The Maestro of Managing : The Los Angeles Philharmonic is preparing to observe two landmarks: its 75th season and the 25th anniversary of Ernest Fleischmann

The writing on Ernest Fleischmann’s wall is unexpected. Pinned to a cork board next to the desk of the man who, for many in the music business, personifies the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is a photocopy of a program from 1945 featuring Arturo Toscanini conducting the Philharmonic at the Shrine Auditorium.

That program shouldn’t be such a surprise. Thursday night the Philharmonic opens its 75th season--a respectable age, even if other American orchestras are older (the New York Philharmonic turned 150 last year). Moreover, the Los Angeles Philharmonic boasts of at least a couple of the greats in its distant past: Its music director from 1933 to 1939 was Otto Klemperer; in the 1940s, Leopold Stokowski was a regular at the Hollywood Bowl.

But one rarely thinks of the Philharmonic in historical terms. Los Angeles, until the last quarter century, was too much of a cultural outpost for the most celebrated conductors to have made the long journey; the Toscanini concert is, in fact, a little-remembered anomaly. For most of us, the Philharmonic’s real anniversary this season is the 25 years of Ernest Fleischmann.

When Fleischmann arrived in Los Angeles a quarter-century ago after having managed the London Symphony Orchestra and headed the European classical division of Columbia Records, he was an arrogant big-town sophisticate; Los Angeles was still something of a musical backwater and the Philharmonic was an administrative mess as well as a messy ensemble.

“My first encounter actually was in the rehearsal room here,” Fleischmann, the orchestra’s executive vice president and managing director, recalls of his first visit to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “It had dreadful sound, and it showed up--magnified--all the deficiencies of the orchestra.”

But it was also a promising orchestra. It had Zubin Mehta, a dashing young conductor in his early 30s with a huge amount of audience appeal and a rising international career. It had a new concert hall, 5 years old. It wanted to be a player.

“There was something very touching, very endearing, in the way both the musicians and Zubin were really striving to improve things,” Fleischmann explains as his principal reason for accepting the job to run the Philharmonic.

Fleischmann came to Los Angeles with the perfect qualifications. Born in Germany and reared in South Africa, he had training in music and accounting. He had been a music critic and a conductor. He had run a music festival in Cape Town. He had inherited a bedraggled London Symphony in 1959 and helped to elevate it into the most attention-getting of London’s five orchestras. He was cosmopolitan. He knew all the right people and spoke all the right languages. He had a British accent.

But it turns out that Fleischmann had one more qualification that proved his greatest and most controversial asset--he was a brilliant and shameless promoter.

Fleischmann--visionary and pragmatist at the same time, and very, very visible--leaped into action. He turned the underused Hollywood Bowl into a happening place with spectacle and fireworks, concert opera and marathon concerts. Some of those Bowl evenings in the early ‘70s were typically prophetic, among them an “Aida” with a then-unknown Jessye Norman; a “Traviata” with Beverly Sills, Placido Domingo and Sherrill Milnes. The conductor, on both occasions, was James Levine, whom Fleischmann remembers as “a fat little kid” who was so astonishing a conductor that the orchestra gave him a standing ovation at his first rehearsal with it.

Fleischmann reached out everywhere. In the early ‘70s, he brought the orchestra to the attention of the rock generation and made it politically active. He broadened its, and Mehta’s, international reputation through recordings. He upped and upped the budget, the number of concerts given, the players’ wages, and played up the star caliber of guest conductors and soloists.

He got into celebrated fight after celebrated fight with the media. He became known as a megalomaniac, so power-hungry that he had to make every Philharmonic decision himself, be it orchestra repertory or the variety of bread served at the Hollywood Bowl.

He played kingmaker. When Mehta resigned to assume the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic, he did the impossible by luring reclusive Carlo Maria Giulini to Los Angeles in 1978. When a power struggle ensued between Fleischmann and Giulini’s successor, Andre Previn, Fleischmann held all the cards and Previn resigned. Now, in our artistically unstable times, when the big East Coast orchestras are retrenching and hiring safe, old German Kapellmeisters, he proudly brought to Los Angeles a young, daring and alluring music director from Finland, Esa-Pekka Salonen, who begins his second season as music director this week.

Fleischmann, everyone says, has mellowed. At 68, after having fought and relished more than his share of battles, he is overseeing an orchestra ready to make its biggest leap into the future but also facing economic hardship. Because of the Southern California recession and the difficulties with the Music Center Unified Fund, which supplies the Philharmonic with much of its budget, Fleischmann has seen many of his innovations, particularly in education and new music programming, whittled away lately, and he has had to cut the staff.

Moreover, the future of any orchestra has become more uncertain than ever as music education and public interest decline. American orchestras have, in fact, entered into a remarkable period of soul searching. And not a few are looking to Fleischmann and the Philharmonic for guidance.

Making himself comfortable on a sofa in his office above the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Fleischmann first responds to the situation of the Philharmonic, after his 25 years here, the way he usually does in his regular dealings with the media--with puffery, this time mainly with praise for Salonen.

A master of such puffery, Fleischmann has used it to sway his board on countless occasions to pay for some grandiose, however worthwhile, Fleischmann project or other; to effectively fund-raise for the Philharmonic over the years, and to attract audiences to hear his latest discovery (Salonen, Simon Rattle and Giuseppe Sinopoli are among the major conductors who got their first big U.S. breaks in Los Angeles, thanks to Fleischmann).

But past the predictable puffery, Fleischmann still turns feisty as ever in his appraisal of the current state of the Philharmonic and of the ills in concert life in America in general and how to fix them.

Where does Fleischmann, who for years has been trying to persuade the music Establishment to get rid of the popular designation of the “big-five” American orchestras (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia, in alphabetical order), think the Los Angeles Philharmonic fits into American music life today?

“In budget size we’re one of the big five or six,” he contends. “In playing quality, it depends on any night. I’ve heard dreadful performances in Boston and Chicago in recent years. Really things that I would be depressed about if I heard them here. I don’t think we ever sink to that low standard. But I’ve also heard splendid ones.

“When you come to the top 10 orchestras, there’s really very little to choose in overall quality. They’re all terrific. It depends very much on who’s conducting. When Boulez or Barenboim is conducting in Chicago, it’s one kind of orchestra; when another conductor, who shall remain nameless, is conducting, it becomes a rather pitiful group of musicians who all go their own way and do it very loudly.

“It’s very difficult to get into a top orchestra. Whenever we have an opening, we have 200-plus applications, and the auditioning process is very severe. So you can take it that, by and large, the musicians in the top orchestras of this country are all of a pretty high technical standard. So what happens is whether that standard manifests itself in the performance, whether the players are really involved, whether they really give everything, whether the conductor is decent. That is what really matters.”

There are, of course, other ways that Los Angeles under Fleischmann has distinguished itself from other orchestras. Los Angeles was the first major orchestra to begin lecture discussions before every concert. It was also the first to begin a new music group. And both innovations have become widely copied. Fleischmann also hopes that orchestras will pay attention to the care Salonen takes in programming, often playing composers together who have something in common.

In four years, however, the Philharmonic will, with the completion of Disney Hall, have something that cannot help but set it apart--the most architecturally radical concert hall in America and, perhaps, in the world. The hall is bound to attract an entirely new crowd to concerts downtown, but there is also the possibility that Frank Gehry’s design could steal the show.

In saying that he believes that he has found the perfect marriage between an architect who loves music and the orchestra, Fleischmann also announces that it is the music that has to come first. “I’m going to do everything possible to be sure that the Philharmonic is noticed as much as the hall.” And once the 75th-anniversary season is underway, he says, he plans to spend much of his time orchestrating the orchestra’s entry into the new hall.

Still, proud and hopeful as he is of the new hall, Fleischmann says he is putting his greatest trust for the Philharmonic’s future in his choice of the young conductor, Salonen, who he believes can lead it into the next century.

Indeed, for Fleischmann, it ultimately comes down to the conductor, whether the orchestra is big or small. “My big beef about the state of orchestral music in this country,” he asserts, “is that there are far too few good conductors. Since the standard of conducting, by and large, is so low, concerts tend to be rather boring in the majority of the places. And that’s what keeps audiences away if they’re kept away at all.

“I think we’ve got to make concerts exciting by getting exciting conductors. Now that’s a very simplistic way of approaching it. But I don’t think much purpose is served by a city like Oshkosh or Cedar Rapids or, you name it, the average American city of between 300,000 and a million people, having performances that are scraggly in sound, poor in intonation, without any great blazing artistic vision of yet another Beethoven symphony or another Brahms concerto.”

This may sound like the Fleischmann of old conniving to remove all competition, to wipe out, say, the Pasadena and Long Beach symphonies. For several years he has been proposing a radical reorganization of orchestral life, replacing the orchestra with a broad-based community of musicians. But he insists that his motives are inherently musical, humanistic and more necessary than ever these days.

“It’s a very real fact, now that orchestras are closing down,” he explains. “You have too many orchestras within a short distance of each other, each competing for audiences, each competing for money, instead of some of them amalgamating with each larger orchestra then being able to provide much more all-around service.”

This pool of players, under one administration, would be available for chamber music ensembles, chamber orchestra concerts, new music programs, symphony concerts and could serve as the ballet and opera orchestras for the city as well. For instance, when 60 of the musicians are playing in the pit for an opera, the other 80 can be giving a symphony concert somewhere else.

“It’s got to come to pass,” Fleischmann insists, “not only if we are going to survive financially, but if we are going to attract the kind of musicians who are no longer satisfied playing, week after week, the same type of repertoire with the same kind of people and the same kind of conductor.”

The obvious rejoinder to this has been, from the start, that such centralizing of artistic power makes people very nervous, and Fleischmann is well-prepared for that.

“This is not a dictatorship,” he says almost wistfully. “And I don’t think I’ve ever had complete control. Obviously, I made my voice heard at a time when I thought it was necessary for the professional to speak up. But it was never a one-man show.

“First of all, Mehta and Giulini were very powerful personalities with very strong ideas. I think the influence that Giulini had in the decision-making process has been grossly underestimated. This man had an iron mind and one just did as he wished. There was a dialogue, but the orchestra and policies during Giulini’s time were Giulini’s policies.

“Possibly during Previn’s time, one had to fill a vacuum, a decision-making vacuum, because he had problems in making up his mind in things. He was not a very decisive leader.

“But now with Salonen, who’s extremely decisive, everything that emanates from here has strong input from him. Obviously, I so often have to be the spokesperson for what we do, and, therefore, I get blamed or praised very often for things that weren’t by any means my own responsibility. I think my own part in running the organization has been exaggerated. Maybe it makes good copy.

“But obviously if there’s something wrong and I spot it, I try to get it corrected. I still don’t think they’re serving good bread in the Bowl restaurant. I’m still trying.”*