Starting the Year Off on a Predictable Note

In these opening days of the new year, it is tempting to take a look into the critic’s crystal ball and divine the highlights of the local music scene in 1989. If this column appeared in a supermarket tabloid, the list of predictions might begin with San Diego Symphony executive director Wesley Brustad sighting a UFO atop the new Symphony Towers. But tabloids and classical music? Never!

This is the year in which the San Diego Symphony is scheduled to announce the name of its new music director. Since the post has been vacant for nearly two years, a new music director, especially one in place for the 1989-90 season, could be the city’s best musical news of the year. Without the steady, cultivating influence of a music director, the local orchestra has little chance of becoming a first-class symphonic organization.

Sources within the symphony claim that Leopold Hager, the guest conductor who opened the symphony season this October, is Brustad’s personal favorite. Kees Bakels, who conducted the orchestra last month, won the hearts of many players, and Jahja Ling made an impressive case for his podium abilities when he conducted Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony a few weeks later. However, Ling’s enthusiasm for American composers and contemporary music is not likely to win him any points with the symphony board or administration.

I predict that Hager will be named the symphony’s new music director.

David Atherton’s Mainly Mozart festival, scheduled to be held at the Old Globe Theatre in June, is not likely to be a significant addition to the local scene. Atherton’s return to music making in this city will no doubt quicken the pulse of many a La Jolla matron. But the La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s SummerFest already has set the standard for a summer festival based around standard repertory, and, in the past, musical events held at the Old Globe have not fared well.

I predict that Mainly Mozart will be more of a social success than a musical milestone.

San Diego Opera’s offerings for the 1989 season are not going to set opera in America on its ear, nor will they lure the cadre of international critics to Civic Theatre. While the production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” set in a contemporary Banana Republic sounds intriguing, the rest of the season--another “Madama Butterfly” and two Donizetti warhorses--is about as ho-hum as it could be.

I predict an increase of No-Doze sales at Civic Theatre during the opera season.

If the mayor’s vaunted Soviet Arts Festival makes a serious contribution to the classical music scene, it will come as a welcome surprise. San Diego Opera is supposed to open the festival in October with a “Boris Godunov” production, still not cast, and other musical plans are even hazier.

I predict a “Boris Godunov” less impressive than the 1971 production by the still fledgling San Diego Opera. Although it was not the most sumptuous staging of Mussorgsky’s grand historical opera, it did boast no less a singer than the late Norman Treigle in the title role.

UC San Diego put itself on the map musically by championing contemporary music and composers. Last summer, SONOR and a large entourage of UCSD musicians, composers and technicians were guests of the noted Institute for Contemporary Music at Darmstadt, West Germany. Since the return of the SONOR traveling show, the department movers and shakers have been recuperating from their exhausting international exposure.

I predict that for UCSD’s SONOR, 1989 will be the first year of a 20-year snooze, a la Rip Van Winkle, in which the contemporary performance ensemble will sleep on its laurels.

Local classical radio station KFSD-FM will resume broadcasting the weekly radio program hosted by San Diego Opera’s Ian Campbell this Saturday at 6 p.m. The 15-week series will present a potpourri of opera news, interviews and music, focusing on the operas and singers featured in the local company’s 1989 season. Among the show’s more winning traits are Campbell’s rare recordings of obscure operas and fabled divas of earlier eras, not to mention the general director’s own tongue-in-cheek evaluations of singers and recapitulation of opera lore. The final program, on April 16, will present San Diego Opera’s new season for 1990.

If the term “petting zoo” sounds slightly off color, banish such impure thoughts. The San Diego Symphony sets up a petting zoo in the Symphony Hall lobby at its family concerts and Classical Hits programs. Patterned after a children’s zoo, it gives youngsters a chance to get some hands-on experience with various musical instruments. Under the supervision and assistance of the petting zoo staff, children can toot a cornet, blow notes on an oboe or bow a cello. For many youngsters, this is the first time they have actually handled instruments they’ve seen in a marching band or watched on the symphony stage.

Should any readers have unused musical instruments they would like to donate to the petting zoo, Marilyn Rue, the orchestra’s education coordinator, would be glad to hear from them. Rue can be reached at the symphony office in Symphony Hall.