EUGENE
A
FOGGY
FUTURE
FOR
THE
BACH
FESTIVAL
ART
TALK
BY B O B K E E F E R
As 2017 comes to a close, there’s still no explanation of Matthew Halls’ firing
D
riving to work on these foggy winter days, I like to listen to
Bach. His clean, cerebral music helps keep the cold fog at bay,
and it always reminds me of pleasant summer nights at the Or-
egon Bach Festival.
Now I wonder how much longer the 47-year-old festival will
continue.
Four months after the University of Oregon fired OBF artistic
director Matthew Halls, the festival feels like it’s teetering on the edge of
extinction — or irrelevance.
Canadian baritone Tyler Duncan has sung at the Oregon Bach Festival
since 2011, drawing reviews like this one in The Oregonian in 2014:
“Duncan sang Jesus with consistent beauty and gravity beneath a ‘halo’
of strings.”
Duncan was invited to perform in the 2018 festival.
But he won’t be coming to Eugene this summer. “I just did not have
a good feeling about accepting a job from OBF this summer,” he said in
an interview. “I want the festival to survive. But I am quite close friends
with Matthew Halls, and seeing what all this has done to him — and he
still has no concrete evidence about why.”
That’s the problem. No one yet seems to have any idea why Halls,
who was chosen to succeed founding artistic director Helmuth Rilling
and take OBF into a new future, was fired in August.
The UO still refuses to explain, falling back on official secrecy
while releasing documents at an unprecedented rate that hint at minor
transgressions.
Unofficially, a whisper campaign has tried to sully Halls’ reputation at
every turn. “Yes, there’s a reason,” a member of the patron class confided
to me one day. “Think Harvey Weinstein.”
That wasn’t the only version of the story I’ve heard. Problem is, not
a single person who has told me about this supposed Weinstein-level
transgression has admitted any direct knowledge of what it was about.
They always heard the tale from somewhere else.
I don’t buy it. Halls may not be a saint — he has a temper and doesn’t
cotton to fools — but despite months of searching and interviewing
people here and around the country, I have yet to find a single person
with firsthand knowledge of anything Halls might have done that’s even
close to deserving dismissal.
A careful reading of hundreds of pages of OBF documents released
since August by the university in response to public records requests by
Eugene Weekly and The Register-Guard paints a sadder picture.
OBF executive director Janelle McCoy apparently kept a laundry list
of Halls’ sins, small and smaller, nearly from the moment she began work
at the festival on Jan. 28, 2016. Item No. 1: Halls used the word “puffer,”
apparently a British term of derision for gays, in a Skype conversation
on Feb. 15 — less than three weeks after McCoy started work. Was she
writing things down even then?
No transgression seems too petty for McCoy’s list, which contains
a photo of excessive lint in the clothes dryer at the house where Halls
stayed during the 2015 festival.
Perhaps the biggest item on the laundry list was that Halls was
“abusive” toward McCoy at an OBF Friends of the Festival board retreat
on Oct. 30, 2016.
Whatever abuse Halls may have committed, though, doesn’t appear
anywhere in the official minutes of that retreat, which EW obtained from
the university.
Instead, the minutes detail what appears to have been a frank discussion
of budget pressures caused by the UO’s decision to cut festival funding.
At the end of the day, the minutes say, participants were asked what
was best about the retreat.
Board member Tom Wuest (who has since left the board) highlighted
the “open and frank discussion we were privileged to witness. Thanks
to Matthew and Janelle. These conversations are rare to occur, but
priceless.”
Board member Julie Gemmell mentioned “the afternoon conversation
with Matthew and Janelle” as a highlight.
Board member and OBF co-founder Royce Saltzman said, “OBF
is in great hands. Openness has given each of us an insight into what
has to happen to make OBF successful.” He’s also quoted saying, “The
openness Janelle and Matthew demonstrated to the board of their working
relationship is important.”
And Doug Blandy, the UO’s senior vice provost for academic affairs,
says in the minutes that “such honest discussion leads to a stellar festival.”
No one, according to the minutes, felt the need to comment on or even
hint at Halls’ supposed abusiveness.
In early December, though, more than a month after the retreat,
Blandy — who would later sign off on Halls’ firing — wrote to Halls that
his “treatment of Ms. McCoy [during the retreat] was unacceptable” and
threatened to terminate his contract.
Isn’t frank discussion what board meetings are all about?
Two days after the firing became public, Colleen Stangeland — wife of
OBF board chairman Brad Stangeland — wrote to UO President Michael
Schill to complain about Halls’ “egregious” firing by McCoy. “The
executive director has undermined his position with endless falsehoods,”
she wrote. “She has singlehandedly orchestrated his demise.”
There was a time this fall when I actually thought that the UO and Halls
could kiss and make up. Surely, I told myself, grownups in the university
administration — and I assume there must be some, somewhere — would
realize the gravity of their mistake.
Couldn’t there be apologies all around and a shaking of hands?
Whether that was ever possible, we’re clearly past that moment
now. Halls is gone, along with any clear future for OBF. Musicians are
wrestling with whether to perform in Eugene next summer.
And Janelle McCoy continues in her job, a ghost skipper piloting a
ghost ship blindly though the fog.
You are cordially invited to the
2018
State of the City Address
Thursday, January 4, 2018
5:30 p.m.
Hult Center for the Performing Arts
Soreng Theater
This is a free event and open to the public.
Wheelchair-accessible and interpreted for the hearing impaired.
20
December 28, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com