Philadelphia Orchestra director taking baton of a mentor

MONTREAL - A generation ago, a boy of about 10 sat in one of this city's parks listening to L'Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal. When the music ended, he walked up to the stage to give the conductor a gift: a drawing of an orchestra in his own hand.

The conductor thanked him - with a card and his latest recording, Saint-Saens' Symphony No. 3.

A brief encounter, for sure, but you never know what kind of sparks get thrown off from a moment like this.

Or where it may lead.

The conductor was Charles Dutoit, the boy Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Now, 25 years later, the baton is slowly passing from master to apprentice with the news that Nézet-Séguin will become music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2012, when Dutoit will move from chief conductor to laureate.

Dutoit's accessibility not only encouraged Nézet-Séguin, now 35, but, reflecting on it last Sunday on the day that word of his appointment seeped out, Nézet-Séguin suggested that it also had implications for a tenure in Philadelphia he had only begun to imagine.

"That has helped shape my vision of what is a music director in a city," he said. "It was maybe the first model I had because of the place he had in Montreal, the city I was growing up in. Maestro Dutoit was extremely involved in the city. We got always the feeling that he knew everyone - he knew the mayor, he knew the key people in the city."

So, already, does Nézet-Séguin. He, with his parents and his partner, Pierre Tourville, met Mayor Nutter on Friday in City Hall, just after the conductor accepted what he called his new post as musical "servant" before hundreds of orchestra supporters in the Kimmel Center plaza.

The mission: "For me it's crucial to awaken the pride of the city for its orchestra. That is what will enable us to keep the name of this orchestra internationally."

Nézet-Séguin comes along as the orchestra's eighth music director when it needs friends more than ever, at perhaps the most perilous time in the institution's history. Facing a string of deficits and houses not quite three-quarters filled this season, it is operating through the support of an emergency bridge fund raised from board members.

It's too early for Nézet-Séguin to say how he will put his stamp on the job - which repertoire, what kind of projects, whether to concentrate locally or internationally. The answers depend largely on a prosaically titled but critical exercise called the strategic planning process, which aims, in essence, to answer where the orchestra's audience went and how it can be reengaged.

"We're about to embark on a journey of strategic and artistic planning, and the idea of naming me music director-designate immediately is that I can be part of that process," the conductor said. "Of course, I will have crucial and determining input on it, but this is a collaborative process.

"I'm actually very excited. This will shape my own way of thinking about repertoire and my own ways of thinking how to build audiences as well as keeping alive the qualities of the orchestra and its sound. But it has to be appropriate to the history and the needs of the community, and about this I need to know more."

Nézet-Séguin has conducted only two programs with the Philadelphians, in 2008 and 2009 - less contact than any other future leader has had since Leopold Stokowski was hired at age 30 in 1912, having never conducted them at all. Clearly, there are unknowns.

Yet you get the feeling that this eager, deeply enthusiastic maestro will do anything he's asked. Embracing the American-style parts of the job that have repelled conductors in other cities - wooing donors and listeners, for instance - won't draw a flinch from him.

That he appeared to maintain his equanimity, even good cheer, during Friday's warm whirlwind of visits to the Kimmel, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Liberty Bell, and a Phillies game was a fair indication of his willingness to work off the podium.

"I never saw any contradiction in speaking to the audience members after or before concerts, being in touch with board members, going to board meetings, having dinner with some sponsors," Nézet-Séguin said. "I always felt that this was part of making the music happen, and I am always happy of doing it. For me it's not something I have to do - no, I enjoy this. For me it's all part of the same thing."

He has already proved a deft rainmaker at the Metropolitan Opera. Jacqueline Desmarais, a managing director of the Met Opera board and wife of Paul Desmarais Sr., one of the 10 richest Canadians, signed on to sponsor this season's new Carmen after Nézet-Séguin was engaged to conduct. He is set to lead one production in each of the next several seasons.

His unpretentious, approachable quality struck orchestra board members and some musicians early on in their short relationship.

"I've had dinner with him several times, and coffee, and I think this is a very nice young man. He is a pleasure to watch, to listen to, but also he is just a very nice person to talk with," orchestra board chairman Richard B. Worley said. "I would be proud of him if he were my son, not just because of his musical accomplishments but the type of person he is. We like him very much. I think he and the musicians have a very good rapport, he and Allison [B. Vulgamore, orchestra president] have a very good rapport, and for this orchestra at this time, this is the right decision."

Nézet-Séguin said the orchestra's delicate financial condition had not caused him to waver.

"I fell in love with this orchestra because of the music-making we did together. If this is there, the strength to go through anything we have to do better - I think we'll find it. So, no, no hesitations."

Short, solidly built, and prone to illustrate points with an obbligato of big gestures, Nézet-Séguin divides his time between homes in Montreal, where he leads the Orchestre Métropolitain, and in the Netherlands, where he leads the Rotterdam Philharmonic - as well as scores of hotel rooms as he makes debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and others.

He realizes this peripatetic phase in his emergence on the world stage is quickly fading. He does not intend to give up posts in Rotterdam or Montreal, but he plans to reduce guest appearances, and can see himself someday buying a home in Philadelphia - an act that translates as loyalty to many Philadelphians.

"I know it looks like, 'Oh, he's so busy.' Of course, I can't deny I'm busy," he said. "What I mean is that to do this, for me, is the realization over the past few months of what I've always felt from the start - that I think I am a music director at heart.

"I am someone who likes to go in depth with the people I work with. I was in the past five years in the incredibly thrilling position of being invited and trying virtually every orchestra that exists, and that was fantastic. But I knew from the start that this was a phase.

"I feel that going to Philadelphia obviously will take not only eventually the major part of my activities, but also that my work will be concentrated around a few key ensembles. I see this as very logical, and I see this as very healthy."

Moving from orchestra to orchestra, Nézet-Séguin said, has made him avoid imposing his will on ensembles. He is known to be more collaborative than authoritarian.

"A conception and an interpretation should be something which is open enough to encompass all the difference of the different groups," he said. "As much as the style and the respect for the composer is important, it's important to have and respect the input of the individual musicians. That's my way of seeing conducting. I cannot arrive everywhere and say that is the way I conceive Mahler 5 or Beethoven 3.

"When I took Rotterdam as music director, the first concert I conducted as designate was with Eroica, and it was broadcast in Canada, and my musicians in Montreal, I had just performed Eroica with them. And they said, 'It wasn't you - really, I mean, how come it sounded so different?' "

Growing up in the same city as Dutoit, and going to school at the Conservatoire de Musique du Québec à Montréal, Nézet-Séguin felt the older conductor as a regular influence.

"I have memories of his Ravel, his Berlioz. Stravinsky was also very special. I remember also some very, very classy Haydn."

Carlo Maria Giulini, too, had an effect. Nézet-Séguin spent apprentice time with the widely worshiped Italian maestro, soaking in "the extraordinary respect that this man had for his art, his work, the composers, and, therefore, the musicians."

"And the embodiment of that respect, I could witness it, because I was witnessing his rehearsals. I saw rehearsals with Orchestre d'Paris, Chamber Orchestra of Europe. But I saw rehearsals also with a youth orchestra in Spain. And when I say youth orchestra, it was, like, average 14 or 15 years old, really young people. And he was treating them with such respect. And the result was when they played in the concert - that Brahms 1 I will never forget. It was the richest string sound you can imagine. It was fantastic, because they all gave their heart to him."

What else he picked up from Giulini, he said, was the confidence to look for answers within himself.

"This taught me to not be shy now of evolving in my own way, but to allow a lot of time for self-examination. To let it grow. And that is exactly why I tackled so much repertoire very young, in order to let it mature."

Hence the Bruckner symphonies he's recorded, which are often a concentration better left for later in life.

On repertoire, Nézet-Séguin has not developed a long suit, and he said Philadelphians should not look for one.

"I feel the orchestra has to be polyvalent in its way of approaching styles, and I feel my way of showing this and cultivating this will be to, myself, touch a lot of repertoire. In other words, I think we should not expect that I will myself specialize in one area with the orchestra. This is not how I am built as a musician, and I don't think that is what is expected of a music director."

Every leader of the Philadelphia Orchestra since Stokowski has had to deal with the orchestra's trademark sound, either by trimming its sails, the way Riccardo Muti did, or by accentuating it only in certain repertoire, as Wolfgang Sawallisch did.

Nézet-Séguin is no less conscious of its existence than his recent predecessors - "No question I have the responsibility to cultivate that sound," he said - and while his way of dealing with it will have to play out over time, he imbued this question of the orchestra's velvety sound with force-of-destiny significance: "I think that is why it clicked."

Why it clicked, yes - but when?

Nézet-Séguin said he couldn't put his finger on the moment he decided to become part of a city where he had conducted only twice.

"It's a very interesting question, because sometimes I am asking myself the same question, like, 'When did I start thinking that, and when did it all start?'

"It's the beautiful thing. I think that since I first was on the podium for that first rehearsal [in 2008], I felt something really extraordinary, and I guess already at that moment part of me was already thinking or dreaming something about the orchestra."