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      An Operatic Mess at the San Carlo Theater

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      The San Carlo in Naples is at the center of an offstage drama in which each of two respected figures believes he is the house’s rightful leader.It’s hard to gauge whether the drama currently playing out behind the scenes at the San Carlo Opera House in Naples will end as “opera seria” (serious) or an “opera buffa” (comedy).Italy’s oldest opera house currently has two respected figures, each of whom believes he is its rightful general director after a convoluted dispute that critics say has cast the theater, and Italy, in an unflattering light.It has all the elements of high drama — conflict, tension, perhaps even vendetta — and is playing out like a farce, or, in the words of some Italian news outlets, “un pasticcio”: a mess.A quick plot synopsis:Act I. In May, Italy’s government passed a law that said general directors of the country’s 13 state-run opera theaters could not serve beyond their 70th birthday. That immediately terminated the contract of Stéphane Lissner, who had turned 70 in January, midway through his term as the general director of the San Carlo.He was the only general director immediately affected by the law, and there was open speculation in the news media that the law, which was passed as an urgent measure, had been drafted to specifically single him out.The French-born Lissner, who ran La Scala in Milan for a decade and the Paris Opera for six years, warned the board of the theater that he would challenge his termination.Act II. In August, the theater hired Carlo Fuortes, 64, as a replacement, not long after he resigned as the chief executive of Italy’s national broadcaster, RAI.Fuortes is an experienced manager who was praised for turning around the Rome Opera during a stint there as general director from 2013 to 2021. Italian news outlets widely reported that the hard-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wanted to replace Fuortes in the broadcast position with its own nominee. It was said that the San Carlo was meant to be a consolation prize for Fuortes, who began there on Sept. 1.Stéphane Lissner was the general director at San Carlo until May, when the Italian government passed a law stating that general directors at opera theaters could not serve beyond age 70.Pascal Le Segretain/Getty ImagesMr. Lissner was replaced by Carlo Fuortes, who before he was hired at the San Carlo, was the head of Italy’s national broadcaster, RAI.Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via ShutterstockAct III. On Sept. 12, a labor court reinstated Lissner, after his lawyers challenged the grounds for his dismissal. The culture ministry told the theater board to reinstate him, which it did on Monday evening, according to his lawyer. (The board declined repeated requests for comment.) Lissner is expected to return to Naples from Paris, where he has been since June, as soon as this week. But the board has also announced it would file appeal the court’s decision.What happens in Act IV remains to be seen. A review panel within the same labor court will now examine the decision to reinstate Lissner, who is again legally the theater’s general director. His lawyer, Pietro Fioruzzi, pointed out the “irony” that his client had been reinstated by the same theater board that was appealing that decision.“What happened is certainly not worthy of the history of Naples and the history of the San Carlo,” said Riccardo Realfonzo, an economics professor who sits on the board.Realfonzo had contested several management decisions at the theater, including some hirings and Lissner’s remuneration, which Realfonzo said was too high. He has also refused to sign off on the theater’s last two budgets, because they were not balanced, he said.As a representative of a regional government that funds the theater, he was concerned about the potential financial fallout in the event that the theater had to end up paying both general directors, or paying off one of them. He protested by not attending meetings.Alberto Mattioli, an opera critic who just published a book about Italy’s opera houses and their history, said the hastily passed law that ended Lissner’s run was also in line with Italy’s hard-right nationalist government drive to “put Italians first” at the top of the country’s cultural institutions, pointing out that the people it initially affected both happened to be French.Dominique Meyer, who runs La Scala and is also from France, would have to leave in 2025 when he turns 70. Officials at the Milan theater said legal experts were examining the new law to determine whether it would apply at La Scala, which is governed by a different statute than other opera theaters.Mattioli said that by using the San Carlo as a pawn in political deal-making the government had diminished the standing of the theater, one of Italy’s most prestigious institutions. “Everything that’s happened confirms that Italy is a really incomprehensible country,” Mattioli said.Fuortes has not spoken publicly about the situation and his lawyer declined to comment. His standing at the theater after Lissner’s reinstatement is unclear, but he has threatened legal repercussions if he is dismissed, according to a letter from his lawyer to the San Carlo board that was shared with The New York Times by a third party.It could take weeks for the review panel to hear the appeal. In the meantime, the drama is certain to continue. More

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      ‘Moonlight’ Writer Tarell Alvin McCraney to Lead Geffen Playhouse

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      The prominent Los Angeles nonprofit chose the playwright to oversee its artistic programming at a time of crisis for American theaters.Tarell Alvin McCraney, an acclaimed playwright who won an Oscar for writing the story that became the 2016 film “Moonlight,” has been named the next artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse, a prominent nonprofit theater in Los Angeles.The Geffen, like many regional theaters in the United States, has been hit by a downturn in the field — as of this spring, its subscriptions were 40 percent below prepandemic levels. But it was among the more innovative theater companies when theaters were closed during the pandemic, producing some popular virtual shows, and it is now in better shape than many.McCraney, 42, said he was fully aware of the crisis facing the field, which he said was the impetus for him to decide to step into leadership.“We’re at a place where, if I really love this, if I really want to effect change, I have to get in,” he said. “I can’t just sit on the sidelines. Across entertainment and across the arts there is a strong shift for everybody. Everybody is feeling this new something — that something else is coming — and I could wade through it, or I could be helpful by being in leadership.”McCraney, an important figure in the American theatrical landscape, won a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2013, and he recently wrapped up six years as chairman of the influential playwriting program at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama. He is also a member of the ensemble at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, and an associate artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain.His play “Choir Boy,” about a gay adolescent at an elite prep school, was staged on Broadway in 2019 and has been performed in theaters around the country, including at the Geffen. Among his other plays are “The Brothers Size” (a part of his “Brother/Sister Plays” trilogy), which has been discussed for a possible Broadway production, and “Head of Passes.”“Moonlight” was adapted from a script McCraney wrote called “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue”; in 2017 he and Barry Jenkins shared the Academy Award for adapted screenplay.McCraney said he would keep writing his own work, for the Geffen and for other theaters, even as he assumes this new role, in which he will choose the productions staged at the Geffen and oversee their artistic development.Stepping into a leadership role, he added, is not as much of a swerve as it might seem. “It’s been something that’s been with me for a long time,” he said. “As a young person in Miami, I always imagined I would run the Coconut Grove Playhouse, which has been shuttered for years.”The Geffen, founded in 1995, has two stages — the 512-seat Gil Cates Theater and the 149-seat Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater. The Geffen has 45 full-time staffers (and another 150 part-timers) and a $12 million annual budget. McCraney succeeds Matt Shakman as artistic director; Gil Cates Jr., whose father founded the theater, serves as its executive director and chief executive.McCraney currently lives in Miami, which is where he grew up; he said he would relocate to Los Angeles. He has worked in Los Angeles, not only on “Moonlight,” but also in the writers room for the television show “David Makes Man,” and for a variety of other projects, including a production of “Head of Passes” at the neighboring Center Theater Group.“Los Angeles is a city that is reminiscent of Miami,” he said, “and it has a theater scene that is often thought of as secondary, but I always thought it had a rich community of artists who were hybrid, and that’s exciting for me to connect to folks who have those multi-hyphenate careers.”Building stronger relationships with U.C.L.A., which is across the street from the Geffen, will be among his priorities, he said, as well as nourishing playwrights in a way that he felt nourished by nonprofit theaters early in his career.“We don’t necessarily take care of our artists,” he said. “I want to be more intentional about that.” More

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      Henry Timms Wants to Tear Down Walls at Lincoln Center

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      For evidence that all is not business as usual at Lincoln Center these days, look no further than its stately travertine campus, which, for much of the summer, was dominated by a giant glittering disco ball, pink and purple flowers painted on the sidewalk and a flock of 200 flamingo lawn ornaments.“There are some who will reasonably eye-roll at this,” said Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, standing on the plaza recently. “I get it. But it sends a message that we are here to have some fun.”“We can afford,” he said, “to loosen up a little.”Since taking the helm in 2019, Timms has been on a mission to remake Lincoln Center. Having helped finally push through the long-delayed $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, he is working to forge closer ties with the city and to bring more diversity to the center’s staff, board and audiences.Now he wants to tear down the barriers that literally wall the campus off from Amsterdam Avenue, with its neighboring housing projects, schools and new developments. But as Lincoln Center rethinks its programming — this summer’s festival included hip-hop, K-pop and an LGBTQ mariachi group — it has drawn some criticism for presenting less classical music and international theater.For the summer, Lincoln Center hung up a disco ball on the plaza.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesThis summer’s festival — which included more popular programming than in the past and choose-what-you-pay tickets for some events — attracted more than 380,000 people, officials said, many of whom were new to the campus. Among them was Sandy Mendez, a saleswoman who lives in Washington Heights, and saw her first Lincoln Center performance, a comedy show, after coming across an advertisement at a community center. She took photos in front of the disco ball with her husband and two children.“It feels like a dance club here,” said Mendez, 42, “not a performing arts center.”It is the kind of observation that both Timms’s admirers and his detractors might make.Running Lincoln Center is not easy. The center acts as landlord to the independent arts organizations on its campus, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet and the New York Philharmonic, but has little power over them, since each has its own leadership, board and budget.Linc. Inc., as it’s known, also presents its own work, which has sometimes led to tensions with constituents. Reynold Levy, its president for more than a decade, called his memoir “They Told Me Not to Take That Job.” After he left, in 2013, Lincoln Center cycled through four leadership teams in five years before appointing Timms in 2019.The British-born Timms, 46, who previously led the 92nd Street Y, helped create #GivingTuesday and co-wrote “New Power,” a book exploring bottom-up leadership, including movements like #MeToo and social networks like Facebook. Now he is trying to apply some of those participatory principles at Lincoln Center. He said his efforts were not “some new trendy idea” but a response to the fact that the center has for too long been disconnected from the community.“We very much came with an agenda, which was we were going to tell a different kind of story about Lincoln Center,” Timms said, “to fundamentally shift the institution in terms of who leads it, who represents it, who’s on our staff, who’s on our stages, who’s in our audiences.”Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the new restaurant at Geffen Hall, has been a hit with critics and is drawing crowds.Nico Schinco for The New York Times“We have a long way to go as an organization — nobody at Lincoln Center is taking a bow,” he added in an interview at Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the new restaurant at Geffen Hall that critics have named one of the best in the city. “But relative to where we were, I feel like we’ve made good progress.”Nevertheless, the reduction in programming, and the shift away from classical music and theater to other genres, has raised questions. Joseph W. Polisi, a former president of the Juilliard School who has written a history of Lincoln Center, said that Timms’s vision was a “sea change” for the center that could come at a cost.“It leaves a gap in music programming in New York City that is not being filled — it can’t be filled,” he said. “All the artistic leaders I know are fully in support of more program diversity at Lincoln Center. Now the question is, how far does the pendulum swing?”The critic Alex Ross recently wrote in The New Yorker that the new approach seemed “fundamentally out of step with Lincoln Center and its public, both extant and potential.”The conductor Jonathon Heyward will lead a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterBut Timms pushes back on such criticism, partly by pointing out that “we have just spent four years through a pandemic, and half a billion dollars, creating a concert hall to house the New York Philharmonic” and noting that the center had hired Jonathon Heyward, who recently became the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, to lead a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.“Lincoln Center was founded as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; it was not founded as Lincoln Center for the Classical Arts,” Timms said. “You go back to the beginning and there’s a reason Mahalia Jackson was playing here. And it’s not because we’re only supposed to be about the opera and the ballet.”Summers at Lincoln Center look different now. The old Lincoln Center Festival was scrapped a few years before Timms arrived, and with it the large-scale, ambitious productions it brought each summer from around the world, including Noh theater and Kabuki theater from Japan, Indonesian dance and Chinese opera. Lincoln Center’s programming is now overseen by Shanta Thake, its chief artistic officer, who was formerly an associate artistic director at the Public Theater. She and Timms have replaced the Mostly Mozart Festival, which had focused on classical music and recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, with the more eclectic Summer for the City festival.Portia and the American Composers Orchestra at “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,” which Lincoln Center staged in Damrosch Park as part of its Summer for the City festival.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln Center“How do we build on this promise of being a performing arts center for all New Yorkers?” Thake asked. “How do we not rest on our laurels but push for what a performing arts center needs to be right now? Everybody’s willing to have hard conversations.”The coming fall and winter season will feature an array of classical offerings, including a new production of Henry Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” and a performance of Philip Glass’s piano études. There will also be more experimental fare in line with the center’s new vision, including a reimagining of “The Sound of Music” through a “utopian, Afrofuturistic lens,” featuring gospel, funk, soul and Afrobeat music.Timms has also prioritized diversity backstage: of the 109 current members of the executive and senior management teams, about 60 percent are women and nearly 40 percent are people of color. In addition, the center recently started a two-year fellowship program to develop a diverse pipeline of potential board members for the resident organizations; three have been placed as trustees and three more have elections pending.Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, who serves on Lincoln Center’s board, praised Timms as a “once-in-a-generation leader” who “genuinely understands that diversity correlates with excellence.”A summer dance party on the Lincoln Center plaza.Mohamed Sadek for The New York TimesThe ballet dancer Misty Copeland, who joined Lincoln Center’s board under Timms, commended his spearheading of the Amsterdam Avenue project, a long-neglected plan to make right Lincoln Center’s initial razing of the low-income San Juan Hill neighborhood where the performing arts complex was built.“He does not shy away from a history that may not look clean and sparkly,” Copeland said. “I don’t think I could imagine 10 years ago that this is where Lincoln Center would be.”Timms, whose mother was an illustrator from the United States and whose father was a British archaeologist, grew up in Exeter, England, where his family often attended regional theaters.“Our childhood was full of ideas and the arts,” he said. “We had access and experience and ownership. You felt like you were a part of something.”He graduated from Durham University in England and landed a job overseeing programming at the 92nd Street Y in 2008, where he helped start #GivingTuesday, a day of philanthropy after Black Friday and Cyber Monday that became a global success. In 2014, he was named the Y’s executive director.Steven R. Swartz, the new chairman of Lincoln Center, said Timms had won over the center’s board with his energy and ideas, quickly recognizing the organization’s main problems, including tensions with the constituents. “He just so quickly diagnosed what needed to be done,” Swartz said.And after years of false starts and bitter feuds, Timms built a good working relationship with the leaders of the Philharmonic — he and Deborah Borda, who was the orchestra’s president and chief executive, sometimes resolved disputes over coffee or martinis — and finally renovated Geffen Hall. By accelerating construction during the pandemic shutdown, they were able to open the reimagined hall ahead of schedule.“He was intent on moving past the history of animosity that existed between Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic,” said Borda, who stepped down at the end of June. “He put a premium on working together. He was essentially the right man at the right time at the right place.”Katherine G. Farley, who stepped down as Lincoln Center’s chairwoman in June, said Timms “has led the transformation of a traditional institution” and that he is “quick and eager to experiment.””Not everything works out,” she added. “When it doesn’t work, he’s quick to shut it down and try something else.”Like other arts institutions, Lincoln Center is still trying to recover from the pandemic shutdown, when the performing arts came to a halt for more than 18 months. The organization is spending less on programming than it did when Timms began his tenure: about $14 million in the fiscal year that ended in June 2022, down from $23 million in 2019, a decrease of about 40 percent that officials attributed in part to the fact that Geffen Hall remained closed for construction through the fiscal year of 2022.But fund-raising remains relatively strong, and the endowment has risen to about $268 million, compared to $258 million in 2019. Moody’s recently affirmed its A3 rating on the center’s $356 million of debt but revised its outlook to stable from negative, noting the completion of Geffen Hall and the center’s efforts to cut expenses and attract new audiences.And relations have eased with the constituent organizations — who historically competed with Lincoln Center for audiences, donors and attention.David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, reopened last year after a long-delayed renovation.Hilary Swift for The New York Times“He’s been very clear that it’s the job of Lincoln Center to honor and pay attention to and try to help all the constituents that make up Lincoln Center,” said Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said Timms had signaled to the constituents early in his tenure that the days of infighting were over. “Here was somebody who understood and really seemed to be listening,” he said. And Damian Woetzel, the president of Juilliard, said Timms had proven “tradition is not at war with innovation.”On a recent day, a team of Lincoln Center staff members inside Geffen Hall was conducting research to prepare for the Amsterdam Avenue project, asking visitors where they spent time on campus and what they would like to do more of: attend cultural events? meet friends? play games? exercise? A poster explained the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and said: “Help us make our campus more welcoming!”In a few hours, Timms would join a salsa band on the outdoor dance floor in a pair of coral-colored Nike Air Max sneakers.“Changing with the world isn’t just the right thing to do morally,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do strategically. And if leaders in a position like ours don’t lead this change, what on earth are you doing?” More

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      At Soho Rep, Eric Ting and Caleb Hammons to Join Leadership Team

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      Following the departures of Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, the two will join Cynthia Flowers as the company continues its shared leadership model.Eric Ting and Caleb Hammons will join Cynthia Flowers as the next directors of Soho Rep, the Lower Manhattan theater announced on Thursday.They will replace Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who had directed the Off Off Broadway company with Cynthia Flowers since 2019 under its shared leadership model. (Both women, who departed in June, have said they wanted to focus more on their own creative output.)“The spirit of the theater centers risk and experimentation,” said Ting, 50, who made his New York City directorial debut with the Jackie Sibblies Drury play “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915” at Soho Rep in 2012 before becoming the artistic director at the East Bay theater company Cal Shakes, a position he held until 2022. “There’s a boldness to the work and a kind of artistic rigor that I’ve never found anywhere else.”The size of the organization — with a 65-seat theater that has long been a home for experimental, formally inventive work — was part of the appeal for Hammons, who comes to the theater from the Fisher Center at Bard, an incubator for commercially promising new work in the Hudson Valley. (He has been the director of artistic planning and producing since 2020, after joining the organization as senior producer in 2013.)“After working at a larger organization outside the city, I knew I wanted to return to my roots in the smaller, scrappier and more experimental realm of theater,” said Hammons, 38, who previously served as a producer for Soho Rep from 2011-13.Flowers, who has been with the theater since 2012, said Hammons not only shares Soho Rep’s vision of trying to make its producing practices more equitable and sustainable, but also “has the practical experience to put those values into action.”And Ting, who recently directed the world premieres of Lloyd Suh’s “The Far Country” at the Atlantic Theater Company and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “The Comeuppance” at the Signature Theater, has long worked “to make theater more anti-racist and humane in a very intense way,” she said.Ting said he was drawn to Soho Rep, which produced Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon,” in 2014, and Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview,” in 2018, because of the premium the theater places on having practicing artists in leadership positions. He said he still plans to direct one or two shows each year at theaters in New York, “and also hopefully for Soho Rep from time to time.”As for Hammons, he said he plans to continue his career-long focus on sustainable and humane producing practices, including pay equity. That includes the continuation of Soho Rep’s Project Number One, a job creation program developed early in the pandemic that brings artists into the organization each season as salaried staff members with benefits. But he also wants to prioritize crew members.“We can’t put all our focus on just making strides to provide sustainable wages to artists when we aren’t taking the same consideration to providing sustainable wages to folks who work behind the scenes,” he said.Both men will start their roles in September. More

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      Louis Langrée Wraps Up a Quietly Transformative Era of Conducting

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      Rehearsals led by the conductor Louis Langrée tend to follow a trajectory. Early on, he speaks poetically and tells stories; during preparations for a May concert with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, where he is the music director, he explained Saint-Saëns with references to the Kyrie of a Mass and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. But then his language becomes technical and specific; that day, broad explanations of mood gave way to meticulous balance and bowing as the playing took shape like an increasingly detailed, fine sculpture.Langrée wasn’t afraid, at that point, to repeat a phrase until it was right. Musicians are capable of understanding a direction when it’s given to them, he said in an interview later, “but they need to feel it, physically.”The result is often an interpretation rich in specificity and color, to a degree that can impress even seasoned musicians. On that program in Cincinnati, Vikingur Olafsson joined the orchestra as the soloist in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, and although he had toured the piece all season, he felt that rehearsing it with Langrée, a Frenchman, was like “talking about Chopin with someone in Warsaw.” And, Olafsson added, “there were things that I hadn’t heard before, and that’s a big compliment.”And yet, at 62, Langrée has never been one of the world’s most famous or sought-after conductors. His career has been a steady climb of prestige and quality, quietly remarkable but undersung even as he has transformed ensembles: in Cincinnati, where he has been at the podium for a decade, and in New York, where he has been the music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra since 2003.Langrée conducting in Cincinnati. “He’d rather leave five years too early,” Jonathan Martin, the orchestra’s chief executive, said, “than stay five minutes too late.”Madeleine Hordinski for The New York TimesHis time at both posts, though, is coming to an end. Lincoln Center has dropped the Mostly Mozart Festival, keeping its orchestra but changing its music director and name, so Langrée is set to depart this summer at the end of his contract; and his tenure in Cincinnati concludes next season. All this, as he settles into his new job as the leader — not the conductor — of the Opéra Comique in Paris.Cincinnati, which is still searching for his successor, will have a mourning period, said Jonathan Martin, that orchestra’s chief executive. But Langrée is returning to France on a high note.“He’d rather leave five years too early,” Martin said, “than stay five minutes too late.”BORN IN MULHOUSE, France, Langrée is a proud Alsatian, who studied in the region at the Strasbourg Conservatory. From there, his work was primarily as a vocal coach and assistant conductor, at institutions including the Orchestre de Paris, where he encountered eminences like Pierre Boulez, Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim.Solti passed down a bit of wisdom for conductors he had heard from Richard Strauss: Go into the hall to listen. Langrée doesn’t always need to do that, though, because he leans on the ears of his assistants, like Samuel Lee in Cincinnati. Langrée said that Lee “knows what I like,” and turned back to check in with him often during the May rehearsals, asking about articulation and whether specific textures were coming through.Starting in the early 1990s, Langrée began to pick up podium appointments in Europe, including at the Opéra National de Lyon and Glyndebourne Touring Opera. He said that his children practically grew up at Glyndebourne, in England; his daughter, Céleste, is now studying scenic design at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, he added, because she was brought up by stage hands instead of nannies.Langrée first conducted the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in 1998, in a program that included Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor. He still remembers details of those rehearsals — working with the ensemble to perfect the style of a minuet by way of connecting the piece to “West Side Story” — and of quickly developing a relationship with the players, who were assembled from a variety of sources, like Lincoln Center institutions and Broadway.In 2002, he was appointed music director after the departure of the orchestra’s longtime conductor, Gerard Schwarz, and a strike that left the players’ morale battered. The ensemble was no critic’s favorite, but once Langrée took over, “he put his heart and soul into every aspect” of it, said Jane Moss, who shepherded Lincoln Center’s artistic programming from 1992 until 2020.Langrée rehearsing Saint-Saëns at Music Hall in Cincinnati.Madeleine Hordinski for The New York TimesThe orchestra, and the Mostly Mozart Festival, flourished under the leadership of Moss and Langrée. He hired most of the ensemble in its current form — he is particularly proud of Ryan Roberts, “this genius” from the New York Philharmonic, who recently joined as principal oboe — and steadily turned it into a powerhouse of Classical style.At the same time, the festival’s repertoire broadened, the programming including contemporary music; idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary performance; and international hits like George Benjamin’s opera “Written on Skin” and Barrie Kosky’s staging of “The Magic Flute.” The ambition, Moss said, flowed from her and Langrée’s relationship as “muses to each other.”“She needed me, and I needed her,” Langrée said. Moss agreed, adding: “We fed each other a very special energy. And that came through to the audience. It was about communicating how much he loved music. It was a golden age, and he was really its star.”When Langrée took over in Cincinnati in 2013, he moved his family there based on advice he had heard from Simon Rattle about his time with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Rattle, he recalled, told him: “If you want to have a deep experience as a music director, you should live in the city. It’s more than conducting many concerts or programs. You have to understand the power and weakness of the city, and think about how the orchestra can be part of the solutions.”Choosing to live in Cincinnati, said Martin, the orchestra’s chief executive, “inevitably led to roots growing out into the community.” Langrée was even an active parent at Walnut Hills High School — where Céleste was involved in theater and his son, Antoine, played in the band; and where he conducted the school orchestra several times. He was tickled by the fact that he worked in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of the city, given that he was born “over the Rhine” in Alsace.Living there also meant that Langrée was present to see the Cincinnati Symphony through the darkest days of the pandemic shutdown; he devised ways, almost immediately, to commission new music and stream concerts for free online. “The thing that was important to Louis was to keep things going,” Martin said.The Cincinnati Symphony today, as with the Mostly Mozart orchestra, is largely a product of Langrée’s efforts. He was actively involved in the renovation of its home theater, Music Hall, and has hired, Martin said, “somewhere between a third and half” of the players. The ensemble has built a reputation on nurturing new works on the scale of concertos and symphonies; 65 of those were led by Langrée during his directorship. And, crucially, the group is performing at a level of excellence that reflects his taste for color and nuance.“He’s set a high bar,” Martin said. “It’s not going to be easy to find someone at least as good.”“He’s set a high bar,” Martin said of Langrée in Cincinnati. “It’s not going to be easy to find someone at least as good.”Madeleine Hordinski for The New York TimesLangrée told the Cincinnati Symphony in 2021 that he wouldn’t renew his contract there beyond the 2023-24 season. That year, he was hired by President Emmanuel Macron of France to run the Opéra Comique; it was, Langrée said, the first job he had ever applied for.His departure from Mostly Mozart, though, was blurrier. His contract there was set to conclude this summer, but there was no formal announcement about whether he would renew. The festival had gone dark in 2020, and by the time it would have come back, last year, Lincoln Center had a new artistic leader, Shanta Thake, who rolled out a summer series that included no festival proper and fewer performances than before by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. The 2019 edition was unceremoniously the festival’s last. How, Langrée said, could he renew for something that doesn’t exist?Langrée didn’t want to say more about the end of his Mostly Mozart tenure — by any measure a triumph of ensemble-building and musical curiosity. He wanted to protect the players, and for the orchestra to continue. Recently, Jonathon Heyward was made its music director, an appointment that came with the news that the group’s name would change.Thake said that, as a New Yorker who knows the Mostly Mozart orchestra as a beloved New York institution, she can see that going into Langrée’s final season, “they’re stronger than ever.” And there are still echt Langrée performances to come, like a pairing of Mozart’s C-minor Mass and a premiere by Amir ElSaffar, beginning July 25.Langrée moved to Paris once he started at the Opéra Comique, and when he is working in the United States, his day begins early, with about three hours of meetings before rehearsal starts. It’s a challenge, but in the future, he will conduct less: Beyond his concerts in Cincinnati next season, he has only a couple of guest appearances.In lieu of score study, he is now getting acquainted with the nonartistic side of his field, stressed now not about orchestral concerts, but about, say, the effect of inflation on the cost of running a theater.“It’s the last major project of my life,” he said of his job with the Opéra Comique. He will conduct one production there each season. And, as a guest, he will lead a “much-reduced repertoire” that he wants to explore more deeply than he could as a music director. Those moments, which he referred to as a “luxury,” will almost be the easy part of his career’s new phase.“I come from a musical background,” Langrée said. “When you have to read these Excel things and have to balance budgets and work with subsidies from the government — now, I feel like I’ve been plunged into real life. And that’s hard.” More

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      in Theater

      The Shed Hires Boston Ballet’s Meredith Hodges as New C.E.O.

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      As the new arts space faces financial challenges, it tapped Meredith Hodges to take over its administrative leadership from Alex Poots, who will remain as artistic director.After a mixed beginning that was complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, the Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards announced Wednesday that it had tapped Meredith Hodges, known as Max, the executive director of the Boston Ballet, to become its new chief executive officer.“She is the right combination to join the Shed at this moment,” said Jonathan M. Tisch, who in April succeeded the Shed’s founding chairman, Daniel L. Doctoroff, and who — with his wife, Lizzie — donated $27.5 million in 2019 toward the building’s construction. “She is a proven leader who understands the business side of culture, but also has an affinity for the culture side of culture.”The chief executive position was initially held by Alex Poots, who previously founded the Manchester International Festival and served as the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory. But he gave up the chief executive title in January, when the organization said he would solely focus on his role as artistic director.Having opened with great promise in 2019, the Shed saw some of its initial ambitious programming meet with mixed reviews. And it had little time to build momentum or an audience before it was hit, like so many other cultural institutions, by the pandemic: 28 of its 107 full-time workers were laid off in July 2020, and its annual operating budget was reduced to $26.5 million from $46 million.In a telephone interview, Hodges, who will start later this year, said she felt confident about the institution’s prospects. “The Shed opened on the eve of one of the worst crises the art world has ever had to weather,” she said. “There is a huge amount to be proud of in the Shed’s short existence.”The Shed’s founding chairman, Doctoroff, who had been a deputy mayor under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, stepped back from the role because of illness.As mayor, Bloomberg helped jump-start the project by securing a $75 million city grant for the Shed, and he has personally donated $130 million of his own fortune toward the architecturally ambitious $475 million arts center.“Obviously it’s a very difficult moment for all cultural institutions,” Tisch said. “The Shed is no different.”Despite its economic challenges, the Shed has had some noteworthy successes, namely sold-out performances for “Straight Line Crazy,” the recent play about Robert Moses featuring Ralph Fiennes, and an ambitious three-part exhibition by the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno.Poots will report to Hodges, who said she felt “lucky and excited” to work with him and “to get to free Alex to put all his energy and attention on his passion.”Poots said that he looked forward to working with her. “Having her expertise will enable me to entirely focus on our artistic direction,” he said in a statement, “to produce and present ambitious new productions, and to develop new artistic formats.”Hodges described herself as “strategic” and “data driven.” Asked whether she had any targets for building the Shed’s audience, revenue or the endowment, Hodges said: “I’m a quantitative person, so I’m sure that will come.”Hodges, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, was also a senior associate consultant with Bain & Company.At the Boston Ballet, which she has led since 2014, Hodges more than doubled the endowment, to $36 million from $14 million; helped lead the organization’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; and built attendance to 170,000 for the company’s 2022-23 season, its second highest ever.Before going to the Boston Ballet, she served as the executive director of Gallim Dance, a contemporary dance company in Brooklyn, and in various roles at the Museum of Modern Art, including project director leading strategic development, membership and technology initiatives. More

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      in Television

      Ryan Seacrest to Succeed Pat Sajak as ‘Wheel of Fortune’ Host

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      The game show has demonstrated remarkable durability even as traditional television has declined in the wake of streaming entertainment.Ryan Seacrest, the dexterous Hollywood master of ceremonies, was named the next host of “Wheel of Fortune” on Tuesday, succeeding the longtime host Pat Sajak in 2024.The selection of a star like Mr. Seacrest by Sony Pictures Television, the studio behind the show, is a big bet on “Wheel of Fortune.” The show has demonstrated remarkable durability even as traditional television has declined in the wake of streaming entertainment.The swift decision by Sony executives, made just two weeks after Mr. Sajak announced he would step down next year, also suggests that they are hoping to avoid the succession fiasco that nearly overwhelmed their other hit game show, “Jeopardy!”Vanna White, Mr. Sajak’s longtime “Wheel of Fortune” co-host, is under contract for another year, and is in negotiations to continue with the show, said a person with knowledge of the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity.“I’m truly humbled to be stepping into the footsteps of the legendary Pat Sajak,” Mr. Seacrest said in a statement. “I can’t wait to continue the tradition of spinning the wheel and working alongside the great Vanna White.”In replacing Mr. Sajak, Mr. Seacrest will face a test: He’ll be replacing a host who is virtually synonymous with the show, like Bob Barker was with “The Price Is Right” or Alex Trebek with “Jeopardy!”Mr. Sajak, a former Los Angeles weatherman, as well as Ms. White, came to “Wheel of Fortune” in the early 1980s and turned the show into a major hit. Within a few years, “Wheel of Fortune” spawned board games, video games, casino slot machines and, eventually, a prime-time spinoff, “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune.”Though “Wheel of Fortune” hardly holds the same spot it once did in American culture — at its height in the 1980s, the game show had a nightly audience of more than 40 million viewers — it remains one of the most popular entertainment programs on television.At its height of popularity in the 1980s, “Wheel of Fortune” had a nightly audience of more than 40 million viewers.ABC, via Everett CollectionIn the most recent television season, “Wheel of Fortune” averaged 8.6 million viewers a night, just a shade behind the 9.1 million who watched “Jeopardy!,” according to Nielsen. Those audiences are nearly as big as anything on prime-time TV, aside from football games.Hosting a popular game show, which requires little more than a few days of work a month, is one of the most coveted jobs in all of entertainment. Landing the job adds another notch to Mr. Seacrest’s résumé, which has included stints as a daytime talk show host, competition series host, red carpet interviewer, radio host and New Year’s Eve master of ceremonies.Mr. Seacrest left “Live,” the morning show mainstay that he hosted with Kelly Ripa, this year after a successful six-year run. He continues to host ABC’s “American Idol,” which garnered an audience of more than six million this past television season, according to Nielsen.When Mr. Sajak announced on June 12 that he would be leaving the show, many in the entertainment industry thought the search for his replacement could take months. Still, succession speculation began immediately, and on social media many “Wheel of Fortune” fans called for Ms. White to take over as host. Puck reported last week that she was in negotiations for a new “Wheel of Fortune” contract.Underscoring just how much celebrity entertainers covet the position, Joy Behar remarked on “The View” two weeks ago that her co-host Whoopi Goldberg had interest in hosting “Wheel of Fortune.”“I want that job,” Ms. Goldberg replied definitively, to the cheers of the studio audience. “I think it would be lots of fun.”After Mr. Trebek died in 2020, Sony trotted out a rotating cast of potential “Jeopardy!” successors, who filled in as guest host for a week or two at a time. In 2021, Sony announced that Mike Richards, the show’s executive producer, would take over hosting duties at “Jeopardy!”But within a matter of days, reports surfaced that Mr. Richards had made a series of sexist and offensive remarks years earlier, and, amid a public uproar, he was pushed out of the job — first as host and then as executive producer of the show. It took nearly another year for Sony to announce that Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik would be the permanent hosts of “Jeopardy!”Over the last year, the drama surrounding “Jeopardy!” has settled down considerably, and the show has sustained its strong ratings.Two weeks ago, Mr. Jennings was asked on “The View” who should take replace Mr. Sajak.“That’s an interesting question,” Mr. Jennings said, adding: “Hopefully, ‘Wheel’ has got an envelope somewhere that says, ‘What to do when Pat packs it in.’” More

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      in Music

      For Riccardo Muti, a Grand Sort-of-Finale in Chicago

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      The concert had ended, and Riccardo Muti, the music director of the Chicago Symphony, was walking out of Orchestra Hall when he saw a banner in the lobby and stopped in his tracks.“Muti Conducts the Grand Finale of the 2022-23 Season,” it read. This was in May, with just a month of programs to go — culminating in performances of Beethoven’s mighty “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25, which will mark the end of Muti’s 13-year directorship.So when Muti, 81, began railing about the banner to his tiny entourage, it seemed like he must be joking: There could hardly be a grander finale to his acclaimed tenure. But it quickly became obvious that his anger was real.“I told them not to write ‘grand finale,’” he said, grimacing. “It’s a finale? And then I’m back in September?”The next morning, the offending banner was gone. His frustration was mostly silly, of course. The orchestra was just being factual in ginning up a little excitement at a climactic moment in the six-decade career of one of the most eminent figures in classical music.But Muti had a point. Since his successor has not yet been named, he will be continuing as a kind of shadow music director next season, and possibly longer. Leaving — yet not entirely leaving — on a high note, with the adoration of Chicago’s musicians and audiences, he has been sensitive that his farewell will seem like a grand anticlimax when he returns, just three months from now, for the fall opening concerts and a trip to Carnegie Hall.“‘He’s here again,’ they will say,” Muti speculated in an interview. “‘He’s back!’ It’s too much.”“I don’t blame him,” said Helen Zell, the former chair of the orchestra’s board, who endowed Muti’s music director position. “Just as courting him was a big, long process, the exit is just as challenging.”Between the complicated beginning and ending, though, Muti’s time in Chicago has been widely reckoned an enormous success. His performances of a broad swath of repertoire — his signature Italian operas in concert, Beethoven symphonies, world premieres, rarities of the past, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner, Florence Price, Philip Glass — have been pristine yet intense, powerful yet graceful.Muti, who was born in Naples and raised in Puglia, is European to the core. Here, he conducts in 2021 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he was music director for 20 years./EPA, via ShutterstockMuti leading the Vienna Philharmonic on New Year’s Day 2021; he will conduct the orchestra on the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony next spring./EPA, via Shutterstock“He took the great Chicago Symphony Orchestra and made it even greater,” Jeff Alexander, the orchestra’s president, said. “The sound now is really spectacular — in a more mellifluous, mellow, lyrical way.”His departure is about more than inevitable turnover at an important ensemble, said Pierre Audi, the stage director and impresario. It’s a milestone as the generation of leaders born before the end of World War II passes — and, with it, the old-school conception of the commanding, protecting maestro.“Muti will leave Chicago, and that’s it,” Audi said. “It’s the beginning of the end.”Muti was born, as he loves to tell people, in Naples and raised in Puglia. His longest-held position was nearly 20 years at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and his most lasting affiliation has been with the Vienna Philharmonic, which names no chief conductor. (He will lead that orchestra on the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony next spring.) He is European to the core.Yet perhaps his most triumphant stints have been with two American ensembles: Chicago and, through the 1980s, the Philadelphia Orchestra. When he arrived in Philadelphia, he was an upstart in his 30s, taking over after four decades of Eugene Ormandy.Ormandy had built an ensemble that was thick and lush, particularly in its famous strings, and he bathed every work in a uniform butteriness: The composer served the sound. Muti aimed to reverse that dynamic, creating distinct styles for Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky — adding a flexibility that took the group, as the violinist Barbara Govatos said, “from the Cadillac of orchestras to the Ferrari.”He surprised the still-enamored musicians when he left in the early 1990s, partly because of the difficulty balancing his work with La Scala and partly because plans for a new hall in Philadelphia were stagnating. As he focused on Milan, Muti said he had no interest in another music director position in America, with all the attendant extramusical responsibilities.The New York Philharmonic nevertheless thought — twice — that it was on the verge of hiring him. Chicago ended up luckier after Daniel Barenboim announced in 2004 that he was leaving. Watching Muti conduct in Paris early the next year, Deborah Rutter, then president in Chicago, told a colleague, “If we can do it, this is the one it should be.”“There is a sort of electrical current to the energy he brings to his music-making,” Rutter said recently. “And that sort of hyper-focused energy is something I would describe as being very Chicago-like.”Muti’s relationship with La Scala was foundering, but he hadn’t appeared with the Chicago Symphony since the 1970s. He and Rutter agreed he would come in 2006, but he canceled, which was crushing. She lured him back with dates the next fall, along with a European tour.“I was too tired to travel, to start a new adventure,” Muti said. “But when I came back here, immediately it was something that happened between me and the orchestra.”Perhaps Muti’s most triumphant stints have been with two American ensembles: Chicago and, through the 1980s, the Philadelphia Orchestra. Lelli & MasottiThe critic Andrew Patner, describing those 2007 performances, wrote, “By the second date, the Italian maestro almost seemed like an old friend.” After the tour, Muti received a box of handwritten letters from the players, a personal touch that helped seal the deal.“There was an ecstatic reception he had when he was in Chicago, from the press and the public,” said Zarin Mehta, then the president of the New York Philharmonic. “He was treated with total respect in New York, but not with the ecstatic admiration he gets in Chicago.”Barenboim had relaxed the ensemble’s sound from the muscular, stentorian days of Georg Solti, but it still had a resolute Germanic style. Under Muti, the orchestra has still been able to produce, say, a Beethoven’s Fifth of blistering force, but he generally wanted something more Italianate.“I found a great orchestra,” he said, “but not balanced. Everyone was speaking about the brass. The strings were a little too — not harsh, but hard. No perfume. And the woodwinds, they had good players, but no one spoke about the woodwinds. And there is another thing: I needed them to sing.”The diet he prescribed was heavy on Schubert and, of course, opera, particularly his beloved Verdi, prepared with unsparing attention to detail. “Otello,” in 2011, was ferociously dramatic; “Macbeth” (2013), a brooding march. “Falstaff” (2016) was witty, more delicate than slapstick; “Aida” (2019), coolly elegant; “Un Ballo in Maschera” (2022), meticulously sumptuous.“The relentless thing he will not back down on is the refinement — of line, of attack, of phrasing,” said James Smelser, a hornist. “He doesn’t make mistakes. There’s always clarity, preparedness, consistency.”Muti has proved enthusiastic about performing in the community, including events at juvenile detention facilities. He embraced a fellowship program seeking to increase the racial diversity of the players’ ranks. And after years of resisting, he even began to drop some of his complaints about appearing at endless donor events.There were troubles. In 2019, a musicians’ strike lasted nearly seven weeks; in an unusual move for a music director, Muti publicly sided with the players, and appeared with them on the picket line. During the pandemic, he agreed to stay on an extra year, but the pause in performances — which meant a pause in appearances by potential candidates — stalled the search for his successor.Since relations between him and the orchestra are far warmer than they were with Barenboim at the end of his tenure — when Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez agreed to take on responsibilities in the interregnum, before Muti was hired — it makes sense for him to help fill the coming gap.“I’ve worked in a few other places,” said Alexander, the orchestra’s president, “where it’s much more common that the music director disappears, or they come back once every three or five years. Early in our discussions with Maestro Muti about the end of his term, we said we wanted to keep seeing him for a number of weeks each season, which I think he was happy to hear.”But while Muti will finish the musician hiring and tenure processes he has started, it’s not yet clear who will oversee new auditions. He seems intent on maintaining some flexibility, partly in case he should want to scale back his commitment after his successor is announced: He said that he has told the orchestra’s administration — who knows how much in jest? — “If you choose somebody that really I don’t like, then I don’t know if I come back.”It takes little prompting for Muti to bemoan a host of cultural problems. “Today,” he said, bags heavy and dark under his eyes, “I think we are all lost.”Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHis replacement is the least of it. It takes little prompting for Muti to bemoan a host of cultural problems: the decline in music education, players and conductors too lazy to properly prepare or respect the letter of the score, what he views as the increasing distance between classical music and mainstream society.“Today,” he said, bags heavy and dark under his eyes, “I think we are all lost.”But his melancholy melts away when he’s on the podium, particularly in rehearsals that he leads with a kind of merry rigor, laughter snapping into a crisp downbeat. There was an endearing, oddball quality to the program he led near the end of May, telescoping between the intimate and the grand.A Mozart divertimento was followed by William Kraft’s raucous Timpani Concerto No. 1. After intermission came one of Respighi’s lively and tender “Ancient Airs and Dances” suites, before his “Pines of Rome,” a Muti party piece that also closed his first concert as music director — in front of some 25,000 people in Millennium Park.When you think of “Pines,” you usually think of bombast. But the loudness comes very near the end; much of the piece is actually quite subtle, and the way to make the finale really potent is to handle the earlier stuff with atmospheric transparency.Muti now stretches those earlier passages into a hazily dreamlike, almost out of time quality, building only slowly to triumph. In the first performance, a Thursday evening, the pianist treated a diaphanous cadenza with too much flamboyance; Muti, visibly displeased on the podium, took him aside later, and the following afternoon, the passage was properly light and watery. Any exaggeration turns this piece into kitsch; even the brassy conclusion, under Muti’s baton, is shockingly elegant and clear.“At the end of ‘Pines of Rome,’” Smelser, the hornist, said, “most conductors are flailing around. The sheer volume, it’s out of control. But he’s never out of control, and he doesn’t want us to be out of control.”“The orchestra knows exactly what I want,” Muti said. “Many times, I don’t even conduct — or it seems that I don’t conduct. It’s been 13 years of wonderful musical experiences, and friendly. In 13 years, I haven’t had a second of fight with them. It’s been always like this.” More