MUSIC : Diva of the Deal : Super manager Jenny Vogel of ICM Artists goes to bat for classical heavy-hitters--and she’s one power player who’s <i> not</i> in New York

Los Angeles Philharmonic impresario Ernest Fleischmann was on the phone. Andre Previn had just resigned as the orchestra’s music director, and Esa-Pekka Salonen was a key contender for the job.

Never mind that Salonen’s manager, Jenny Vogel, was home on maternity leave that day in April, 1989. A few meetings later, she realized that phone calls back and forth to Salonen and his European managers weren’t enough. She headed for the airport.

Salonen was impressed. “She just had her first baby and she flew over to Stockholm to see me,” the conductor recalls. “I thought it was an incredibly heroic deed.”

But that wasn’t all that impressed Salonen. So did Vogel’s “cool, matter-of-fact approach” to the incredible opportunity dangling in front of her client, who had just turned 30. “Jenny tried to present pros and cons and give me an objective view of the implications. (She didn’t) try to make me accept right away and secure a coup. I thought this was professional ethics on a very high level.”

It was also her job. ICM Artists Vice President Vogel nurtures, advises and represents classical talent. She negotiated Music Director-designate Salonen’s current contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (worth “in the same neighborhood” as Previn’s $537,000 a year here), and her client roster includes pianists Emanuel Ax and Radu Lupu as well as such conductors as Leonard Slatkin and David Zinman.

Many managers are women--including Vogel’s boss, ICMA President Lee Lamont--but nearly all of the major players are in New York. Even in Los Angeles, where deal-making keeps many a trendy restaurant open, Vogel’s office is more a satellite of the company’s New York base than a power center all its own.

Visit her Beverly Boulevard office for a look at what happens backstage in the classical music world. In a city that values deals and deal-makers, Vogel stands out as a key Los Angeles player in the international matchmaking of orchestras, musicians and conductors.

The dollars involved are obviously smaller negotiating for pianists Ax and Lupu than for rapper Hammer--a client of ICMA’s sister organization, International Creative Management--but the process isn’t that different. Classical managers identify talent, sign artists and hustle top-dollar deals for them.

The key difference, Vogel explains, is that she thinks long term. “It’s virtually opposite of a pop musician, who can become a star overnight and disappear overnight,” she says. “The career of a classical musician may take 15 years to reach its peak, but once it’s there, it usually lasts.”

Pianist Ax is certainly convinced. “People get frustrated,” he says, “and I think sometimes managers feel all artists are basically ungrateful. . . . But management is a very tough profession. Very few people are pleased with whom they landed in the management lottery, and I’m one of those lucky few.”

Vogel is lunching poolside at the Westwood Marquis with conductor Zinman, and the glass patio table between them is strewn with papers, notebooks and pencils. Here to guest-conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Baltimore-based Zinman is in jeans and T-shirt, clearly relishing both the California sunshine and cuisine.

Not Vogel. The 40-year-old, smartly dressed Australian is concentrating so keenly on her mission that she hardly touches the food in front of her. Zinman and Vogel have been working together since 1979, when she was a London-based manager, but these days they’re rarely in the same city.

The two are reviewing a few years’ worth of commitments, and Vogel has many questions. While much of Zinman’s time is accounted for by his duties as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Vogel wants to work in plenty of guest conducting here and abroad.

Ten minutes into their meal, and they’re talking May, 1994. Zinman is interested in conducting an opera premiere in Minneapolis, and Vogel wants to know more about it. Among her questions: Is the composer reliable? Will he deliver on time? Is it a project to which Zinman is “particularly wedded”? The conductor answers yes to all her questions.

Zinman, 51, hopes to take 1995 off to finish a book, learn to sail and otherwise “clear my head.” That’s fine with Vogel, so long as they plan for it. But, she tells him, it means everything he does before and after his sabbatical has to be very profitable. In other words, she continues, he should work more in the United States than in Europe, where fees are lower, and he should try to skip or postpone low-paying venues.

Vogel works out of a thick three-ring binder with color-coded calendars representing the next several seasons, and such long-term planning is common in this business. Zinman, for instance, has already blocked out time at home for his son Raphael’s high school graduation, and Raphael is currently just a sophomore. Vogel’s boss Lamont is said to have once discussed when a musician’s wife should get pregnant so that the birth would occur when he wasn’t performing overseas.

After two hours of reviewing dates, repertory and logistics, their meeting is winding down. “Will there be a vacation in the ‘93-94 season?” Zinman asks. “Any time when I’m not flopping my arms?”

Vogel flips through her notebook. No, not really, she replies.

Face-to-face meetings with clients are relatively rare for Vogel and other managers, whose contact with peripatetic musicians is usually by phone and fax machine. Vogel and assistant Jillian Katz keep four phone lines going pretty much nonstop.

Vogel runs ICM Artists’ Los Angeles office. ICMA and Columbia Artists Management Inc., also based in New York, are the two largest classical agencies. (Columbia is considerably larger.) ICMA’s roster consists of Isaac Stern, Wynton Marsalis and more than 100 others. Many of them perform in Los Angeles regularly, and Vogel checks in on them as well as manages her own client list.

ICM Artists is a member of the Josephson Talent Agency Group, an umbrella organization that also includes International Creative Management. ICM, which bills itself as the world’s largest theatrical agency, has offices in several countries and represents everyone from rock stars to playwrights.

Aside from taking on pops symphony bookings for Oscar-winning composer-conductor Jerry Goldsmith, who scored such films as “The Omen,” “Chinatown” and “The Russia House,” Vogel has few dealings with the show business crowd that frequents ICM’s other offices.

Vogel also does not consider herself an agent. “An agent books dates. A manager plans careers,” she says. “My job is to identify, support and guide careers for classical musicians.”

She is also the key ICMA contact for orchestras in Los Angeles, San Francisco and several other cities.

Ara Guzelimian, Los Angeles Philharmonic artistic administrator, says he and Vogel “talk endlessly, regularly, religiously.” They chat daily by phone on some matter or another, schmooze informally backstage before or after concerts featuring ICMA clients or meet across a desk to hammer out fees or other artist arrangements.

At a recent session with Guzelimian in her office, Vogel and the Philharmonic executive march matter-of-factly through negotiations on fees for assorted ICMA artists due at the Philharmonic in the 1992-93 season. “There are a lot of understood parameters on fees,” Guzelimian says, “because we both know the market, and with established artists, there is an established fee history already.”

In talking about one frequent Philharmonic visitor, for instance, Guzelimian explains that funds are scarce--a familiar refrain given today’s recession--but that the orchestra doesn’t want to lose the engagement either. When Vogel calls one figure too low, he counters with a request for a fee that is “honorable” yet reflects budget restraints.

Vogel tosses out a five-digit number. Guzelimian says it seems high, but Vogel doesn’t come down. She says she’ll take it back to her client.

“Part of our job as managers is to take a gamble on what we think is the value of an artist in any given marketplace,” Vogel says. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. We base that on the number of appearances the artist has made with a particular orchestra, how regular those appearances have been and how the artist’s popularity with the audience has grown.”

In the film business, she says, “somebody can be paid many times his salary from one movie to the next. In our business it’s considered to be a tremendous success if they get 50% to 100% more from one season to the next. A 10% increase from one season to the next is considered the norm for a successful artist.”

How does it work? With very few exceptions, Vogel says, artists begin at the same level of about $2,000 to $3,000 a concert, regardless of age. From there on, fees can escalate depending on reviews, audience response and reception by the orchestra members and management.

Word will get around quickly when an artist is “hot,” Vogel says. “There’s a very efficient grapevine in the business, and the quicker that word spreads, and the more talk there is about an artist, the more ‘valuable’ he becomes.”

Vogel’s day starts early, partly because she has two sons younger than 4, and partly because there are so many long-distance calls ahead. Besides talking with the home office in New York at least a dozen times a day, Vogel sends and receives a daily pouch full of letters, memos and such. Computer hookups provide instant access to schedules and bookings made on both coasts as well as in ICMA’s new London office.

An elegant-looking woman given to wearing slacks and understated jewelry, Vogel looks more like a corporate executive than a Hollywood agent. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, speaks several languages and has worked in music her entire adult life. She studied piano and spent a year working for Italian composer Luciano Berio in Rome.

Vogel’s time with Berio intrigued Salonen. “Her interest in contemporary music made it easier to relate to her,” Salonen says. “She knows what I’m thinking about and where some of my values came from.”

Salonen also praises the manager’s calm, unfrenzied manner, and Vogel appears to soften her cool efficiency with nurturing. Her office sends cards to artists on their birthdays, get-well cards when they’re sick, flowers or champagne on opening nights. She once took chicken soup to an ailing musician lodged in a hotel while on tour.

Ax and Yefim Bronfman played four-handed piano at Vogel’s wedding, and several of her other clients see her socially; her husband, Steven Koltai, an executive at Warner Bros., even arranged a special studio tour when Zinman was in town. “We all want to feel that the person we’re working with really cares about us as people,” Ax says. “I think that’s really true in spades with Jenny.”

Vogel currently handles 29 artists--12 instrumentalists and 17 conductors--a number that she believes is pretty much her limit. That roster includes relative newcomers like Indonesian pianist Eduardus Halim and Philharmonic associate conductor David Alan Miller--whose coming stint as music director of the Albany Symphony Orchestra was negotiated by Vogel--as well as stars like Ax and Slatkin.

ICMA receives 20% of instrumentalists’ fees and 15% of conductors’ fees. (The percentage is lower, and involves a sliding scale, for music directors.) Instrumentalists can earn $2,000 to $35,000 for a single performance, while conductors can bring in $2,000 to $30,000 for a two- to four-concert subscription series.

Contracts are generally for three years industrywide, and often come with extension options.

“You might spend one or two seasons sending out tapes and publicity material and getting people to recognize a name before you can even get any bookings,” Vogel says. “So the fruits of your labor sometimes don’t come in for three or four years.”

For their commissions--which go to the agency, not to Vogel, who works on a straight salary--artists get advice of all sorts. Vogel has recommended accountants and made sure clients have medical insurance. Others, she says, have to be reminded that their air or hotel bills are being picked up by a presenter or record company, then reminded again to keep invoices so they can indeed be reimbursed.

Vogel also helps artists keep in mind other performance and recording commitments as they plan repertory. “What I try to head off by doing that is their last-minute hysteria about being overcommitted and having to face five weeks of a different concerto every week,” she says. “They panic, they cancel, and I lose a contract.”

Consider conductors, who are Vogel’s specialty.

“Most conductors want to have their own orchestras, so the general plan would be steps toward that goal,” she explains. “That means increasing the level and number of guest-conducting dates so that (the conductor) has high visibility and his name becomes recognized.”

With 31-year-old Miller, for instance, Vogel makes the most of his reputation conducting children’s concerts. The conductor says he gets many calls to duplicate the popular children’s concerts he does here--in costumes ranging from Super Orchestra Man to Beethoven. “Jenny engineered it so that when a major orchestra calls, she’ll agree to do it if they agree to a subscription concert later on,” Miller says. “It’s something I never would have thought of.”

Miller also says that since their affiliation began in April, 1990, his conducting jobs have increased. Last year’s eight guest spots, he says, will rise to more than 20 this year.

The young conductor takes over the Albany orchestra a few months after his Philharmonic contract expires in June, but Vogel is thinking far beyond that.

“Once he has an orchestra, as David now does,” she says, “the goal would be to find a better orchestra until he reaches the level of David Zinman, whose goal now is to raise the level and perception of the Baltimore (orchestra) and probably eventually move on to an orchestra on the highest level.”

Managers learn of new talent through everything from unsolicited tapes, usually audio, to record company referrals. ICMA President Lamont learned of both Midori and Korean preteen Sarah Chang from their New York-based violin teacher, Dorothy DeLay, and existing clients frequently suggest others.

What do managers look for? Talent, obviously, and its absence can be uncovered fairly quickly. Personality is also key, managers say, whether that personality is accessible or eccentric.

“It’s what comes across the footlights to the audience,” says New York-based manager Marvin Schofer, formerly of ICMA. “Without personality, there is nothing special for an audience to listen to. There are just the notes.”

What Vogel calls her “investigation of personality” includes getting to know if she clicks personally with a prospective client. “A personal relationship is very, very crucial,” she says.

That can take time to develop. Her acquaintance with pianist Halim, now 27, dates to Sydney in the early ‘80s, for instance, when she first heard him perform as a teen-ager at a piano competition. Vogel and equally impressed ICMA colleagues encouraged Halim to audition for Young Concert Artists, a New York-based nonprofit agency that handles emerging musicians.

His audition was successful; Young Concert Artists took him on. And by the time he got to ICMA a few years later, the young pianist had a track record. He also had a recording that Vogel could send around. He’s since played with the Philadelphia Orchestra, is heading for Hong Kong at year-end and “is now starting to get a very nice bunch of U.S. engagements,” Vogel says.

Vogel books Halim whenever something attractive comes along, but that isn’t always the case. Managers monitor the number of engagements for young artists like Midori and Chang, while Vogel has suggested that veterans like Zinman also turn down work for assorted reasons. Vogel also recently encouraged Zinman to change European managers when she felt his old one wasn’t getting him work at a high enough level.

Although artists do change managers, Guzelimian of the Philharmonic says, “it’s still a big event when that happens among top artists. It has to do with personal relationships, which can sometimes sour after a long time. Or an artist’s career may begin to stall, and artists feel their management is not being responsive and moving them forward. That may be true or may be out of the manager’s control.”

Salonen, for instance, will sever his ties with Vogel and ICMA at the end of August, citing economic concerns. In the case of such European-based clients as the Finnish conductor, U.S. management complements worldwide management overseas, and the conductor says his exclusive contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic precludes his doing any other U.S. work that would require a U.S. manager.

Salonen’s London-based management and ICMA are still negotiating commissions for concerts booked but not yet performed. Asked if there are any problems with Vogel--whom he has been with since Schofer, his former manager, left ICMA in 1986--Salonen says “nothing whatsoever.”

”. . . If one day I found myself in a position to start guest-conducting in America again, Jenny would be the first person to represent me in this country. But, practically, it is not likely to happen because I am planning to stay with the Philharmonic for a long time.”

Vogel says she’s also planning to stay on in Los Angeles, but she has no thick black binder on hand for her own career. “I don’t plan long term,” says the professional planner. “I live from day to day. I can plan for others and for my family but not for myself.”