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Evans Mirageas and Opera · Evans Mirageas and the Symphony Orchestra
By the spring of 1989, word had gone out that three major orchestras, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco were looking for an artistic administrator. A year earlier Tom Morris of the Cleveland Orchestra had a similar post to fill and, though we spoke and met, I didn't feel ready to jump into the orchestra business. One year later, however, the temptation was greater and I threw my hat into the ring for the Boston job. I had serious talks with Joe Kluger in Philadelphia and I had also been invited for a preliminary interview in San Francisco. Boston won out in my eyes, especially after my first interview at Tanglewood. Here was an idyllic location, summer home of the Boston Symphony and the Tanglewood Music Center. Serge Koussevistky's dream of founding a summer festival and an academy for gifted young musicians had become an enormously successful enterprise. I now felt ready and eager for the challenge of programming both the summer festival and the winter season concerts in Boston's fabled Symphony Hall.
With Pierre Boulez and Seiji Ozawa in FrankfurtA second interview in Berlin with Boston's music director Seiji Ozawa (in the swimming pool of the maestro's hotel) sealed the deal and I began working for one of the greatest orchestras in the world. From the fall of 1989 until the spring of 1994 I collaborated with the finest living composers, conductors, and soloists -- period. In those five years we made recordings for no fewer than NINE record labels; toured Japan, Europe, South America, and across the US; created four staged opera productions in Symphony Hall and Tanglewood; and gave countless memorable concerts with Seiji and our guests. What a privilege it was to craft programs with the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Bernard Haitink, Roger Norrington, Valery Gergiev, Simon Rattle, Kurt Sanderling, and James Levine. And what a pleasure it was to work with singers Jessye Norman, Renée Fleming, Mirella Freni, Marilyn Horne, and Thomas Hampson; and intrumentalists Itzhak Perlman, Gidon Kremer, Yo-Yo Ma, Maurzio Pollini, Martha Argerich, Krystian Zimmerman, Alfred Brendel, and Yevgeny Kissin (whom I helped learn to swim in the lake at Tanglewood).
This was where I learned first-hand how an orchestra works, day to day. It is an amazing entity, and all the animate and inanimate analogies of family and machine apply. An orchestra, next to an opera company, is the most complicated arts organization imaginable, especially one as large and ambitious as the BSO. The stakes are always high on every front. Programming, the selection of guest conductors and soloists, working with the ever-shifting needs (and anxieties) of orchestra members and guests, contract negotiations, recordings, tour planning -- all of this is going on simultaneously. In the summer at Tanglewood, we added the equally intense activities of the students at the Tanglewood Music Center to the busy summer concert season, creating opportunities for the cross-fertilization of experiences between the students and professionals. To this day, the BSO is the busiest and most successful orchestra in the world. I cherish my time with the orchestra and the chance to work with the best in the business: music director Seiji Ozawa and executive director the late Ken Haas, as well as Tanglewood director Dan Gustin and Richard Ortner, who ran the student programs.
I even spent a year programming the Boston Pops with John Williams while we were looking for a new Pops manager. My highbrow classical colleagues were mystified at my deep knowledge of this repertoire until I reminded them of my own Pops lineage of listening to those Fielder recordings in my Ann Arbor living room. I'd again come full circle.
Wiith the late Ray Minshull at his retirement party, March 1994In the summer of 1993 the Decca Record Company came calling. Ray Minshull, their long-time senior vice-president for Artists and Repertoire, was retiring after over twenty-five years and the search was on for his successor. I'd known Ray for many years, going back to the early 1980s when he came to Chicago and produced Chicago Symphony recordings with Sir Georg Solti. I'd also visited the Decca offices in London to interview Minshull and his colleagues for the Music In America series. I met with the headhunter who came to Tanglewood in a rather ostentatious and un-English white limousine. At first I declined the job offer as my partner Thom Dreeze and I both had wonderful jobs in Boston. Thom had worked his way up in the fast-growing Boston Lyric Opera and he, too, was now an artistic administrator. However, in December, 1993, while on tour with the BSO in Europe, I met Ray Minshull himself. In a long afternoon at a café table in London's Royal Festival Hall, he persuaded me to come to Decca. Even though the classical recording business was in a somewhat shaky state, the opportunity to live abroad and to shepherd the activities of a record company I had admired since my teens was finally irresistible.
When I began my appointment in 1994 Decca had a wide variety of artists under contract, including no fewer than eleven conductors and several orchestras. At the top of the roster was conductor Sir Georg Solti, who had just celebrated his eightieth birthday and would soon mark fifty years as an exclusive Decca artist.
with Sir Georg Solti, Spring 1996Classical music recording storm clouds were already gathering and I had the unenviable task of pruning the Decca roster. The CD boom was ending and, especially in the world of orchestral recording, there seemed to be no new generation of giants to take the place of the recently deceased Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein. Solti was the last of the superstar recording conductors and Decca was lucky to have him. The emphasis was increasingly on singers and projects like The Three Tenors, also a Decca recording.
While trying to find the artists who would ensure the survival of Decca (I signed both Renée Fleming and Angela Gheorghiu), there were still plenty of orchestral recordings to be made. I wanted to create discs that were commercially viable and were also valuable additions to the catalog.
With legendary Decca producer Christopher Raeburn
and Riccardo Chailly in Milan, July 1997 Conductors Solti, Chailly, Dohnanyi, Hogwood, Ashkenazy, Blomstedt, Eschenbach, Tilson Thomas, Norrington (and Simon Rattle -- kindly loaned from EMI for a special project), and the orchestras of London, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Milan, Rome, Berlin, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco -- all of these and many more made Decca recordings during my tenure.
When I arrived at Decca, I inherited a roster of thirty-seven artists and the mandate to create 100 new top-price recordings that year. In 2000, fewer than ten artists made twenty new recordings. I had achieved the goal of a manageable number of discs with a handful of the very best artists; however, in those seven years the company had been sold twice and each time the financial goalposts had changed. The historical method of return on investment for a classical recording was a seven-year cycle of sales at various price levels. By 1999 the bottom-line pressure had increased to the point where a recording project of classical repertoire would not be approved if we could not guarantee that it would make its costs back in ONE year. The role of the A&R director was changing and rapidly diminishing. It was a fascinating era and we're not likely to see such ambitious recording programs from major multi-national companies again in our time. It was my good fortune to work with these artists and orchestras and supervise their recordings, but it was time to move on.
We have a joke in my family that I was the only sibling who had never worked for himself. Greek-American immigrant lore is filled with the stories of self-starters and independent businessmen. My father was one of them as were numerous relatives. In retrospect, I suppose my time had come.
In December 2000, the Brooklyn Philharmonic was in a financial crisis. Midway through the season they either had to re-program the remainder of the season or face bankruptcy. Music director Robert Spano (whom I had hired as one the assistant conductors at the Boston Symphony), asked the newly-appointed interim executive director, Catherine Cahill, to find someone who could help them preserve their artistic goals for a lot less money. He felt there was really only one person for that task: Evans Mirageas. I was contracted and in a matter of weeks the problem was solved. Since that time I've had an ongoing agreement with Brooklyn as their artistic advisor.
Steve Ovitsky, executive director of the Milwaukee Symphony, whom I knew from my Chicago days, called in April 2001. He asked if I would be interested in assisting the orchestra and its music director Andreas Delfs expand its programming and profile in terms of international artists and repertoire. I accepted immediately and have worked for them since.
About the same time conductor Semyon Bychkov, with whom I first worked in 1980 when he was music director of the Grand Rapids Symphony in Michigan, invited me to work for him as his personal artistic advisor. He wanted someone who could be his eyes and ears to seek out new artists and repertoire. Not long after, Robert Spano suggested a similar arrangement.
Within the first six months of 2001, a new business had been created. It was as if my consulting career had been waiting for me to attain the right age and range of experience!
Evans Mirageas and the Symphony Orchestra: Part 1
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