The conductor

In his 15th season with the Portland Symphony Orchestra, Toshiyuki Shimada reflects on budgets, relationships, and life after the PSO

by Doug Hubley

The Portland Symphony Orchestra performs at 7:30 p.m. on November 14 at Merrill Auditorium. Call 842-0800.

Toshi: “At some point . . . we have to part, because orchestra will need completely new ideas.”

“I’m very happy to be here,” says Toshiyuki Shimada. How nice for him, you may say, but in fact the music director and conductor of the Portland

Symphony Orchestra has plenty to be happy about. His marriage to pianist Eva Virsik is strong, he says, and their 9-year-old son Mathias is “one of my finest joys.” The orchestra, now in its 15th season with Shimada at the helm, sounds as good as it ever has. And the 48-year-old Shimada gets enough conducting action on the side — including a recording contract with a Vienna-based label — to be reasonably assured that Portland isn’t the last stop on his career path.

Still, like all of us, Shimada could be happier. These aren’t the worst of times for the Portland Symphony Orchestra, but neither are they the best. Why? “Money’s tight,” Shimada says. The budget’s in the black, but the organization runs very lean, and there are things Shimada can’t do that would make him even happier. For example, he can’t program big-ticket repertoire such as Mahler’s Symphony No. 8. Perhaps more important, he can’t develop the new concert formats that might attract younger or larger audiences.

“I think that somebody has to do really a lot of thinking and change how to present so-called classical music,” Shimada says in his slightly broken English. But until the booming economy flings a few more clams toward the PSO, that somebody won’t be him. In the meanwhile, the old concert formats will just have to do.

Such as the Classical Series program at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. The season’s fourth concert has something for everybody: modern American music, by Copland and Barber; a war-horse of the standard 19th-century repertoire, in Brahms’s Violin Concerto; a high-profile guest artist to ride the war-horse in violinist Kyoko Takezawa, a shining star on the RCA Victor label. (For concert particulars, see sidebar.)

Shimada was born in Tokyo, moved to the United States at 15, studied in California and Vienna, and came here from the Houston Symphony. The legacy left him by his PSO predecessor, Bruce Hangen, was a strong core of players, a highly competent organization and a community attentive to the orchestra. Shimada has steadily refined those strengths and built upon them.

Tuesday’s show Homages to Aaron Copland have popped up all over this season, 2000 being the composer’s birth centennial. Shimada wanted to represent Copland with something substantial and selected Symphony No. 3, published in 1946. Substantial, you bet: this orchestral showcase is big, complex, and slightly cryptic, a sort of mid-life retrospective that covers Copland’s whole stylistic range and incorporates his popular Fanfare for the Common Man. Where the Copland sprawls, Samuel Barber’s Second Essay for Orchestra is a gem, a world of orchestral potential compressed into one movement. It opens with the spotlight on the PSO’s new principal flutist, Lisa Hennessy, and progresses from her solo turn to an orchestral climax that, in its size and coloration, PSO Music Director Toshiyuki Shimada likens to the Grand Canyon. Sandwiched between the two Americans is the Violin Concerto in D Major by Johannes Brahms. Like the Barber, this concerto often draws comparisons to a proper symphony. The soloist is often integrated into the orchestral fabric, contrasted to the usual role of the heroic voice soaring over the whole shebang. (A contemporary of Brahms said the piece was written against the violin, not for it.) It’s typically Brahmsian in its density, in the lyricism of the slow movement, and in the Hungarian Gypsy flavor of the finale. Not to mention the demands placed on the soloist, who in this case is more than up to it. Kyoko Takezawa is not quite a superstar, but close. A child prodigy who survived the transition to an adult career, she makes the rounds from major orchestra to major orchestra when she’s not jurying international competitions or running a chamber festival in Japan. Takezawa first appeared with the PSO in 1989, the year she graduated from Juilliard. “She was a very young lady, straight out of Japan, and at that time her mother was traveling with her, so you could tell she still hadn’t grown up personally,” says Shimada. Musically, it was a different story. “The way she approached music was like an Olympic diver just ready to dive into the pool, you know?” he says. “That kind of energy, concentration.” Since then she has only gotten better, which tends to happen when you play with the world’s great orchestras all the time. Now, Shimada says, Takezawa’s great ability is tempered by a mature perspective that shows her the large view of a piece of music. “She can grasp what it really means, what it means to her and what it meant to the composer,” he says. “Ten years ago I would never have wanted to do Brahms Violin Concerto with her. But now she has matured into the quality that Brahms’s Violin Concerto requires, to see into the music.”

His programming is a persuasive explanation for the loyalty of the PSO audience, which totaled nearly 100,000 people during the 1999-2000 season. Tuesday’s concert is typical in its balance and its embrace of such traditional virtues as beauty, drama, virtuosity, and reverence toward history. Elsewhere in the current season we see Beethoven, Mozart, et al. for the traditionalists, Pärt and Prokofiev for the edgeheads, and lots of ’40s swing for lighter sensibilities. That kind of deliberate careful moderation, which is also manifested in Shimada’s conducting, plays well here.

As does his approach to the ever-delicate question of contemporary music. Too much new music and your audience gets mad; too little, and the insiders declare you a wimp. Again, Shimada has trodden cautiously, unlike Hangen, who liked new music a lot and the more clangorous, the better. These days, though, Shimada is espousing a renewed commitment to new American music, albeit the kinder, gentler kind.

“There is a fear of this work, of avant-garde or contemporary music, but I’m here now trying to present more — I hate this word, but I can’t think of other words to describe it — accessible music,” he adds. “More lovable music, you know?”

Fortunately, after decades of soundtrack music for a nervous breakdown, “the younger generation of composers are staying away now from these harsh, violent-sounding pieces,” he says. “There is actually a melody you can whistle, which is an amazing thing.” This season, he has picked composers like the popular Tan Dun, whose Dragon and Phoenix turns up in January, and Gia Comolli, of Bath, Maine, whose Flight of Icarus will be presented in March.

Shimada has built the audience in other ways. “I’ve tried to really take down the barrier as much as possible,” he says. “I’m very accessible, I think, to anybody who lives here — not like a big maestro hiding in some castle somewhere. I hope I have brought this audience to feel that, indeed, this is their orchestra.”

Yet he still feels the lack of an effective draw for younger listeners. The PSO has a strong education program, but do in-school “Kinderkonzerts” and Merrill Auditorium youth concerts make for a symphony habit comparable to a rave or a nightclub habit? The regular concert series — Classical, Pops, and the Mozart & More series, for chamber orchestra — don’t angle explicitly for people in their teens and 20s, although the chamber series may come closest, with an intimate atmosphere and slightly adventurous programming.

Shimada knows that change is due. “We just tell them, ‘Well, come to the concert, sit there and listen to it,’ ” he says. “That’s no good.” He has tried diverse tactics to increase accessibility — coupling music with theater or film, say, or the casual “Classic Encounters” concerts that invited audience discussion. “There should be some kind of feeling for the audience that they are participating, not passively but actively,” says Shimada, who gets all revved up by the topic and wonders if there might eventually be a way to bring Internet-style information access right into the concert hall.

The problem with all these schemes is money. The City Hall renovation that produced the gorgeous Merrill Auditorium left the PSO and other presenters exiled to lesser venues for 25 months. The orchestra had lost $400,000 by the time it returned to Merrill in March 1997. Government arts funding collapsed in the early 1990s; the appropriation for the National Endowment for the Arts, which peaked in 1992 at $176 million, has hovered under $100 million for the last five years. (In fiscal year 2001 it finally went up, to around $105 million.) Business support has shrunk as well, due to the recession a decade ago and, more recently, the surrender of local control by major Maine corporations. Decision-makers in Tennessee don’t much care about the arts in Maine.

The PSO is doing OK — “running modest surpluses” on a current annual budget of $2.4 million, according to spokesperson Deborah Hammond — but there’s little money for extras.

The other collective relationship Shimada has to maintain is with the musicians. That too seems to be going well. Most of the musicians holding principal chairs in 1986 are still here. That familiarity thus engendered has been a good thing.

“We’ve been making music for so many years, for so long together, I feel like some of these principals are like my other ear,” Shimada says. In return, he has tried to allow as much creative freedom as the form allows. And his long tenure allows Shimada and the PSO the precious opportunity to rediscover repertoire from early in his tenure.

“We all grew up together,” he says. “And now we have a different view about the music, different skills, and so we like to revisit these pieces, and we tackle again.” The PSO last played the Brahms concerto in 1987. Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, from Shimada’s first season here, turned up again last month. And he was much happier with it this time.

“You can tell listening to the tapes back to back that this is a different orchestra,” he says. “And for me, it’s a different interpretation. I got older and wiser, and I can see more things in the pieces than I did before.”

Another way of broadening his understanding, not to mention his career opportunities, is work on the outside. Shimada routinely takes conducting gigs in Europe in summer. Three years ago he started recording with the Moravian Philharmonic, an orchestra in the Czech Republic, for Vienna Modern Masters, a label specializing in contemporary music. To date he has recorded six titles for VMM. Next winter, Shimada will conduct the Philharmonic in concert.

As happy as Shimada is here, happiness can be portable. There’s always another rung up the career ladder, even after 14 years in one spot. “When the opportunity comes, I’ll go,” he says. “At this point I’m very happy with what’s happening with the Portland Symphony Orchestra, and I’d love to continue that relationship.

“But at some point — and I don’t know when that point is — we have to part, because orchestra will need completely new ideas. That’s very important, I think, for the long range of orchestra.”

In the meantime, he’s got unfinished business here. He’d like to do more “runouts,” PSO concerts out of town, which this year are taking place in Presque Isle and Rockland. And of course, there’s the Mahler Eighth, with its 100-piece orchestra, two choruses, and eight vocal soloists.

“That will break the bank,” he laughs. “We can’t do it immediately in the future. So there is still time for me here.”

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net..