New NYCO Director Keene, Sills Deny Rift

Conductor Christopher Keene, whose appointment to succeed Beverly Sills as general director of New York City Opera effective March 15 was announced Thursday, says he has made no long-term plans for the company, but “will spend the next six months thinking about it.”

Keene’s departure from City Opera in January, 1987--he served as music director and an assistant administrator to Sills--had been considered by some opera insiders as an unhappy parting. Friday, in the glow of Keene’s appointment, both the 41-year-old American musician and his 59-year-old former boss, denied that was the case.

“He was not asked to leave,” said Sills, by phone from Lincoln Center, where she was attending one of Keene’s rehearsals for the world premiere of Jay Reise’s opera, “Rasputin,” which opens Sept. 17.

“He came to me one day, and said he was getting bogged down in administrative details, and wanted to be released early from his duties. The parting was friendly,” Sills told The Times.

Keene, a few minutes later, reiterated that his subsequent relations with both Sills and City Opera have been “happy ones. I knew I was a candidate for this job, and when I was interviewed on June 26, the committee promised to give me an answer in September. Last Friday, they kept their promise.”

Under the terms of the undisclosed contract, Keene will assume directorship from Sills on March 15 and will conduct two NYCO productions a year. “That is a limitation I put on myself,” Keene said Friday. “I enjoy being an administrator, and have learned just how much I can do, outside those duties.”

The Berkeley-born Keene has run the Artpark summer festival in Lewiston, N.Y., since 1974. The summer of 1989 may be his last season there, he said. Keene is also music director of the Long Island Philharmonic.

In May, Sills announced that she intended to quit as City Opera’s general director on Jan. 1, 1989. The soprano took over leadership of the company in 1979 after her retirement from singing. As the first general director, she succeeded her former boss, music director Julius Rudel (1957-79). Rudel was the last in a line of conductor-managers who ran the company since its first performances in 1944: Laszlo Halasz (1944-51)); Josef Rosenstock (1952-55) and Erich Leinsdorf (1956-57).

Keene, who began his association with City Opera as winner of the first Julius Rudel Award in 1969, was music director of the company from 1983 through the end of 1986.

Sills said that the Rudel award “was founded by Lloyd Rigler and (the late) Lawrence Deutsch specifically for the training of general directors. It was never intended, as some people thought, to be for conductors only. But now it has paid off, because we will now have a general director who was trained under this program.”

Upon her retirement, after 10 years as general director, Sills will become president of the board of directors and, ostensibly, its chief fund-raiser.

In New York, the 44-year-old City Opera, with a budget of $26 million for fiscal 1989 and a 20-week summer-fall season plus a spring musical comedy season, is second in size to the Metropolitan Opera.