What Went Wrong With the Batiquitos Dream? : Some Blame the Festival’s Artistic Director, Others Still Hold Hope for Success in Future

Classical music amid the alfresco beauty of coastal North County. This summer’s Batiquitos Festival of the Arts was designed to put San Diego on the world music map almost overnight.

As envisioned, the festival would include a top-notch training program for student musicians as well as a sophisticated series of public concerts. The Batiquitos advisory board boasts famed violinist-conductor Sir Yehudi Menuhin and operatic soprano Renata Scotto as chairman and vice president, respectively. A faculty of 97, including some of the world’s best music teachers, is listed in a brochure promoting the festival’s music institute.

In the eyes of Michael Tseitlin, its founder and artistic director, Batiquitos has every chance of rivaling the major summer music festivals of America.

“I think it can be on a par with Aspen or Tanglewood,” he said in a recent interview.

Tseitlin, 38, a graduate in violin of the Gnesin’s Music Institute and the Moscow Conservatory in the Soviet Union, emigrated to the United States in 1976 and became artistic director of the Taos Music Festival in 1982, according to Batiquitos promotional material. He also helped found the International Institute of Music in Taos, N.M.

He teaches violin at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Del Mar, where he lives with his wife, concert violinist Irina Tseitlin.

Batiquitos, in Tseitlin’s vision, could ultimately become a musical mecca, along the lines of Austria’s Salzburg Festival.

But even the most ambitious dreams of artistic directors go awry. Rather than attracting attention for the acknowledged excellence of its faculty and student body, the Batiquitos Festival has drawn a rash of criticism.

What promised on paper to be an impressive five weeks of substantial music making has turned into a disheartening miasma of almost daily staff, faculty and student resignations.

Faculty members who learned they would not be paid have quit or never arrived. The reduced faculty--only a shadow of the nearly 100 promised--is working this last week of the event without pay.

Logistics for the June 19-July 24 festival, which takes place over a good part of the county, are complicated. Many of the more than 200 students, each of whom pays $100 to $250 a week in tuition, are housed near San Diego State University, must be bused to rehearsals at UC San Diego, and perform in La Jolla and Carlsbad.

Anumber of students have complained that the festival has failed to deliver on a variety of promises, from housing and transportation to teachers and chamber music lessons and concerts.

What went wrong? Clear indications of financial trouble surfaced as early as March. On March 8, the festival’s three-member administrative staff resigned en masse after the directors refused to accept their financial projections, which they claimed showed the festival could not meet its obligations.

Within weeks of the staff resignations, nine members on the 14-member board of directors also jumped ship, acknowledging belatedly their belief in the staff estimates, according to former board President Seena Trigas. Replacements were recruited.

The staff had urged the board to cut back the program, which once included a series of jazz and rock concerts, to “a realistic number of students, professors and concerts. That was what the board preferred to do,” according to Trigas.

But Tseitlin helped convince the directors to retain much of his vision of the festival, Trigas said.

“You have a certain vision. Michael Tseitlin thought this would work out the way he perceived it.”

Former Batiquitos workers view Tseitlin as both the festival’s inspirational visionary and its Achilles’ heel.

“He is a genius in the choice of pieces of music and as an artistic director,” said Catherine Messiere, the festival’s recently resigned production and administrative director. “When you meet him, you feel confident that he is a very inspired person, that he has a definite dream. When he speaks about it, you feel it could happen.”

But Tseitlin also contributed to problems in faculty and production scheduling, she said.

“In a phone call (to artists or teachers), he would turn that around and not tell anybody, so suddenly there was mass confusion,” she said.

Kimberly Fox, who preceded Messiere as administrative director, agreed.

“Faculty contracts kept getting changed again and again,” she said. “Michael insisted on doing contract negotiations with the artists. I (was) responsible for the budget, but he was doing the contracts.

“He worked at home and not in the office and was making deals. He’s on the phone and doesn’t have the budget in front of him, wheeling and dealing, going on without . . . having the numbers.

“It was an awkward situation,” Fox said. “He was doing what he needed to do, and I was finding out about it later.”

Fox, who had experience in managing smaller chamber music and opera festivals at California State University, Long Beach, was hired by Tseitlin and the board in 1986 to run a fund-raising campaign for a classical music conservatory in Carlsbad as part of a land-development project.

As part of that program, she managed a small but impressive pops music series in the summer of 1987 at the festival site in Carlsbad. The success of the three-concert series was intoxicating to the board.

“Everyone was excited and loved it,” Trigas said. “Everything went smoothly and professionally. Everything was in the right place, from the parking of the cars to the timing of the music with the fireworks. A lot of credit goes to Kimberly.”

The full-scale festival grew out of that success.

“Michael had run a festival in Taos,” Fox said. “He spoke very confidently of the fact that he could transfer those activities to San Diego. One thing led to another, and suddenly the festival was put on the front burner for a lot of reasons.”

Fox said she first felt that putting together a major, five-week festival--including the tasks of attracting, housing and training 350 students--was not impossible. In fact, she saw it as a step in the direction of the ultimate goal: the building of a conservatory.

“It seemed that it would be easier to do and, if the show was done, these people would trust us to do other things,” Fox said. “I don’t think it was faulty logic. If we could have pulled off Batiquitos, it would have put us in a good position, community-wise. We had found out that people were willing to buy tickets, and the market seemed right.

“The problem with Batiquitos was that nothing ever solidified,” she said. “It never reached a point where we said we’re stopping the planning and starting the execution.

“We needed to be able to control Michael’s commitments, to tell him not to make any more phone calls, to draw the line here and say, from now on, we’re dealing with how to plan this monster.”

By March, Fox was sitting on $10,000 worth of unpaid bills and a payroll that couldn’t be met. She said she had been waiting for 2 1/2 months for a $100,000 donation promised by land developer Donald Sammis. Sammis eventually borrowed $75,000 from a bank and turned it over to the festival (as a loan rather than a donation), but by then Fox and two other administrators--Julie Adams, director of academic affairs, and Scott Pedersen, director of bookings and promotions--had left.

“The question (was) would the money be there if Don wasn’t in?” Fox said. “Without that safety net, there was a very big deficit potential.”

Fox said that, while explaining the figures to festival directors, she urged them to reduce the program’s scope but that Tseitlin was adamantly against it.

“The spirit of compromise was non-existent,” she said.

Tseitlin denied that he opposed scaling down the festival.

“We scaled more than half of it down,” he said. “I did not change the commitment to the educational part and did not change the commitment to classical music. We did react to signals. We did scale it back from 20 chamber concerts to 10.”

The Batiquitos board also decided to contract the jazz concerts separately.

“I do not like to compromise,” Tseitlin acknowledged. “Certain things I would not compromise on, like the quality of the performers, the great soloists, the great conductors. . . . “

He said the festival’s biggest problem is the student housing, which is far from the site of rehearsals and classes. He blames that on an inexperienced staff, including Fox.

“We had an inexperienced but well-intended office,” he said. “Kimberly was one of them. The apartments were far away. Transportation was complicated.”

When she resigned, Fox said, there were no plans to billet students near SDSU, but rather at the Residence Inn, less than a mile from UCSD.

She said she and the others quit in frustration.

“We had long meetings with the treasurer and president,” Fox said. “They said it would be too embarrassing (to scale down the festival), that we owe it to the people (to deliver). I kept saying that you do not owe it to people to fall flat on your face. The concept of going on blindly, saying we can do business this way, didn’t make sense. I would be the one having faculty, parents and students screaming at me.”

Bobbie Hoder, who resigned from the board in March, thought the festival was still a possibility then but that “it had to be scaled down considerably from what was proposed. It was too grand a scale. I think the whole idea could have worked with, say, 100 students and build it as you go along.

“The board, I think, erred initially in not putting down firm, positive guidelines for the artistic director and the staff. As a result, it got out of hand. It grew too large too fast.”

Another former board member, who asked not to be named, blamed Tseitlin’s stubbornness for the financial crises.

Tseitlin “is very headstrong; he was making commitments without consulting the board,” the former member said. “They could not live up to his commitments. If any board member spoke out in opposition, he immediately brought friends and tried to load the board.”

Former administrative director Messiere said that, even before the festival opened, it carried a $60,000 debt to various businesses, plus the $75,000 bank loan through Sammis, and interest was owed on that.

“A lot of people, including board members, pulled money out of their pockets to make ends meet, to pay phone bills, travel expenses and to help kids through situations,” Messiere said.

But the pressure of working under a growing debt, with no relief in sight, was eventually too much.

“I could not continue to solicit services that were already past due,” Messiere said. “People would say, ‘How could you solicit me when you already owe me?’ ”

As the Batiquitos Festival of the Performing Arts enters its last week of concerts, the volunteer board of directors finds itself performing many of the staff functions involving housing, production and press relations. One board member assessed the state of affairs:

“The problems were that some of the funds that were promised were not in place,” said Tom Sergott. “Some of the estimates based on last year’s attendance figures did not materialize.

Sergott, who has been on the board since March, is handling press relations. He remains optimistic about the festival’s future.

“In spite of the trouble, I’m very excited about the concept,” he said. “There could be live theater, you could have ballet there. It could be a true, all-around performing arts center.”