SEEKING
HARMONY
he Oregon Bach Festival is
getting a reboot.
In the wake of the sudden
and controversial firing of
popular Artistic Director
Matthew Halls in 2017, the
49-year-old summer music
fest at the University of
Oregon was put under the
control of the UO School of
Music and Dance.
The new SOMD dean,
Sabrina Madison-Cannon
already appears to be exert-
ing her authority. She began
work here just last summer.
Contrary to previous statements by OBF Executive
Director Janelle McCoy, Madison-Cannon announced in
January that the festival would conduct an international
search for a new artistic director. McCoy had announced
after Halls’ departure that OBF would no longer have a
single artistic director in charge of its programming.
McCoy appears to have been behind Halls’ firing.
In an interview at her music school office last week,
Madison-Cannon stressed that she wanted to see the
festival put the past behind it. “My focus has been on
keeping this festival healthy and moving it forward,” she
said when asked if she believed Halls’ firing was justified.
“I think that’s enough to focus on.”
But it’s clear that moving the festival forward means
changes.
The hiring of a new artistic director is just one. The
search will be overseen by Eugene lawyer and arts
patron Roger Saydack, who has run Eugene Symphony’s
intricate music-director selection process going back to
the hiring of then-unknown, now-superstar Marin Alsop
in 1989. Madison-Cannon says she expects to have a
new artistic director on board by the 2020 festival. The
artistic director will report directly to the dean.
Other, subtler changes are afoot. Josh Gren, the
festival’s public relations spokesman during the Halls
debacle, resigned earlier this year. He is being replaced,
temporarily, by a New York arts marketing consultant,
Jonathan Eifert. The festival has also hired a full-time
T
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Under new leadership, the Oregon Bach Festival
t r i e s t o r e c o v e r f r o m t h e H a l l s f i a s c o BY BOB KEEFER
accountant in addition to its full-time financial director.
McCoy’s future with the festival is unclear. Asked
about the executive director’s hold on her job, Madison-
Cannon neither answered the question nor indicated
support for McCoy.
“I’ll put it this way. I don’t think I want to answer any
questions about any personnel decisions that we’re
going to make,” the dean said. “I will say this, you know:
The festival is doing well.”
In the months she’s been on the job, Madison-Cannon
says she’s discovered that OBF is many things to many
people.
“When I was asking for information from people
on what the artistic direction of the festival should be,
there would be people that would say to me, ‘Oh, this is,
you know, a choral festival. We need someone in here
who really gets choral music.’ And then I’d be talking
to someone else who would say, ‘Boy, I miss the days of
the big lush orchestra with Rilling.’ And then I talked
to someone else who would say, ‘This is a historically
informed performance kind of venue.’ And what I realized
in all of that is the Bach Festival is all of those things.”
Madison-Cannon wants to reach out to broader
audiences, both in number and demographics.
Finally, she says, the new artistic director needs to be
“someone who’s visionary in their thinking.”
OBF, which exists as a project of the university rather
than as a separate nonprofit, has stumbled repeatedly
for two decades as it’s tried to replace its two founders,
UO music professor Royce Saltzman and German choral
conductor Rilling. The two men started the festival as
an informal choral gathering in 1970.
When Saltzman retired, for the first time, in the
1990s, he was replaced as executive director by the
flamboyant Neill Archer Roan. Roan was the former
programming director at the Hult Center whom The
Oregonian once described as “the P.T. Barnum” of the
Oregon arts world. Roan lasted just two seasons before
leaving the festival with its staff and budget in chaos; he
resigned in 1997, citing health problems.
Saltzman came out of retirement to run the festival
once again.
At that point a consultant hired by the UO to examine
festival operations wrote a scathing report that said
OBF had gone stale in its programming and flat in its
marketing, racking up a deficit of $800,000.
In the wake of the report, OBF hired former BBC
producer John Evans as executive director. Smart
and well connected in the classical music world, but
sometimes abrasive, Evans drew major donations to put
the festival back on its feet financially, but alienated a
lot of staffers. He left his job suddenly with no public
announcement in 2014 and died of a heart attack in 2016.
In late 2015 the festival hired McCoy, a singer with
less administrative experience than her predecessors,
as executive director, and soon named Halls as artistic
director to succeed Rilling. At last OBF appeared to be
on a stable track to success, as Halls seemed to bring the
right combination of charm, wit and musical substance
to the job.
But in August 2017 Halls was summarily fired. The
UO has never publicly explained his termination, but
has hinted that it involved sexual improprieties. Halls
flatly denied any such charges and insisted — before he
was silenced by a non-disparagement agreement with a
$90,000 payout — that he had no idea why his contract
was ended.
Scrambling after Eugene Weekly broke the story of
Halls’ firing, McCoy and then-OBF spokesman Gren put
out a hasty statement saying the festival was taking a
different direction and would operate without a single
artistic director.
As board members, donors and fans of the festival
expressed their outrage at both the firing and the new
artistic plan, the university hunkered down in silence.
Ultimately, the festival, which had reported to the
university provost’s office, was put under control of the
SOMD, and a committee was appointed to take on the
job of artistic direction.
That committee remains active; it planned the 2018
festival and is working on the schedules for 2019 and
2020, Madison-Cannon said.
The 2019 festival lineup was announced in early
February; it lists a stripped-down program that opens
with Mozart and closes with Berlioz. The only Bach
choral works on the program to be performed by the
OBF Chorus are two cantatas to be performed in the
Discovery series and C.P.E. Bach’s Magnificat. ■
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