Music in the trees and a night with Deborah Borda at the Hollywood Bowl
One night a few years ago, while the orchestra played and the moon rose over the Hollywood Bowl, Deborah Borda went up to the cheap seats and took in the view. The band shell glowed against silhouettes of trees and hipsters. The music drifted up and found her, and Borda, who has an infectiousness that can knock you over, said: “Isn’t it something?”
She knew it was. There was pleasure in saying it, though, a reaffirmation of things built and polished, a testament to years spent making the L.A. Philharmonic one of the best orchestras in the world. To spend time with Borda, now on her way to head the New York Philharmonic, is like chasing light. She’s brisk, swift and demanding. She’s a joker and sly cajoler. Cropped hair, eyes flashing, she’s as comfortable with the likes of architect Frank Gehry as she is with a stagehand tangled in a tool belt.
“Hi, guys” is her opening line. The words often arrive before she does.
That night in the cheap seats at the Bowl, Borda pointed to rows of new wooden benches. “So you don’t get a splinter in your butt,” she said. “You can bring your family here for a dollar [apiece].”
She looked into the darkness and a moment later toward the stage and its speakers.The acoustics were clear, the music alive. Then came a classic Borda moment — an instant when the sublime meets the practical. “Do you know a rise in the minimum wage could cost us [the L.A. Phil] about three-quarters of a million dollars next year? We employ about 1,000 people here every summer.” She headed back down to her box.
THE NEWS: L.A. Phil chief Deborah Borda to leave for New York »
That was 2014, and days later Borda and I met again at the Bowl. It was morning and nearly empty. The air was crisp but the heat was rising. A breeze lifted. Conductor Gustavo Dudamel was leading the orchestra through a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fifth. Borda smiled; no matter how many times she’d heard the piece, it still struck bone deep. She sat with a coffee in the shade and spoke of a musical career that began as a child listening to 45s on her parents’ Victrola and grew into a chief executive job of finessing donors, commissioning new works and booking concerts in Tokyo, Amsterdam and London.
“I was able to break through that [sexist] barrier,” she said of managing an orchestra. “I was very good at what I did. I was very focused and also I got a reputation for being able to go into a very problematic situation and fix it.” She added: “Frankly, in the arts that’s often what people are looking for because they’ve allowed things to deteriorate. I had the skill and the courage to do it.”
A few days before that encounter, I accompanied Borda to a rehearsal at a soundstage for Mozart’s “CosÌ fan tutte” opera. Sopranos, tenors, a pianist; old and new faces arrived. The pianist touched a key. Another. Voices of betrayal, love and sorrow filled the half-lit room. Borda pushed aside her iPhone. She closed her eyes and for a moment was reminded again of how there are no words for some things; they come into you and reside, and you carry them wherever you go.
A Times 2015 profile of Borda can be read here.
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