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    Jorja Fleezanis, Violinist and Pioneering Concertmaster, Dies at 70

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    “Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she once said, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Jorja Fleezanis, a dynamic violinist and dedicated teacher who was one of the first women to serve as concertmaster of a major symphony orchestra in the United States, died on Sept. 9 at her home in Lake Leelanau, Mich. She was 70.The Minnesota Orchestra, in which Ms. Fleezanis played from the first chair for two decades, said the cause was “a cardiovascular event.”The concertmaster holds a key position with an orchestra, with considerable responsibility for defining its sound. Ms. Fleezanis was “a cornerstone player” in the Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vanska, its music director from 2003 to 2022, said in a phone interview.“You need to be hearing the whole score and acting as second in command to the conductor,” Ms. Fleezanis explained to The Boston Globe this year. “You need to understand all the possible interpretive ways the conductor can go at that moment, so you’re prepared to make a sharp left, or a gentle left. And you create that unification, that sense of ensemble, almost instantaneously.”Concertmasters often take solo turns, too, playing concertos with their own orchestras. Ms. Fleezanis used those opportunities to advocate for works that audiences were otherwise unlikely to hear from guest violinists — by Benjamin Britten, say, or Roger Sessions — and to promote new scores. She gave the premiere of John Adams’s Violin Concerto, in St. Paul in 1994, collaborating on a pathbreaking piece that won the Grawemeyer Award for composition a year later.For much of the history of the professional orchestra, the post of concertmaster had been reserved for men. Ms. Fleezanis, a “rebel with a violin,” as The Pioneer Press of St. Paul called her, sought to change that from early in her career.“Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she told The Cincinnati Post in 1976, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Ms. Fleezanis at first looked likely to break barriers at the San Francisco Symphony, which she joined as a second violinist in 1980, becoming its associate concertmaster in 1981. Sharing the first stand with Raymond Kobler, she played so “splendidly,” the critic Robert Commanday wrote in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988, that she struck observers “as the stronger of the two, and often the real leader of the section.”In a decision that Mr. Commanday described as “not very defensible,” the San Francisco Symphony’s music director, Herbert Blomstedt, stuck with his man, even after it became clear that the cost would be Ms. Fleezanis’s departure. She accepted the overtures of Mr. Blomstedt’s predecessor, Edo de Waart, who was eager to bring her to his new ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra.Hired as acting concertmaster in 1988, she was technically not the first woman to hold the full title of concertmaster at a major orchestra; by the time her position was made permanent early in 1989, Emmanuelle Boisvert had begun work as the concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony. But Ms. Fleezanis was a trailblazer at a time when the gender composition of American orchestras was starting to become more equitable.With her frank personality and her palpable intensity onstage, she was in large part responsible for the resurgence of the Minnesota Orchestra, which came to be widely regarded as one of the finest in the nation early in Mr. Vanska’s tenure, not least for the crisp precision and risk-taking sensibility of its strings. Like its concertmaster, the orchestra performed “with the kind of furious finesse that every composer prays for,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2005.“Early in my career I was told, ‘If you play like that in every concert, you’ll burn out,’ but I knew that wasn’t right,” Ms. Fleezanis said when she left the orchestra to become a professor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 2009. “Playing with full commitment gives back: It revitalizes me.”Ms. Fleezanis during a rehearsal for a weeklong Minnesota Orchestra program in 2006 presenting the work of then-emerging composers. Missy Mazzoli, left, was one of them. Greg Helgeson for The New York TimesJorja Kay Fleezanis was born on March 19, 1952, in Detroit. She was the younger of Parios and Kay Fleezanis’s two children. Her parents, who were Greek immigrants, were not musicians but loved music.She began learning violin at age 8, studying in Detroit with Ara Zerounian and Mischa Mischakoff, the former concertmaster of Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony. She later attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she played for the young James Levine in his University Circle Orchestra, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.It was still rare for women to be admitted to major orchestras when Ms. Fleezanis finished her studies. The Chicago Symphony’s music director, Georg Solti, required her to win three separate auditions and to play concerts right under his eye before he was willing to hire a “girl,” as he called her, for his second violin section in 1975. Her kinetic style did not match the staid demeanor of her colleagues, though, and she was all but alone among men. She left after a single season.“A solid musician with a big sound and surprising reserves of energy,” as The Cincinnati Enquirer described her in 1976, Ms. Fleezanis returned to Ohio to lead the newly formed Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. There she founded the Trio d’Accordo, a string trio. She later started the FOG Trio with the cellist Michael Grebanier and the pianist Garrick Ohlsson. An inspirational pedagogue, she held posts at the San Francisco Conservatory, the University of Minnesota and a variety of other institutions. She retired from the Jacobs School in 2020.While at the San Francisco Symphony, Ms. Fleezanis met Michael Steinberg, a former critic for The Boston Globe who was that orchestra’s publications director and artistic adviser. They married in 1983; he died in 2009. She is survived by her brother, Nickolas.In a 2009 conversation with Sam Bergman, a Minnesota Orchestra violist, Ms. Fleezanis said her husband had stoked her interest in unusual and new works. She recorded Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas, but she also recorded pieces by Stefan Wolpe and Aaron Jay Kernis. Nicholas Maw wrote a sonata for her, and John Tavener made her the “Divine Eros” in his vast, mystical “Ikon of Eros,” written for the Minnesota Orchestra’s centennial in 2002. After her husband’s death, she started a commissioning fund in their joint names.“There is a huge body of genius out there,” Ms. Fleezanis told Mr. Bergman, reflecting on the repertoire as she found it. “It’s just a question of how limited you want to choose to be.” More

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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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      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

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      Even When the Music Returns, Pandemic Pay Cuts Will Linger

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEven When the Music Returns, Pandemic Pay Cuts Will LingerThe coronavirus crisis is leading many performing arts unions to agree to concessions, but some fear it could change the balance of power between labor and management.The Metropolitan Opera says that it will need long-term pay cuts if it is to survive after the pandemic, but its workers, many of whom have gone unpaid since April, are resisting.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesDec. 17, 2020Updated 7:22 p.m. ETWhen the coronavirus outbreak brought performances across the United States to a screeching halt, many of the nation’s leading orchestras, dance companies and opera houses temporarily cut the pay of their workers, and some stopped paying them at all.Now, hopes that vaccines will allow performances to resume next fall are being tempered by fears that it could take years for hibernating box offices to rebound, and many battered institutions are turning to their unions to negotiate longer-term cuts that they say are necessary to survive.The crisis is posing a major challenge to performing arts unions, which in recent decades have been among the strongest in the nation. While musicians at some major ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, have agreed to steep cuts that would have been unthinkable in normal times, others are resisting. Some unions fear that the concessions being sought could outlast the pandemic, and reset the balance of power between management and labor.“Historically, labor agreements in the performing arts have been moving toward more money and better conditions,” said Thomas W. Morris, who led major orchestras in the United States for more than three decades. “And all of a sudden that isn’t an option. It’s a fundamental change in the pattern.”Nowhere is the tension between labor and management more acute than at the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts organization in the nation. Its artists and other workers, many of whom have been furloughed without pay since April, are resisting an offer by management to begin receiving reduced wages of up to $1,500 a week again in exchange for long-term pay cuts and changes in work rules. After failing to reach an agreement with its stagehands, the company locked them out last week, shortly before more were scheduled to return to work to begin building sets for next season.But musicians in a growing number of orchestras are agreeing to long-term cuts, recognizing that it could take years for audiences and philanthropy to bounce back after this extended period of darkened concert halls and theaters.The New York Philharmonic announced a new contract last week that will cut the base pay of musicians by 25 percent through mid-2023, to $115,128 a year from $153,504. Then some pay will be restored, but the players will still earn less than they did before the pandemic struck when the contract expires in 2024. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, one of the richest ensembles in the nation, agreed to a new three-year contract reducing pay by an average of 37 percent in the first year, gradually increasing in the following years but only recovering fully if the orchestra meets at least one of three financial benchmarks. The San Francisco Opera agreed to a new deal that halves the orchestra’s salary this season, but later makes up some ground.Unions play a major role behind the scenes at many arts organizations. The contracts they negotiate not only set pay, but also help establish a wide range of working conditions, from how many permanent members an orchestra should have to how many stagehands are needed backstage for each performance to whether Sunday performances require extra pay. It is not uncommon to see major orchestras abruptly end rehearsals mid-phrase — even when a famous maestro is conducting — when the digital rehearsal clock shows that they are about to go into overtime.Workers and artists say that many of these rules have improved health and safety and raised the quality of performances; management has often chafed at the expense.Many nonprofit performing arts organizations, including the Met, faced real financial challenges even before the pandemic struck. Now, they say, they are fighting for their survival, furloughing or laying off administrative staff and seeking relief from unions.After stagehands at the Metropolitan Opera rejected calls for a new contract with long-term cuts, management locked them out.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York Times“Unions are very reluctant to make concessions; it goes against everything trade union strategy has told them for 100-plus years,” said Susan J. Schurman, a professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University. “But clearly they understand that this is an unprecedented situation.”But at some institutions, including at the Met and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, workers are accusing management of trying to take advantage of the crisis to push for changes to their union contracts that they have long sought.Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, wants to cut the pay of workers by 30 percent, and restore only half of those cuts when box office revenues recover. He hopes to achieve most of the cuts by changing work rules. In a letter last month to the union representing the Met’s roughly 300 stagehands, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, he wrote that “the health crisis has compounded the Met’s previous financial fragility, threatening our very existence.” He also wrote that the average full-time stagehand cost the Met $260,000 last year, including benefits.“For the Met to get back on its feet, we’re all going to have to make financial concessions and sacrifices,” Mr. Gelb told employees in a video call last month.There are 15 unions at the Met, and while the leaders of several of the biggest have said that they are willing to agree to some cuts, they are pushing back on changes that would outlast the pandemic and redefine work rules that they have long fought for — especially after so many workers, including the orchestra, chorus and legions of backstage workers, have endured many months without pay. The Met’s orchestra, which is represented by Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, said in a statement that management was “exploiting this temporary situation to permanently gut contracts of the very workers who create the performances on their global stage.”Leonard Egert, the national executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents members of the chorus, soloists, dancers, stage managers and others at the Met, said that unions recognized the difficult reality and were willing to compromise. “It’s just that no one wants to sell out the future,” he said.Musicians at the New York Philharmonic, and at other orchestras, have agreed to lasting pay cuts to help their institutions recover after the pandemic. Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn Washington, the stagehands at the Kennedy Center are fighting a similar battle. David McIntyre, president of Local 22 of the alliance, said he had been in contentious negotiations with the Kennedy Center for months over its demand for a 25 percent pay cut, something that is hard for the union members to stomach after many of them have gone without pay since March.Management is also asking for concessions such as an elimination of time-and-a-half pay on Sundays, he said, a change that would be permanent rather than limited to the pandemic. The union stagehands are particularly indignant because the Kennedy Center received $25 million from the federal stimulus bill passed in March.“They’re just trying to get concessions out of us by leveraging a pandemic when none of us are working,” Mr. McIntyre said.A spokeswoman for the Kennedy Center, Eileen Andrews, said that several of the unions that it works with already accepted pay cuts, including the musicians with the National Symphony Orchestra, and that the recovery from the pandemic needed to be accomplished through “shared sacrifices.”Organizations have lost tens of millions of dollars in ticket revenue, and the outlook for the philanthropy that they rely on for their survival remains uncertain. As union negotiations proceed within the grids of video calls rather than around the typical stuffy board room tables, both sides recognize the financial fragility.In some respects the pandemic has altered the negotiating landscape. Unions, which normally have tremendous leverage because strikes halt performances, have less at the moment, when there are no performances to halt. Management’s leverage has changed as well. While the Met’s threat that it would lock out its stagehands unless they agreed to cuts carried less menace at a moment when most employees were not working anyway, its offer to begin paying workers who have gone without paychecks since April in exchange for long-term agreements may be hard to resist.At some institutions, memories of the destructiveness of recent labor disputes have helped foster cooperation during this crisis. At the Minnesota Orchestra, where a bitter lockout kept the concert hall dark for 16 months starting in 2012, management and the musicians agreed on a 25 percent pay cut through August. Some orchestras that have recently experienced labor strife, including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where the players were locked out in 2019, came together during the pandemic.Credit…Shawn Hubbard for The New York TimesAnd the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which had its own hard-fought labor dispute last year, managed to reach agreement on a five-year contract this summer, cutting the pay of players sharply at first before gradually increasing it again.The last time a national crisis of this magnitude affected every performing arts organization in the country was during the Great Recession, when organizations sought cuts to offset the decline in philanthropy and ticket sales, triggering strikes, lockouts and bitter disputes.Meredith Snow, the chair of International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians, which represents players, said that labor and management mostly appeared to be working together more amicably than they did then — at least for now.“There is more of a recognition that we need to be a unified face to the community,” said Ms. Snow, a violist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “and that we can’t be squabbling or we’re both going to go down.”“You come together,” she said, “or you sink.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More