IN-BETWEENER: Joseph Silverstein is helping keep things going at the PSO. |
The Portland Symphony Orchestra sees light at the end of the tunnel. For its second season, it has been, er, conducting a search for a music director to succeed Toshiyuki Shimada, who led the PSO for an unprecedented 20 years. Two hundred applications later, the search committee is homing in on its target — a new leader for the region’s most popular and best-loved professional orchestra.
“It’s been a tumultuous time without a music director,” says Ari Solotoff, PSO’s executive director, “but we’ve come to recognize the superior quality of the orchestra. They have taken the best from, and given their best to, the guest conductors.”
After two seasons packed with numerous conductors, many of whom were finalists in the search, stability is on the way. Joseph Silverstein, a self-proclaimed “in-betweener,” and a former concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, will serve as the artistic advisor for the 2007-2008 season, and will conduct at least four performances. Silverstein has earned a reputation for leading orchestras through times of transition, and has a 40-year history with the PSO, appearing as both soloist and conductor. In selecting programs for next season, he looked at lists of past repertoires, and pieces the orchestra had never performed (such as Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique). “I wanted to further enhance the musical experience of the audience and let the orchestra expand itself,” Silverstein explains.
Gordon Gayer, a PSO trustee who chairs the search committee consisting of four orchestra musicians and four trustees, says “the guest conductorship experience is the final interview” for prospective music directors. At a meeting with the full orchestra earlier in the year, Gayer was asked by a musician, “Are you going to pick somebody the musicians don’t like?” Chuckling at a press conference thereafter, Gayer responded, “now if we did that, first of all [concertmaster] Charles Dimmick would throw a shoe at me. And never mind having to deal with [principal oboist] Neil Boyer backstage.” The musicians have played a, well, “instrumental” role in the search process, asserts Gayer.
By June, the selected person will be announced to the public. However, due to scheduling conflicts among nationally renowned conductors, who typically prepare for concerts years in advance, the chosen one will be labeled “music director designate” for 2007-2008, and may conduct one or more concerts. Other guest conductors will fill in the gaps between Silverstein and the “designate,” and in 2008-2009, the music director will finally be “ours” — serving full time.
In the meantime, the upcoming season presents audiences with international rising stars like violinist Augustin Hadelich, soprano Mary Wilson, pianist Yuja Wang, Canadian cellist Denise Djokic, and pianist Benjamin Hochman. The “best of Maine” plays into next year’s themes also, with appearances by organist Ray Cornils, conductors Robert Russell and Robert Lehmann, violist Laurie Kennedy, soprano Lisa Saffer, tenor John McVeigh, and a performance of Three Longfellow Poems by Maine composer Vineet Shende. For fun, Silverstein plays violin with Kennedy, in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola.
