A City Opera Conductor With Connections - New York Times
リンク: A City Opera Conductor With Connections - New York Times.
A City Opera Conductor With Connections
It is a Cinderella story - and perhaps one more tale of how money talks.
On Sunday afternoon, eight years after joining the New York City Opera as an unpaid intern, Atsushi Yamada, a one-time Sony salaryman without conservatory training or a single English-language review to his name, will conduct the company in Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" in Tokyo.
Mr. Yamada's rise to the podium is a testament to the spirit of artistic entrepreneurship: he helped raise millions of dollars for City Opera's foray to his native land, its first overseas tour in almost 20 years. But it also leads to questions about the role big money plays in the arts, particularly in the cash-desperate world of classical music, and how it influences artistic choices. Mr. Yamada, 41, studied and worked his way onto the City Opera's conducting roster; the company says he is a genuine talent and is well liked at the house, where he is an established presence, having conducted eight performances so far. But he also had the backing of a City Opera board member who was his boss at Sony, a longtime supporter of the opera.
"This young man raised that much money himself?" said Stephen Lord, a fellow conductor on the City Opera's roster, who is also music director of Opera Theater of St. Louis and the Boston Lyric Opera. "Wow! That I were so lucky to have those kind of friends!"
He added: "I hope this young man is deserving of a real opportunity. If not, I would feel sorry for those who might not have had this opportunity."
In the United States, music directors of orchestras are expected to help raise money for their seasons. And conductors have long created opportunities for themselves with other people's money, or their own. But the phenomenon sometimes invites doubts, warranted or not, about the artistic merit of the conductor's work, or about the artistic judgment of the institution that presents it.
Earlier this month, for example, the Royal Opera House in London presented "1984," an opera by Lorin Maazel, the music director of the New York Philharmonic. Some in the British press accused him of staging a vanity production, because he paid for much of it himself, and faulted Covent Garden for turning over its stage to an inexperienced composer. (Mr. Maazel said he helped pay for the production to maintain artistic control and preserve it for presentation at other houses.)
City Opera officials described its tour, the company's first abroad since 1987, as Mr. Yamada's "brainchild" and acknowledged that it would never have happened without him. Matthew Price, the house's tour organizer, said that Mr. Yamada helped raise nearly $2 million from Japanese businesses toward the total cost of $6.8 million.
"How do you say Cinderella in Japanese?" asked George Manahan, the City Opera's music director and Mr. Yamada's teacher.
In an interview last week, Mr. Yamada said that he was proud to use his business contacts and skills to raise money and that he saw the performances in Japan - an official United States cultural offering at the 2005 World Exposition - as a chance to say thank you to the company for taking him in.
"I have connections," he said. "I am a conductor and study with George. But if I'm not a good conductor, I couldn't assemble this thing."
Mr. Yamada graduated from Waseda University with a love of music but no degree in it, and he says it was difficult to break into the field without one. So he went to work as a salesman for I.B.M. in Japan. In 1992, he left to work for Sony Life Insurance.
At about the same time, Masaaki Morita became chairman and president of Sony Life. Mr. Morita is the younger brother of Akio Morita, the chairman and co-founder of Sony, who died in 1999. Masaaki Morita was also a board member of the New York City Opera, and during his tenure, from 1992 to 1999, he channeled nearly a half-million dollars in donations from Sony to the company, said Susan Woelzl, City Opera's spokeswoman.
"He expressed a big interest in Atsushi," Mr. Manahan said in an interview. "Somehow he expressed hope we would be interested in talking to Atsushi if he came to the States."
Mr. Yamada insisted that he approached City Opera himself. Paul Kellogg, the City Opera's general and artistic director, said that Mr. Yamada would never have been given conducting assignments at the opera if he were not gifted. "I see a great future for this guy," Mr. Kellogg said.
He also rejected the idea that the "Butterfly" performances amounted to vanity productions.
"I would like that everybody could bring money," Mr. Kellogg said. "This whole thing grew up from his connections with the business community."
A Sony spokesman, Kei Sakaguchi, said Mr. Morita was not immediately reachable today to discuss his role in the conductor's involvement with the house. Mr. Yamada said that Sony Life Insurance and the parent Sony Corporation together put up almost $500,000 toward the tour; Sony Electronics in the United States gave $50,000. A group of companies in Japan are the main sponsors.
"They're promoting Mr. Yamada, and they're also interested in this type of business, the business of presenting opera," said John Miller, the conductor's manager and a consultant to the Japanese sponsors. "It's called patronage. It's been a role increasingly assumed by businesses over the last 30 years."
Mr. Yamada's podium appearances are a natural reward, Mr. Miller said. "He's the one who's brought the money to the table," he said. "It's a win-win for everyone."
Mr. Yamada has served for a season as the chief guest conductor of the Honolulu Symphony and has led several small orchestras in Tokyo. He made his City Opera debut in November 2002 in a performance of "Hansel and Gretel" and has since conducted three performances of "La Traviata" and four of "Butterfly" at the house. Mr. Miller said no reviews of his work exist in English.
Mr. Yamada's fellow conductors on the City Opera roster - some with flourishing careers or who are considered rising stars - begrudge him nothing, at least for the record. "It's a wonderful career-builder," Mr. Lord said of the tour. "I'm all for someone getting work."
The conductors noted that often factors other than talent, like personal connections and availability, go into the decision of who conducts what.
But sometimes talent is enough to keep a musician busy. The young Australian Antony Walker, who won the Richard F. Gold Debut Award at the City Opera this season, said he has little time for fund-raising.
"I regard what I'm best at as conducting," he said, "and I just stick to that, really."
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