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Acoustic designer Tateo Nakajima of Artec Consultants looks around the new concert hall at Place des Arts in Montreal during a tour June 14, 2011.
Photograph by: John Mahoney , The Gazette
Which one of these names is not like the other? Which one of these names just doesn?t belong?
The old Sesame Street jingle is a little easier to whistle than Schoenberg?s Chamber Symphony No. 2, which is what the Orchestre M?tropolitain will be performing as part of the penultimate concert of its 2013-14 season under the baton of Tateo Nakajima.
Yes, that Tateo Nakajima. The former partner of Artec Consultants, who was the executive in charge of matters acoustical for the Maison symphonique and available for hard-hat photo ops only a few short years ago.
Not many authorities on the subset of physics and engineering we call acoustics have a professional musical upbringing. Nakajima is an exception.
This Canadian graduate of the Royal Conservatory in Toronto was building a career as a conductor before meeting the late Russell Johnson, founder of Artec, at the Lucerne Concert Hall in 1999. Johnson, a man with his eye on posterity, saw his potential, and hired him in 2001.
Nakajima was already installed as chief acoustician of the Montreal project when it was announced in June 2006. Artec?s reputation was such that the Quebec government hired the firm even before putting out a call for architects and builders.
But Artec is no more. Less than three weeks ago, the New York company was absorbed into Arup, an engineering firm based in London. Among the not-so-artistic projects in the Arup dossier are the eternally under-consideration Second Avenue Subway in New York and Highway 30 here in Quebec. To say nothing of the Letsibogo Dam in Botswana.
These people are going to create performing-arts facilities? They already have. Indeed, the multinational powerhouse built the Sydney Opera House in 1973 and counts the Barbican Centre in London and the renovation of the Royal Opera House among engineering projects.
All the same, the disappearance of Artec, one of the world?s best-known acoustical and theatre consulting firm, leads to some sober second thought. As well as the inevitable question: What would Russell Johnson think?
?Russell?s driving desire was that his life?s work would continue to be celebrated and serve as a foundation for future generations of concert halls and opera houses,? Nakajima, 42, now an Arup employee, wrote in an email.
?I firmly believe that he would have appreciated that Artec and Arup share many fundamental approaches and beliefs, and that the combined practice will be better positioned to build on his work to create wonderful performance spaces for future generations.?
As for conducting, Nakajima is not quitting his new day job at Arup.
?I?m very pleased to have been invited by Yannick and the OM. While most of my time these days is focused on the design and planning of venues for the performing arts, I relish each opportunity I have to practise my original profession.
?I think it true that my background as a musician and conductor gives me a particularly appropriate background for working on acoustics and theatre design. Opportunities such as this reinforce and enhance my understanding of the needs of musicians and are therefore important for me as an acoustics and theatre designer as well.
?But most of all, I look forward to working with the musicians of the orchestra in performing some wonderful music in Montreal and the surrounding communities.?
Even in the let-us-be-reasonable age of labour relations, orchestra strikes are regular spectacles. There is a dandy underway in San Francisco.
San Francisco Symphony management has just cancelled an East Coast tour comprising two dates in Carnegie Hall and one each in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and Kennedy Center in Washington.
None of the concerts will be rescheduled. Cancelling Carnegie Hall concerts ranks near the top of the bad karma scale. Think about blowing off lunch at Buckingham Palace. Or skipping that installation mass at the Vatican.
To judge by the media treatment in California, management people are in control of the message. The musicians, they say, rejected a ?cooling off period? that would have permitted the tour to go ahead as planned. Of course, the point of a strike is to withhold service, not to supply it selectively, but the optics for the musicians could hardly be worse.
The eye-popping salary proposals they have rejected should have a similar baleful effect. The last management offer would have raised the minimum to $145,979 with 10 weeks paid vacation and health care coverage. Increments of only one and two per cent, the musicians will say, but once you are into six figures, small percentages go a long way. At any rate, extra work would have lifted the de facto San Francisco minimum to more than $165,000. And a fair percentage of musicians make more than the minimum.
SFS music director Michael Tilson Thomas has attempted to stay above the fray, the traditional posture of a conductor during such disputes. Musicians generally respect that distance as well. But not this time. The local American Federation of Musicians president has drawn attention to MTT?s high salary ($2.4 million in 2010), the $11-million renovation of (awful) Davies Hall undertaken in 2011 and a $250,000 bonus paid to the SFS executive director as evidence that the orchestra has the wherewithal to pay the musicians more.
?The money?s there, it?s time to share,? ran the message on a poster carried by one of the picketers last week in front of Davies Hall. ?World-class orchestra, low-class management,? reads another.
Phew. OSM strikes are strawberry socials by comparison.
In case you are wondering, the OSM contract signed in 2011 runs until Aug. 31, 2014.
akaptainis@sympatico.ca
? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
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