Bad news now from?

Heinz Hall, Pittsburgh, PA

The fact that the Pittsburgh Symphony played to a sparse audience on its November 5 subscription concert may be a harbinger of things to come for this respected ensemble.  Mark Tamburri, the President and CEO of the orchestra--which has included Victor Herbert, Fritz Reiner, William Steinberg, Lorin Maazel and Maris Jansons--announced his immediate resignation on November 14.  He was replaced almost on-the-spot by James Wilkinson, a lawyer and Vice-Chair of the orchestra's Board of Trustees since 2003.  Wilkinson has absolutely no experience in orchestra management.

Still, Harold Smoliar, chair of the orchestra committee, says of the new boss, "While I know he may never have had the job of general manager of an orchestra, I think he knows an awful lot about the Pittsburgh Symphony and what makes it tick."  Personally I have been part of musical organizations that have employed "non-artistic" management personnel.  One of these showed her total ignorance of musical matters by hiring an operations manager, stating that "she had taken an orchestration class." Obviously that makes one qualified!

Pittsburgh has been running multi-million dollar deficits over the past few years and "sparse audiences" don't make for good forecasts for the future.  Of course, maybe it was the programming of a new work by Cindy McTee, Walter Piston's Viola Concerto, Vaughan Williams' "Dives and Lazarus," Jean Francaix's The Flower Clock and Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.  Even reviewer Mark Kanny called it an "odd program."

It sounds to me as though Tamburri possibly decided to get out while the getting was good.