For months rumors had swirled, and finally, on June 1 of last year, Zarin Mehta handed in his resignation as president and CEO of the Ravinia Festival. Three months earlier, Mehta had confided to the head of Ravinia’s board of trustees, David Weinberg, that the New York Philharmonic Orchestra had been asking him since the fall of 1999 to be their executive director. Mehta recalls, “I kept fending them off, saying, ‘No, no. I don’t want to manage an orchestra.’”
In May, Mehta accepted the post of executive director and told the Ravinia trustees that he would leave Chicago when the new season began in September. “Truthfully,” he says, “in the end I felt I might get stale staying in the same environment for, say, 15 years.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The criteria were daunting. “That person has to know music, feel passionate about it,” Fogel says. “He or she must be relatively facile with numbers. And just as important, that person needs to have people skills, know how to build consensus and deal with the board of a not-for-profit outfit–political savvy, if you want to call it that.” Mehta adds another qualification: “That person’s relationship with major artists–that helps determine if a first-rate soloist like Yo-Yo Ma returns to your festival again and again.”
Mehta had clearly met the criteria. He’d befriended a legion of conductors and performers, beginning many years ago when his father, Mehli, founded the first Western orchestra in India. And he’d worked as an accountant before becoming administrative head of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. “I would cite Zarin as Exhibit A of someone who met all those requirements,” says Fogel, “and took his organization in new directions.”
In 1977, when he was 16, Kauffman participated in his first summer music festival, as a piano student at Tanglewood. But he was also into rock and jazz, and he played bass in a band. “I thought about a career on Broadway until my voice changed,” he recalls. “I became a piano accompanist instead.” He took courses in music and political science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, toyed with the idea of going into law, and worked part-time for the Kurt Weill Foundation and Nonesuch Records. He also soloed in piano concerti with the college’s orchestra, but says he didn’t have the technique or the confidence for the long haul.
His next moves reinforced his reputation as a fast-tracker. In 1992 he became the artistic administrator of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. “I’m most proud of the programs that tried to attract an economically and racially diverse audience to classical music,” he says. “As part of Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta Project, [conductor] Robert Shaw and the orchestra gave master classes and free concerts for neighborhood kids.” A couple of years later he was hired by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra to be its manager. “The innovation there,” he says, “was the crossover concerts given by Bobby McFerrin.”
Meanwhile, the search committee had begun interviewing candidates. Kauffman came to Chicago twice for meetings with some of the trustees, and by mid-August they’d made up their mind.
