Opening nights at Carnegie Hall have suffered a little too much drama in recent years. In the fall of 2012, the opening trio of concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was put in doubt because of a players’ strike; the C.S.O.’s home-town opening was scrubbed, but the players and management settled just in time for the Carnegie events to go on as planned. One year later, Carnegie’s luck ran out: the Philadelphia Orchestra had been scheduled to appear, but a strike by the Carnegie stagehands forced the theatre to go dark, and the concert was cancelled. This year’s opening gala, a concert by the New York Philharmonic, was never in doubt, but dark clouds had gathered nevertheless, due to the dramatic departure of the board chair, Ronald O. Perelman, only a few months after his acceptance of the position—one of the most honored in American philanthropy.
None of these events have threatened the existence of Carnegie, but each is a manifestation of the extraordinary unease that afflicts American classical music today. (Michael Cooper, in the Times, has reported a detailed analysis of the issues at stake.) Perelman, with the support of one other board officer, briefly suspended the hall’s executive and artistic director, Clive Gillinson, in August, citing a frustration in attempting to obtain from Gillinson “a full picture of Carnegie Hall’s financial operations, especially as it related to profits and losses involving performances.” Perelman’s complaints also included a concern about going ahead with the Warner Music Prize, a hundred-thousand-dollar award given to a young musician that is sponsored by the Warner Music Group, a company owned by Len Blavatnik, who also sits on the Carnegie board and with whom Perelman tangled in 2011, when Warner was for sale. Gillinson was quickly reinstated on the insistence of a majority of the board, but the bad blood continued to boil, and Perelman, who would have had a difficult time in getting reëlected as chair, agreed to step down this week, on the cusp of the hall’s hundred-and-twenty-fifth anniversary season. (Late on Friday afternoon, Carnegie announced that its board had elected Mercedes T. Bass as Acting Chairman.)
Questions of conflicts of interest are not unknown at Carnegie. The last big one occurred in 2007, when the hall awarded the son-in-law of Sanford I. Weill, the board chairman at the time, a multimillion-dollar contract to renovate Carnegie’s tower studios into rehearsal rooms and educational spaces. Weill’s involvement in the appointment of Perelman—who, upon becoming chair, pronounced that he wanted to bring more pop acts to Carnegie—was also pivotal. To calm the ensuing controversy, Weill told Bloomberg News that in naming Perelman, a notoriously aggressive and litigious corporate raider, to the chairman’s post, the public would “see a nicer, kinder, less litigious Ron than you’ve seen in the past.” Now we know how that worked out. In his quarter century of service as Carnegie’s board chairman, Weill, the former longtime Citigroup chieftain, has been enormously generous and wise, recognizing the growing importance of education to the long-term growth of a major arts center like Carnegie. But even giants stumble. In his recent book, “They Told Me Not to Take that Job,” Reynold Levy, the former president of Lincoln Center, recounts Weill’s significant role in the disastrous attempt to transfer the New York Philharmonic from its longtime home, Avery Fisher Hall, to Carnegie, some twelve years ago.
That Weill and Perelman come from the world of high finance is a crucial element in the problems at Carnegie and elsewhere. Thirty years ago, arts boards were dominated by figures from the corporate world—people who were principally engaged in building things, and who had deep knowledge about, and concern for, the maintenance of large institutions. Many of them also had an abiding love of classical music. But in the ensuing decades, leadership has passed to a class of wealthy persons whose love of the art is less profound and whose background in speculation and finance leads them to expect a return, sometimes an immediate return, on their investment—a mindset that often leads such people to remake or destroy companies and institutions, not cherish them.
Perelman, like Weill, has been greatly generous to Carnegie. (The stage is named for him.) But the reluctance of Gillinson and his staff to provide detailed information about profits and losses of particular concerts to Perelman and the board is entirely justified: if artists’ fees (which are often extremely high) at such a prominent venue as Carnegie were distributed to board members, the information would find its way to the Internet in a matter of days. And while Perelman’s point about bringing more pop acts to Carnegie is certainly legitimate—the hall loves to tout its connections to such legends as Judy Garland and Benny Goodman as much as it does to Vladimir Horowitz and Leonard Bernstein—it would be absurd and destructive for a board chair to put his amateur preferences above those of the professionals on the artistic and administrative staffs. It is simply not his job. Carnegie Hall cannot exist without large private donations, gratefully received. But it is primarily a nonprofit institution and a public trust, not a billionaire’s plaything, and preferences on programming can only be discussed between board and staff in the most general of conversations.
It is important to note, amid this tumult, that an opening-night concert of respectable calibre, led by Alan Gilbert, the Philharmonic’s music director, did indeed proceed on Wednesday night. Not all of it was in the gala spirit. “Vivo,” a brisk and busy essay in postmodernist professionalism by the Finnish master Magnus Lindberg, registered as a mild disappointment. The intermissionless program continued with a commanding but eccentric traversal of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto by Evgeny Kissin, in which Gilbert and the orchestra, perpetually out of balance, strove to preserve the lyrical coherence of the first two movements while in sync with the Russian virtuoso’s leaden tempos. (Kissin’s account of the finale delivered the requisite electrical charge.) Things brightened remarkably, however, when Gilbert returned to conduct Ravel’s Suite No. 2 from the ballet “Daphnis et Chloé,” one of the great orchestral favorites, which Lindberg, in his own composition, had nodded to an hour earlier. When the Philharmonic takes temporary leave of David Geffen Hall for a long-planned renovation, it will probably want to spend as much time here as possible, and the Ravel gave a fine preview of what we might expect: Gilbert drew from them a performance of sleek, propulsive sensuality, with the sharp angles of the woodwind timbres moderated by a surprisingly plummy resonance in the middle and lower ranges. The Philharmonic, of course, played at Carnegie for many years before the group moved to Lincoln Center, in 1962. It might be a good thing—occasionally—to welcome them back.
