covid world, and I’m not sure whether we are yet,” he said, “the biggest challenges are rebuilding audiences and then finding ways to connect with our communities and in new and different ways.”The Philharmonic is just beginning its search for a conductor to replace Jaap van Zweden, its maestro since 2018, who announced unexpectedly in September that he would step down at the end of the 2023-24 season. Conductors like Dudamel, Susanna Mälkki and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, among others, have been mentioned as possible contenders, though the field remains open.It is unclear whether the search will conclude before the end of Borda’s tenure. She said she was proceeding “full steam ahead” and would continue to offer advice if it is needed.In a statement, van Zweden, who last year said he would leave the orchestra because the pandemic had made him rethink his life and priorities, praised Borda’s stewardship of the orchestra.“The future and security of this orchestra is very important to me, and I am grateful to Deborah for leading with me from a position of strength,” he said. “I really look forward to welcoming Gary and to working with him.”The appointment is something of a homecoming for Ginstling, who grew up in New Jersey, the son of a Juilliard-trained pianist and a tax lawyer. His parents subscribed to Philharmonic concerts and he attended concerts featuring giants like Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta. He took up the clarinet in elementary school and later studied with a Philharmonic player.“I’ve long had a deep love and passion for orchestras and orchestral music,” he said, “and that really started with the New York Philharmonic.” More

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      A Conductor’s Tumultuous, Invaluable Tenure Ends in Minnesota

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      After 19 years, Osmo Vänskä is leaving a Minnesota Orchestra that once again stands proud after a nearly disastrous lockout.MINNEAPOLIS — Osmo Vänskä has said goodbye to the Minnesota Orchestra once before. But this time, it’s for real.In October 2013, at the nadir of one of the darkest periods any major American orchestra has faced, Vänskä resigned in protest over a lockout that was diminishing — and would come close to destroying — this ensemble, which he had spent a decade drilling to perfection as its music director.A few days later, blazing a trail for conductors to side openly with their players during labor strife, he led three concerts with the orchestra’s musicians, whose management had exiled them from their own hall. Vänskä asked the adoring audience members to withhold their ovations after his encore of Sibelius’s “Valse Triste,” a dance with death that he led in fury. He left in silence, and to tears.Eight seasons later, any tears at his departure will be because of his triumph.The Minnesota Orchestra stands proud again. That lockout ended shortly after Vänskä’s angry resignation, and he returned in April 2014, as if by popular acclamation. After 19 years as the ensemble’s conductor, he bids farewell with Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 at Orchestra Hall here on Sunday.“I don’t want to say this is a happy family, because there is not a happy family in the world,” Vänskä, 69, said jokingly during an interview last week. “But it is as happy as it is possible to have.”His departure is a moment to take stock of why his tenure, one of the most tumultuous in the history of American orchestras, has been so important.Vänskä conducting the orchestra on June 2 in a program that ended with Jaakko Kuusisto’s Symphony.Travis AndersonBorn and trained in Finland, Vänskä, a dynamic podium presence, arrived in Minneapolis in 2003, declaring that he would make the Minnesotans “the best orchestra in this country in four or five years.” He pursued that ambition with an intensity that he now admits was too aggressively intolerant of imperfections in rehearsal. But there was a time around a decade ago when critics habitually hailed the ensemble as one of the greatest in the country — or anywhere — for its willingness to take risks, its rhythmic verve, its crisp articulation and its unanimity of purpose.Ask Vänskä — who led the orchestra on a diplomatic mission to Cuba in 2015 and a pioneering tour to South Africa in 2018 — what he is most proud of, and he lauds the musicians for always playing, he said, as though their work is about “more than getting a paycheck.”Consult the recorded legacy he has left with the BIS label, one at least equal in stature to those of predecessors including Dimitri Mitropoulos and Antal Dorati, and it would be difficult to disagree. If Vänskä’s Mahler cycle misfired in symphonies that need more extroversion than reserve, it also includes a Tenth that is among the most convincing available. His Sibelius remains admired, richer than his taut, biting earlier set with the Lahti Symphony. His enthralling Beethoven still sounds as fresh as it did when it first came out, and remains arguably the finest such survey of the century so far.These are signal achievements, but Vänskä’s time in charge has been about more than the pursuit of musical excellence. There was ample proof of that, though, in a concert here on June 2 that ended with the premiere of his friend Jaakko Kuusisto’s Symphony — an unsparing, frightening reflection on mortality that was left unfinished at Kuusisto’s death in February from a brain tumor and completed by his brother, Pekka.Now, after a lockout and a pandemic lockdown, what seems to matter more than national or international acclaim is that the ensemble tries to be the best it can be for this city, which Vänskä — with Erin Keefe, his wife of seven years and the orchestra’s concertmaster — will continue to call home.“We are stronger when a crisis comes if we are connected to this community,” he said. “We have to be there for this community, and then they will take care of us.”Being there requires first of all that the Minnesota Orchestra continues to exist, an imperative that was once not as obvious as it should have been. “We have to be there for this community,” Vänskä said, “and then they will take care of us.”Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesAlthough the ensemble’s underlying finances have improved since the lockout, its chief executive Michelle Miller Burns said, it continues to face the sobering constraints familiar to many orchestras. Even before pandemic restrictions ravaged its income in the last two years, the balanced budgets that had steadily built confidence after 2014 had yielded to a record deficit of $8.8 million in 2019 — a reminder of grimmer times.The spirit and structures of transparency, consultation and collaboration that emerged from the lockout served the orchestra then and during the pandemic. In September 2020, the musicians willingly took a temporary 25 percent pay cut to help right the finances, and no full-time administrative staff were laid off. Vänskä chose to forgo 35 percent of his salary.Despite the pain, no major problems are expected in coming negotiations over the musicians’ contract, which expires in August. The financial plan remains to try to raise revenue, rather than impose cuts.“Every decision we make, we are making it together,” said Sam Bergman, a violist and the chair of the orchestra committee. “There is a greater trust level than there would be if it was just decisions handed down from on high.”Much of that collaborative impulse has come from the musicians, as well as Burns and her predecessor, Kevin Smith, but Bergman said that Vänskä had also taken a leading role in helping to foster a healthy culture at the orchestra, not least in an artistic planning process that includes musicians more meaningfully, such as in auditions and repertory choices.“When you have musicians and an administration that want a collaborative working model, a music director who is too easily threatened could potentially be a huge impediment,” Bergman said. “He has embraced the idea that the musicians need to take some ownership of the organization, and to lead in the way that we interface with the community. And he didn’t have to do that.”That has been particularly true of the players’ efforts to address racism in classical music and beyond. Their work predated the murder of George Floyd here in May 2020, Bergman said, but intensified after it. The issue struck even closer to home in February, when Minneapolis Police Department officers fatally shot Amir Locke in an apartment across the street from the stage door.Concerts that included Joel Thompson’s “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed” in May came with an exhibition mounted in conjunction with the George Floyd Global Memorial; after Locke’s name was spray painted onto Orchestra Hall during protests, the administration invited teen artists to commemorate him more formally.Among other initiatives, the orchestra has also started a musician-led project to record works by Black composers, including Margaret Bonds and Ulysses Kay, that have not received professional recordings. And it continues to work with the Sphinx Organization, three of whose affiliates held one-year positions in the strings this season, and whose Virtuosi ensemble shared the stage last week.Vänskä at the June 2 Minnesota Orchestra performance in Minneapolis, where he plans to continue living after stepping down as music director.Travis AndersonAll this is intended to be just a beginning, though one that goes further than the token efforts of many other orchestras. Laurie Greeno, a former co-chair of Orchestrate Excellence — one of the two main community groups that sprang up during the lockout — and who later joined the board of directors, said the board was eager to diversify a roster that remains 84 percent white.“If you look at just the demographics out 30 years,” Greeno said, “this organization will not exist if it’s not relevant.”Vänskä, for his part, has embraced this agenda in planning recent seasons; subscription programs in Minnesota now routinely include at least one work by a composer of color.“We cannot say that this is our style, and we just play this and that,” he said of the inherited canon, and insisted that elevating underrepresented composers does not mean compromising on quality or taking a box-office risk. “No. We have to change.”Vänskä’s blend of musical ability and steadfast local commitment will make him difficult to replace. He will serve as conductor laureate, but the organization remains in no hurry to confirm his successor, four years after he announced that he would leave.“Someone who is going to really embrace what and who this orchestra is, is really important,” Burns said of the search committee’s priorities. “I think that is going to be well indicated by how engaged and active in this community our next music director is.”The roster for next season offers few clues. Fabien Gabel and Dima Slobodeniouk have been mentioned in rapidly changing lists of candidates in the local press. Otherwise, there is a blend of experienced hands like Donald Runnicles, midcareer maestros like Thomas Sondergard and Pablo Heras-Casado, and younger possibilities, including Dalia Stasevska and Ryan Bancroft, a Californian who, at 32, was recently announced as the chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic.Vänskä has no immediate plans to raise another orchestra to the heights that he insists on. His brief dalliance as music director of the troubled Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra ends this year, and he is in no rush to find a new long-term post.“The orchestra must be ready to work hard,” he said of any potential music directorship. “There are orchestras that don’t want to work, and we both start to hate each other pretty soon. The good thing is that it is not a must for me to get a new job. I can guest conduct until it comes to the end.”He continued: “That’s the only thing I can do, to make music. If I stopped right now, I would go mad in a month.” More