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Jahja's finale
During Jahja Ling's 14-year tenure with the Florida Orchestra, he has conducted more than 400 different works. This weekend's performances are his last with the orchestra.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 25, 2002
[Times photos: Jamie Francis]
Jahja Ling conducts the Florida Orchestra at a concert in March at the Mahaffey Theater. Ling’s first appearance with the Florida Orchestra was as a guest conductor in 1986, leading a program of Elgar’s Symphony No. 1, the overture to Barber’s School for Scandal and Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with soloist Stephen Hough.
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Fittingly, Jahja Ling will bow out with a Mahler symphony. He will conduct Mahler's vast Symphony No. 3 this weekend in his last concerts as music director of the Florida Orchestra.
"Mahler Three is the symphony of love for me," Ling said. "Love of nature, humanity and God. I want to show my love of the orchestra, of the audience and the community here. It's my best-loved Mahler symphony."
Mahler has been a cornerstone of Ling's 14-year tenure with the orchestra. He has conducted eight of the nine symphonies, missing only the eighth, the "symphony of a thousand," with its mammoth chorus. Several Mahler symphonies have been programmed twice, including the third, which he also conducted in 1991.
This has been a season of change for Ling. In October, he turned 50. Last month, he conducted his final performances as resident conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, winding up 18 years in that post with Mahler's Second Symphony.
The orchestra players refused to stand at the end of the Cleveland concerts so that the focus of the applause was on Ling.
"For a long, long time, they kept applauding, and the love that I felt was unbelievable," he said. "It's hard when you have to leave, but it's better to leave that way than the other way around, when people don't want you anymore."
Ling's first appearance with the Florida Orchestra was as a guest conductor in 1986, leading a program of Elgar's Symphony No. 1, the overture to Barber's School for Scandal and Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1, with soloist Stephen Hough.
He has conducted more than 400 different works with the orchestra, a wide-ranging cross section of the symphonic repertoire, from John Williams movie scores to some 40 performances of Beethoven (the most of any composer). Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss were frequently on the Ling agenda, while baroque and classical works were relatively rare. He conducted only three works of J.S. Bach and only five of Haydn, according to a list that will be distributed to audience members this weekend.
Ling, who succeeded founding music director Irwin Hoffman, appointed all but four of the first-chair players in the 34-year-old orchestra. Only the principal clarinet, double bass, viola and trombone are holdovers from the Hoffman era. Ling is proud of what he accomplished.
"When this orchestra plays Mahler or Bruckner or Strauss, the lusciousness, the warmth, the involvement of the sound moves people," he said. "When they play a phrase, they try to say something musically, and it's the conductor's job to inspire them to do that."
He believes that he molded a distinctive personality for the orchestra.
"What it comes down to in the end is personality, and each orchestra has to have its own personality," he said. "When they play, people can tell it's the Florida Orchestra."
In Ling's view, versatility is an orchestra's most important asset.
"Orchestras should be able to create the sound the composer intended," he said. "When you play Stephen Montague's From the White Edge of Phrygia, you need a kind of sharpness of rhythm. When you play a romantic Barber piece, it's not the same kind of romantic sound as in Czech romantic music by Dvorak or Smetana. You can't play Mozart like Mahler; you can't play Bruckner like Shostakovich. This orchestra is able to adapt to what an individual composer requires."
Ling brought the standards of the world-class Cleveland Orchestra to the Florida musicians. "I always insisted that they listen to each other, rather than just follow the conductor's stick. It's like chamber music. The great orchestras like Cleveland or Vienna play with that kind of ensemble, intonation, texture and transparency."
At the close of this season, Ling will have left three of the four posts he once held. He resigned last year as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan. He retains only the music directorship of the Blossom Festival, the summer home of the Cleveland Orchestra.
"After four positions in four different places, it was too much," he said. "I want to renew myself, refresh myself."
Next season, he has at least 20 weeks of guest conducting engagements with orchestras in Cincinnati, Minnesota, Buffalo, St. Louis, Stockholm and elsewhere. He'll conduct an opera at the Juilliard School in New York.
As conductor laureate, he will return for two programs with the Florida Orchestra, including Bruckner's Symphony No. 4.
He has withdrawn his name from consideration as music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, which he led as a guest conductor this season. "I didn't feel it was right for me. I don't know if they know what they're looking for."
Ling and his wife, pianist Jessie Chang, whom he married last year, will continue to make their home in Cleveland for now. But with his two sons now in college in the east -- Gabriel, a sophomore at Yale, and Daniel, a freshman at Harvard -- and a sister living in New York, he can imagine a move.
"For the time being, we'll be based in Cleveland," he said. "We'll see how it feels after this summer's Blossom."
Ling's tenure as music director included some difficult times. The worst came in 1998, when his first wife, Jane, died of cancer. There also were years when financial problems and management instability threatened to put the orchestra out of business. "Many times I almost decided to leave," he said.
The orchestra continues to be financially precarious, a situation that can affect artistic quality. For example, this season Ling was unable to hire extra players for performances of Schubert's Ninth Symphony.
"I've never done Schubert Nine without doubling woodwinds. But here we can't do it because there's no budget. You can't just ask the woodwinds to play louder in the tutti passages."
The orchestra's being shut out of Morsani Hall in Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center has been an ongoing sore point. Ling loathed playing in the center's acoustically inadequate Ferguson Hall, where the orchestra is relegated when Morsani is booked with a Broadway tour.
"Just imagine playing Schubert Nine in Ferguson. Imagine playing Sibelius One in Ferguson. We cannot produce great music in that space."
There is an irony in the orchestra's hall predicament in Tampa. When Ling was being courted as a music director candidate, TBPAC was under construction, and the orchestra played in antiquated McKay Auditorium. "My first concert was at McKay, but they took me with a hard hat on to go to see where Morsani Hall would be. That's one reason I decided to come here."
He is quick to identify what needs to happen for the Florida Orchestra to grow and improve. "No. 1, we need an endowment. No. 2, we need to solve that problem with the hall."
Ling has not been without critics, notably among musicians who think he neglected the orchestra in recent years as his other conducting jobs proliferated.
"I've been hurt when some people said I don't do enough for the orchestra," he said. "Some people would probably criticize that I lost interest over the years. But they don't know what I've done. Artistically, I never came here not prepared or not demanding that the orchestra perform their best. Of course, some concerts are better than others. I can't say every one was great."
Ling has not been involved with the orchestra's search for a new music director, a process that appears to have produced a pair of front runners, Russian Pavel Kogan and German Stefan Sanderling. He likes both.
"It depends on what you want," Ling said of the two. "If you want the Russian repertoire, you go with Kogan. If you want the standard European repertoire, you go with Sanderling. No conductor has everything. It could not go wrong with either one of them."
The outgoing music director will miss many everyday things about the Tampa Bay area, such as toll takers on the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway recognizing him and saying hello as he dashed between Tampa and St. Petersburg for concerts or taking soloists for after-concert dinners at his favorite restaurant, Bern's Steakhouse, which would stay open late for the conductor and his guests.
"We just love it here. People have been very warm, very kind," he said.
He expects this weekend to be a powerful experience on the podium. "It will be very emotional. You have a relationship together for so long. It will be very hard."
But after 14 years, Ling is satisfied that his work is done here.
"There's a Chinese saying: There's no party without an ending. Everything comes to an end, and you have to move on."
Music preview
Jahja Ling conducts Mahler's Symphony No. 3 with the Florida Orchestra, women of the Master Chorale, the Tampa Bay Children's Chorus and mezzo-soprano Janis Taylor. Performances are at 8 p.m. Friday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, 8 p.m. Saturday at Mahaffey Theater and 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Tickets: $20-$38. (813) 286-2403.
Ling's Top 5
Outgoing music director Jahja Ling did not hesitate when asked to name his favorite performances with the Florida Orchestra during the past 14 years. Here are his top five, with the seasons in which they were performed.
- Mendelssohn Elijah, 1997-98.
- Mahler Symphony No. 3, 1991-92.
- Mahler Symphony No. 7, 2000-01.
- Bruckner Symphony No. 8, 1995-96.
- Shostakovich Symphony No. 5, 2001-02.
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