Of the many internal changes that have taken place at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since Henry Fogel became executive director in 1985, few are likely to have a greater immediate impact on the orchestra`s community outreach than the staff appointments of Kenneth Jean as associate conductor and Michael Morgan as assistant conductor.
Jean, 33, and Morgan, 29, are prominent examples of a new breed of young conductor, born and educated in America, whose superior talents and training have won them important engagements with American symphony orchestras and opera companies, positions that have allowed them to establish beachheads in other parts of the musical world.
Jean and Morgan were chosen from a field of 13 American conductors invited to audition first with the Civic Orchestra (the CSO`s training orchestra) and later with the Chicago Symphony. Music director Georg Solti made the final choice after observing the final audition and considering the evaluation sheets filled out by all 104 members of his orchestra. With few exceptions, there is no tougher judge or jury in the symphonic world.
To merge energies with Solti and his celebrated orchestra would be a Utopian fantasy-come-true for any up-and-coming young conductor. But while Jean and Morgan are clearly delighted to be in Chicago, they also are realistic enough to understand what is expected of them here and the responsibility their positions entail.
”Working with the Chicago Symphony is a tremendous education,” Jean says. ”But you have to be able to deliver the goods. If you pull it off, that`s okay, because it`s what you are paid to do. If you don`t, people ask,
`What is he getting a salary for?”`
Morgan echoes his colleague`s sentiment when he says, ”I consider the members of the CSO to be our primary teachers. Because it`s highly unlikely either of us is going to say anything to them that they haven`t heard before. So it`s wonderful when they come to us and share their experiences with so many of the world`s great conductors. It helps you feel a part of the family.”
If neither Jean nor Morgan is precisely a household name to the Chicago concert public, that is because neither man has conducted a CSO subscription concert. Their recognizability quotient should begin to soar next April, when Jean is scheduled to inherit a Beethoven program from Solti while the boss goes home to London to attend his daughter`s birthday party. Morgan will make his subscription series debut during the 1988-89 season.
Just because the audience does not see them, however, does not mean the new staff conductors are not deeply involved in the music that the subscribers hear. Part of the responsibility of a house maestro is to be on call for each week`s concerts should one of the scheduled guest conductors fall ill. This involves, of course, a vast amount of musical literature to be learned, which is one of the main reasons Fogel has divided the associate`s job, essentially, in half.
A ”cover” conductor must be a quick learn to survive this kind of week- to-week pressure. Fortunately, both conductors have served as covers with other orchestras–Jean says he has gone 14 years as an associate conductor without ever having had to replace an indisposed maestro–and this experience has enabled them to absorb most of the standard repertory and a good deal else besides.
In the event opportunity should knock on their dressing room doors, however, both Jean and Morgan keep well-pressed sets of dress tails backstage at Orchestra Hall.
For the thousands of inner city, suburban and outlying county schoolchildren for whom the CSO youth concerts represent an important first and perhaps only exposure to classical music, Jean and Morgan already are familiar figures.
This week they will share podium duties for a series of five CSO youth concerts, their second such assignment of the season, returning to Orchestra Hall Friday night for the season`s final Civic Orchestra concert, a program they will also share. Several weeks later, on May 25, Morgan will direct the CSO in a special open-air Memorial Day program at Chicago State University, free to the public.
As artistic director of the CSO educational programs, Jean must oversee the 14 concerts the orchestra is giving this season in Orchestra Hall, and the two Rosemont Horizon events last March that were heard by nearly 25,000 young people. Working with CSO special projects director Evelyn Meine, he makes school visits, prepares information packets for classroom use and huddles with the orchestra`s army of docents and volunteers, among other duties.
Because Jean abhors the deadly dull exercises in prefab Music Appreciation that usually pass as children`s concerts, he devises clever strategems by which to draw his young listeners into the music. He began his recent Rosemont concerts by conducting an empty stage, a device that allowed him to introduce the instruments of the orchestra, section by section. It worked; the children clearly were engrossed. ”These were the most well-behaved kids I`ve ever seen in my life,” Jean proudly reports.
”The point of this,” he explains, ”is to sell the idea of listening to good music. ”You know you can`t work miracles in just four or five programs, so you try to seize their attention right away. I don`t care if they also listen to rock. I just want classical music to be a part of their lives.”
Unlike many younger conductors who occupy similar positions with American orchestras, Jean and Morgan brought to Chicago a broad range of conducting experience.
Jean already had directed educational concerts for 10 years with the Cleveland and Detroit symphonies, while Morgan (a first-prize winner of conducting competitions in Vienna, San Remo and Baltimore) had served one season as Exxon/Arts Endowment assistant conductor with the St. Louis Symphony. (Morgan`s Chicago tenure also falls under the Exxon/Arts Endowment program.)
Recognizing their need to flex their musical muscles in a variety of settings, Fogel made it one of the stipulations of his hiring Jean and Morgan that they seize every opportunity to develop their careers outside the Chicago Symphony organization while they are here.
They are doing just that. Jean is serving his initial season as music director of the Florida Symphony Orchestra and continues as principal guest conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic. Morgan is busy conducting opera in Vienna, East Berlin and New York. Both conductors make guest appearances with orchestras in the United States.
Because Jean`s obligations to Orlando and Hong Kong require him to commute back and forth between those outposts and Chicago, Fogel hired Morgan to assist Jean in the educational concerts and in other areas and in so doing brought the CSO for the first time into the Exxon apprentice-conductors program.
”As it turns out, Michael and I have known each other for the last 10 years and we can work so easily together. We are crazy in the same way,” Jean says, with a wink. Martha Gilmer, the CSO`s artistic administrator, keeps track of the conductors` global comings and goings on a huge chart that hangs in the CSO office. Careful planning prevents there being very much overlap in their residencies. ”The joke around here is that there`s something wrong if you see both of us in the building at the same time,” says Jean.
The invitation to audition for the CSO could not have come at a more opportune moment for Morgan, a native of Washington, D.C., who has been conducting since age 12.
His star has risen rapidly. In 1979, while still a student at Oberlin College, he became an assistant to Julius Rudel at the Buffalo Philharmonic. A year later, he won the Hans Swarowsky Conductors Competition in Vienna. A year after that, he joined the St. Louis Symphony as an assistant conductor. And his troubles began.
”The St Louis position was a bad match–wrong person, wrong place, wrong time,” Morgan declares. ”When I got there, I discovered there was very little for me to do. The orchestra was absolutely wonderful, and I got along with (music director) Leonard Slatkin. But at 23 I was not equipped to deal gracefully with the frustration of standing around idle.”
Morgan did not remain idle for long. ”After leaving St. Louis, I had time to go through a lot of repertory, rethink some of it and build my musical reserves.” In the five years before his coming to Chicago he conducted the Washington Summer Opera and the Baltimore Symphony (with which he has enjoyed a cordial relationship since 1974) and was one of three young American conductors selected by Leonard Bernstein to share a program with the New York Philharmonic. He also was the subject of a recent segment of ABC-TV`s ”20/
20” series.
”Solti appointed Michael because he is extraordinarily talented,”
Gilmer explains. ”That he`s black is a great plus. He will be going out to conduct the orchestra in schools where there are many black students. That kids can have Michael as a role model is wonderful, and we hope it will break down a lot of barriers.”
As Jean sees it, the challenge he and Morgan face as staff conductors of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago is to breathe new life into the institution. Both praise the accomplishments of Gordon Peters, the orchestra`s longtime administrator, who, in Jean`s words, has given the organization ”a professional attitude in microcosm.”
Given their ambitious natures, it is not surprising to learn that both Jean and Morgan already are grappling with the question: Is there career life after Chicago? ”By 1988, when my contract expires, I will have to be doing other things,” says Jean. ”One should make room for the next generation.”
As for Morgan, he expects to have a three-year residency as part of the Exxon arrangement with Chicago. After that, he suggests that he wouldn`t mind having an American orchestra of his own. For Morgan the big challenge will be taking things as they come.
”I got some good advice from my junior high school music teacher, Hermann Suehs. He said if you cannot be discouraged, then you belong in music. The people who stay in music are the ones who absolutely cannot imagine doing anything else.”
