New arts leaders will face big challenges, opportunities

As Seattle arts organizations celebrate new seasons with nearly normal schedules and in-person performances, they’re also doing a little nail-biting. Companies need audiences to return. However, patrons are showing they’re willing and, in fact, hungry for the emotional, life-affirming vibe that only live performance can bring. It’s a marriage of wallets and hearts.

But quite a bit has changed. Incomes, spending patterns and entertainment habits are still not normal and may never be. Looming over all this is the specter of a “triple threat” respiratory illness season with a COVID subvariant, flu and the particularly nasty respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. There’s a lot riding on this season and the ones to come.

That’s especially true of Seattle’s Big Three — the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera and Seattle Art Museum. All are in search of new artistic leadership, a rare confluence. It’s a huge opportunity. Much depends on their success, and not just in terms of ticket sales but the revitalization of downtown social life and the continuity of Seattle’s long history with, and investment in, art of all kinds.

Remember, SAM brought King Tut to town in 1978, and 1.3 million visitors came to Seattle Center to meet him. Before 2007, the Olympic Sculpture Park was just a stretch of polluted ground. In just over a year, the symphony commissioned a piece that earned a Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy and an invitation to perform at Carnegie Hall, topping the many Grammy nominations of years past. The opera became world-recognized for staging the “Green Ring” cycle, a fusion of Wagner and the forest.

One thing to understand is that the age of the long tenure is over. And Seattle was once at the heart of don’t-fix-what-ain’t-broke territory. The founding director of the Seattle Art Museum, Richard Fuller, served for four decades, beating the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s longest-serving director, Philippe de Montebello, by nine years. Seattle Opera General Director Speight Jenkins served for 31 years, and Seattle Symphony maestro Gerard Schwarz was at the podium at SSO for 26.

Contrast that with where we are today: The opera’s general director, Christina Scheppelmann, is departing in 2024, at the end of her five-year contract; Seattle Art Museum’s CEO/director Amada Cruz resigned after four years; Seattle Symphony’s last music director, Thomas Dausgaard, departed messily by email in 2022 after barely three years, and for much of that time he was stranded by COVID travel restrictions.

Everything is different. But the importance of these positions is not.

Granted, the period 2020-23 was a floating dumpster fire that burned extra-hot and could be seen from space. Some pastures became greener. Scheppelmann is going to helm La Monnaie/De Munt, the National Opera of Belgium, where she’ll oversee an eight-opera season at one of Europe’s most prestigious opera companies. Dausgaard, among other, less existential reasons, said at the time that the pandemic “centers the question for us all: how do we value our lives?” Cruz is moving on to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, citing her frequent visits and long-standing friendships there.

Jonathan Rosoff, executive vice president of the Seattle Opera board and head of the company’s search committee, credits Scheppelmann with continuing to elevate the opera’s reputation, and is confident that will help attract accomplished candidates who understand the plan to stay the course of inviting new audiences (with premieres like “A Thousand Splendid Suns”) and welcoming the regulars (“Das Rheingold,” which was packed on a summer Wednesday). While the opera would love to have someone stay for some time, he and his fellow searchers realize shorter tenures are the new reality, Rosoff said.

The symphony, meanwhile, is entering its second consecutive season without a permanent music director. Ludovic Morlot, Schwarz’s charismatic and popular successor, stayed for eight years. As conductor emeritus, he’s serving as artistic adviser for SSO programming, keeping his Seattle ties and visibility strong. A roster of guest conductors is set for the season, and milestones such as Benaroya Hall’s 25th anniversary and the orchestra’s 120th birthday are reasons to celebrate. Longtime patrons are likely missing that cohesive sense of identity that a music director brings. But it’s not unusual for music directors to move about, either. Most have obligations beyond their home orchestra that take them far and wide for parts of every season; Morlot, for example, is also music director of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and an associate artist with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and continues his guest conducting appearances.

SAM is on the hunt for its fourth director since 2009, and given the lead time needed for big loans and blockbuster traveling shows, focusing on finding a leader slows that process. Its main facility at First and Union needs crowds and lines again that will spill over to surrounding businesses. The 2011 show, “Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris,” was one of the highest-attended shows in the country that year, but that wasn’t put together overnight.

The tasks for new leaders:

∙ Keep what works. The opera’s relaxed performances and post-show dialogues, the symphony’s highly successful, hopping-on-Fridays performance space Octave 9 and the art museum’s Remix parties brought nontraditional audiences in and kept them coming. For example, If you like hearing Jean Sibelius’ great-grandson, Finnish metal guitarist and composer Lauri Porra (which you can do in November), you might give his great-granddad a try. People really want to come back, noted Courtney Bullard, SSO’s senior manager of public relations. They’re just coming back, and spending, in a different way, she added. The new music director needs to meet these audiences where they are.

∙ Be visible. The pandemic’s forced unraveling of shared public experiences has made the faces behind arts institutions a bit of a mystery. Meet people. Welcome them. Offer them chances to ask questions. Be transparent in how you do what you do, and why. (Potential audiences, check out Seattle Opera’s free open house on Sept. 23, seattleopera.org)

∙ Do a big thing. Collaborate with one another. Make a season-opening celebration that stretches for blocks and for multiple nights. Make it easier to take transit or park, with discounts. Can some artists return to Bumbershoot? Add some trendy food. Bring in the mayor. Make art a party.

Audiences await.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story contained an incorrect title for Courtney Bullard at Seattle Symphony.