[From the 9/28 www.sfcv.org]

   This may not be official for a while, but with Kent Nagano's
   de facto departure Monday as music director of the Los Angeles
   Opera (two remaining performances of "Ariadne auf Naxos" will
   be led by assistant conductor Laurent Pillot), the announcement
   will be made soon.

   The incoming music director, Classical Voice has learned,
   will be James Conlon, an American conductor with an extensive
   European career, but practically no West Coast experience.
   Los Angeles' relatively light schedule is perfect for Conlon,
   who resigned from major positions in Europe to return to the
   US and to lighten his workload of heading opera houses with
   virtually year-around schedules.

   In a 2002 interview in Cincinnati, Conlon said the reason for
   his quitting work in Europe, including positions in Paris and
   Cologne, was to "come home," meaning New York, with his wife,
   soprano Jennifer Ringo, and be able to spend more time with
   his two young daughters.  The next year, he was named to
   succeed Christoph Eschenbach as music director of the Ravinia
   Festival (a position for which candidates included Robert
   Spano, Marin Alsop and Leonard Slatkin, among others.

   Born in New York (March 18, 1950) and educated at Juilliard,
   Conlon conducted a "Boris Godunov" in Spoleto at age 21, made
   his NY Philharmonic and Met debuts just a few years later,
   and then built a career almost exclusively in Europe for the
   past couple of decades.  With major positions in Cologne,
   Rotterdam and Paris, Conlon has maintained US connections at
   summer events, including Cincinnati's May Festival since 1978.

   In that Cincinnati interview, Conlon spoke about the "EuroTrash"
   controversy in opera, and blamed some directors with big egos
   and lazy journalists for more heat than light.  Directors can
   make a name for themselves faster and easier with a "non-standard
   production" (regardless of how the work is being served, if
   at all), Conlon said, but reviewers are also at fault: "It's
   easier to write about the staging of an opera than about the
   music," he said.  "So you have six-seven paragraphs about
   what the audience sees, and then maybe something about the
   music." It's understandable, he allowed, because describing
   music in words is hard.  Writing about the action (the more
   bizarre, the better) doesn't pose the same obstacles as saying
   that "this phrase was like that, the harmonic progression was
   interpreted in a novel way," and so on.

   It wasn't a straightforward case of blaming the messenger
   for bad news, but Conlon did point at the problem of how even
   opposition to regietheater can turn into significant publicity
   for something you wouldn't want to promote in any way.  Conlon's
   own experience with the genre goes back many years, having
   made his Cologne Opera debut in 1989 in Harry Kupfer's
   production of "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," a year before becoming
   chief director of the company.

Janos Gereben
www.sfcv.org
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