A Conversation With the Maestro

The following interview with Boris Brott, the new conductor of the Ventura County Symphony, took place high above Oxnard, in the Tower Club. The reporter had the lobster ravioli.

JW: You’re entering into an atmosphere with a symphonic organization ripe for change.

BB: But there’s also an excellent tradition that I’m building on here. I was particularly impressed with Frank Salazar’s programs. I think the foundations are very solid here, both financial and artistic.

I met with Frank and we talked at some length before I accepted the position. We’ve already developed a friendship.

I’d like to maintain and develop that relationship because I think he’s made a tremendous contribution, and I would like to have his involvement and expertise as the orchestra grows.

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JW: Were there specific mandates that the board brought to you when you signed on?

BB: They wanted to maintain a sense of fiscal responsibility as the orchestra grew and developed, and they looked to me, in a way, for guidance for what to do next. I think that’s the proper relationship between a board and a music director. In a sense, I propose and they dispose.

It’s very important that a development of trust occurs and that they buy into the project and then make it their own. What I did was to lay out some options. We’ve had a certain meeting of the minds in terms of what they want and what I’d like to see happen.

And then it’s also very important for members of the orchestra to buy into the plan, and have a collaborative effort. It’s no longer possible for a dictatorship to exist.

In a way, it’s a Catch-22 situation. One of the detriments of democracy in an orchestral situation has been that orchestras have tended to become homogenous. They lose personality, and consequently they lose their attraction.

In a sense, you need to have somebody’s personality to make the team function, to give it a sense of pizazz. It’s the kind of pizazz that (Wayne) Gretzky gives the L.A. hockey team. Much the same way, Fritz Reinger or Stokowsky, Bernstein, Szell or Ormandy gave to their orchestras a very specific sound.

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JW: You seem to have a benevolent attitude about the relationship between conductors and musicians.

BB: It requires a benevolence, in the true meaning of the word benevolence--”of goodwill”--if I can expand on your semantics. It’s goodwill. Without goodwill, you can’t get anywhere.

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JW: You’ve recharged orchestras before. Is that a special art, to impose a grander view on an orchestra and its needs?

BB: It’s a necessity to do anything worthwhile, even in music today. We’re a global profession. Otherwise, this situation will remain parochial, and if the economics continue this way, it would die.

We have to develop a niche that’s significant, to where what’s happening in Ventura is of significance to Los Angeles, and is significant to New York. Maybe that sounds incredibly grandiose, but you have to think that way.

I’m not saying that’s achievable right away. But that’s the vantage point from which I’m looking at the whole thing. I’m thinking: “How can I direct this so that Pepsico will be interested in putting a half a million dollars into an education program? How do I do something that’s significantly different and is of relevance?”

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JW: Is the Birmingham Symphony a good paradigm for what you’re talking about?

BB: Absolutely. Before Simon (Rattle) went there, no one would have believed that was possible. For that matter, look at what Charles Dutoit has done for Montreal. It’s of similar significance.

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JW: In coming here, have you brought along a particular attitude, an approach to programming over the next three years?

BB: Yes. The theory behind the policy that I and the board have arrived at relies on segmentation. We’re responding to a divided audience. There are people in our audience who prefer Classical music--Mozart and Haydn--or, say, Baroque.

I would say the majority of people in the audience love what they know predominantly, and what they know stretches from Classical and heavily into the Romantic repertoire. There are other people who like opera and choral music. Then there’s a small segment of people who are interested in modernity or contemporary composition.

Rather than try to fulfill all of those programmatic needs in a series of six concerts, we want to construct miniseries of concerts that satisfy specific audience delineations. We’ve already started it this year. There is a Classical series and a Romantic series in that mix.

For next year, I’m currently working on the development of what I call loosely a world music series, which will be a contemporary series. It will marry contemporary music and world music influences.

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JW: This is as opposed to the concept of a concert as a sampler of various musical ideas?

BB: Yes, as opposed to smorgasbord programming. I don’t think smorgasbord planning works, because I think it gives no one what they want. It bores some of the people some of the time.

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JW: What about the all-inclusive music aficionado, who appreciates a wide spectrum of music?

BB: Fine. There are only three concerts in each series. Subscribe to two series. Build your own series. You want to have one Baroque concert, one contemporary concert, one opera, one Romantic concert, and so on? Build your own series. Buy what you want. In a sense, it’s market-driven.

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JW: Frank Salazar had an obvious commitment to 20th-Century music and also Latin American music, which may have alienated a certain segment of the audience and the board. That must have been a stickling point with this transition.

BB: Yep. On the other hand, when the board came to me and said, “What do you think of these programs?” I said, “They’re fabulous, outstanding.” Then they said, “But they don’t work.” I said, “All right, if they don’t work, how can we do the same thing and give the community the potential of all of this material without alienating the people who don’t want to listen to it?”

My answer is program segmentation. So we’ll try it. It might be work, but we’re going to give it a try.