Photograph by Paul Myers
Leonid Grin, who lives in Los Gatos, headed the San Jose Symphony from 1992 until its recent shutdown.
Classical Revival
Conductor Leonid Grin believes the South Bay can sustain its own symphony
By Oakley Brooks
Photographs by Paul Myers
Leonid Grin thought he had beaten this monster before. He thought he had dispatched it altogether. Two decades ago, in the process of emigrating from the Soviet Union, Maestro Grin says he was blackballed by the Russian symphony community. And when he reached his new home in New York, Grin's talents went unrecognized for a long spell. His fast ascent in the conducting world--he had appeared in front of the top Soviet orchestras--had been stopped dead in its tracks.
"Those were black, dark days," he told a reporter in 1992.
The circumstances have changed. Today, Grin is a popular conductor with a full slate of worldwide appearances, and for part of the year he leads the Saarbrücken orchestra in southwestern Germany.
But as the former conductor of the San Jose Symphony, he is frustrated once again.
In late October, facing a $2.5 million budget deficit after years of chronic debt, leaders of the San Jose Symphony shut down the organization and canceled its upcoming season. Only interim CEO Dick Gourley and board of directors Chairman Mike McSweeney are left. They have promised to bring the symphony back sometime early next year.
For the moment, though, the San Jose Symphony, the American orchestra he had dreamed of directing when he first arrived in the United States, has been pulled away from Grin.
And he's been given no assurances that he'll be the musical director in San Jose when the symphony reopens. McSweeney, who is gathering a transition team, refers to Grin as a resource.
Stopping to consider his situation in his Los Gatos home, Grin turns his chiseled face toward the window.
"It's bitter," he says.
Grin, 54, isn't going anywhere, however. He has made San Jose his home, and he is committed to returning the financially beleaguered symphony to the stage in the South Bay. Silicon Valley is at a critical crossroads, and Grin and key symphony supporters say the community needs to make a stronger sacrifice for the arts by reviving the symphony. It's a tall order in what many see as a valley full of work junkies who haven't sunk their teeth into local culture.
But Grin believes the South Bay can bring the symphony back to its feet.
"I'm an optimist. That's the only way I could survive what I did," he says. "I'm a fighter."
Guided by Bernstein
Born in the Ukraine, Grin graduated with top honors from the Moscow Conservatory in 1977 and was soon appointed associate conductor with the Moscow Philharmonic. Despite this success, Grin says that he never could have risen to the level of head conductor because of his Jewish heritage.
On a tour to Mexico in 1979, a former Russian living in Mexico City finally convinced Grin there was nothing left for him in the Soviet Union.
When he returned, he and his wife, Marina, filed for emigration. The symphony called for his resignation, and his status in the Soviet Union effectively vanished.
After waiting close to two years for exit visas, Grin, his wife and their two young children, Rada and Daniel, began anew in Manhattan. An accomplished pianist, Marina taught piano lessons wherever she could while Grin tended to their younger child, Daniel, and waited by the phone.
And waited.
He did not conduct an orchestra for more than two years.
Finally, a friend found him a guest-conducting gig in Sweden. Then Grin's life took a giant turn for the better when he befriended the late Leonard Bernstein one day in New York.
Classical musicians still consider Bernstein an even better conductor than he was a composer. The masses know him best as the brains behind West Side Story and other popular musicals.
Grin had been deeply inspired by Bernstein as a student, and when he heard that Bernstein was in town for a show at Avery Fisher Hall, Grin sneaked backstage before a rehearsal. He found Bernstein's dressing-room door open, and he marched in. Though at first baffled by a strange visitor, as Grin tells it, Bernstein softened when he found out that the young Ukrainian was a maestro and that the two had different versions of the same name.
Bernstein immediately took the young conductor under his wing. In the summer of 1982, he selected Grin to help lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute for several weeks and conduct three concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.
"I was honored by the collaboration," Grin says now. "Those were unforgettable times."
Bernstein and Grin continued their friendship, and other posts followed for Grin, including a professorship at the University of Houston and later the music director's position with the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra in Finland.
In the early 1990s, San Jose Symphony leaders began to look for a replacement for George Cleve, who was leaving the orchestra after a 20-year tenure. San Jose Symphony enthusiasts heard Grin in Helsinki and encouraged him to come to San Jose for an audition.
When he arrived in San Jose, search committee members looked into Grin's dazzling blue eyes and saw a bright future. Cleve was a quality conductor, but according to former organizers of the San Jose Symphony, he had a tendency to keep mostly to himself outside the concert hall and shied away from community events.
Grin promised to bring big-name soloists like Yo-Yo Ma and Issac Stern to San Jose, and his approachable and passionate character would give the symphony a decidedly different figurehead.
"I got excited about the orchestra again because of Leonid," says Carl Cookson, a symphony board member through the 1980s who rejoined the board after interviewing Grin in '92.
The orchestra's musicians threw their support behind Grin, leading to his eventual selection.
"He brought a sense of compassion and commitment," says John Russell, a trombonist with the symphony. "He was far and away the right person."
Leonid Grin believes the San Jose Symphony will make a strong comeback: 'I'm an optimist. That's the only way I could have survived what I did,' he says.
Photograph by Paul Myers
A Flavor of Grin
During Grin's first few seasons with San Jose, a substantial portion of the programming that he directed was by Russian composers.
That drew the criticism of several members of the local music community, including local music critics.
One account in the San Jose Mercury News following the opening night of the 1996 season read, "The weather forecast at the San Jose Symphony is for a long Russian winter."
But as a former symphony board member, David Cohen says Grin merely showed his tendency toward the music of his roots.
"It's like saying that the Grateful Dead was biased toward bluegrass," says Cohen, the publisher of Silicon Valley Community Newspapers, which includes the Saratoga News.
Russian music had always been a strength of Grin's--some of his most celebrated recordings with Finland's Tampere symphony and the Berlin Radio Orchestra include the works of Russian composers Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.
And as Tim Beswick, director of operations for the San Jose Symphony, says, "You direct what you do best," but he also says that Grin didn't overdo it. At one point Beswick sat down and compared the music selections of the former conductor Cleve and Grin and found that the two were quite similar in how much Russian music they chose for each season.
Beswick says that when the board asked him and Grin to diversify programming at the symphony, Grin responded well.
But Grin always maintained that concert goers themselves called for much of the Russian music he chose. He still prides himself in the tight relationship he developed with community members--people who now stop him in the street and ask him what they can do to get him back on the podium, Grin says.
To draw young people into classical music, Grin hired charismatic musician Yair Samet as his associate conductor more than seven years ago. Together with Beswick, Samet has grown San Jose's Youth Symphony more than four-fold.
Grin initiated a family series of concerts and then took on a pops series despite Beswick's comment that "It's not his cup of tea."
The symphony was set to make an even bigger pitch to San Jose's diverse ethnic communities this season, with concerts that featured local traditional Japanese Taiko drummers, Indian star Anoushka Shankar and the Swiss-based Klezmer Hebrew ensemble.
On the podium, Grin drew in audiences with his moving brand of conducting. He relished the conductor's role as a conduit between the audience and the ensemble, and his eyes flash when he thinks of it: "Art on the spot," he says.
"He comes at conducting from a level of spirituality," says Mary Curtis, chairwoman of the symphony board from 1997 to 1999.
Off the podium, Grin moved fluidly in the community, giving speeches about his turbulent past and hosting dinner parties for donors at his home.
"He's a maestro the community can touch," Curtis says.
It was Grin, though, who touched the community with sadness in November 1997, when Marina Gusak-Grin succumbed to cancer after a long battle.
He lost a companion and a collaborator, a woman who had lived with him through the lows of emigration and shared some of the finer moments in San Jose, in which she appeared with his orchestra as a soloist on several occasions.
"She was my most loyal friend, and her absence in my life changed my overview of this whole world," Grin says.
As an instructor at San Jose State University and the San Francisco Conservatory, Gusak-Grin cut a wide swath in the Bay Area music community; it gave her a worthy farewell. In December of '97, more than 300 people listened as then-Symphony Concertmaster Byung-Woo Kim performed at her memorial service. Gusak-Grin's former students contributed their own offerings, along with local tenor Joseph Frank and Daniel Grin on the cello.
"She was much loved by her colleagues and students," Grin says.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Although Leonid Grin is without an orchestra in the South Bay, he says he's made his home here and doesn't intend to leave.
The Growing Years
Around Grin, the orchestra broadened a bit. According to Beswick, over the last decade or so, a number of musicians increased their appearances with the orchestra. Within their collective agreement with the symphony (a subject of some typical grumbling between former board members and musicians during the recent halt of operations), musicians are grouped by the number of performances they are guaranteed each season. And Beswick says that the second tier of musicians, performing 169 times a year, grew by about 15 members. So while the total musicians held at 89, a good chunk was being paid for 22 more performance dates every year.
Increases in programming also contributed to a swelling overall budget, which interim CEO Gourley says went from $3.3 million at Grin's arrival to $7.8 million for this ill-fated season.
But the community's financial support for the orchestra hasn't mirrored the symphony's steady expansion Gourley says. The organization's budget deficit has plagued it throughout most of the last 10 years before it finally grew overwhelming this fall.
In a region that is home to some of the world's wealthiest companies and individuals, the lack of support for the local symphony baffles Grin and symphony organizers.
"When I'm traveling in Europe, people say, 'Oh, you're lucky that you're in Silicon Valley--your orchestra shouldn't have a problem,'" Grin says.
Although it is hard to get those close to the symphony to talk specifically about what went wrong, most say it was a lack of good leadership, and they put much of the blame on themselves.
"It always comes back to who's leading, and that's the board," says Cookson, a member of the board until the recent shutdown.
Those close to the symphony almost unanimously fault themselves for not better using Grin as a lure for potential donors. They say that making a more aggressive pitch to community leaders should be part of new-and-improved symphony in the future.
But leaders sense that in rallying the South Bay they may be working against the prevailing tide of the community.
Grin and former board Chairwoman Marie Bianco believe some of the symphony's problems lie in the South Bay elite's continued allegiance to San Francisco as the Bay Area's cultural mecca.
Grin suspects that the South Bay's past as a former agricultural community that looked to San Francisco for the arts still influences today's residents. Bianco, a Saratogan, says many wealthy residents of places like Los Gatos, Saratoga and Menlo Park pass up their local classical group for the San Francisco Symphony.
"I don't think they realize how good our orchestra is," Bianco says .
Those close to the symphony also say that newer members of the South Bay community, drawn by the latest high-tech boom, haven't taken the time to connect with the music scene here. Cohen, the former board member, blamed the lack of support for the symphony on a "culturally part-time Valley" that works too hard.
Jon Nakamatsu, a concert pianist who grew up in San Jose and graduated from Prospect High School, says many in Silicon Valley may not know how to find entree into the classical music world.
"I'm not totally surprised," says Nakamatsu about the symphony suspending operations. "There a lot of transplants here who are successful but haven't ever held an instrument."
Symphony leaders know that their business is a tenuous one: they note that financial troubles have hit established orchestras in St. Louis and Toronto this fall. But that doesn't obscure the wide support they've seen for classical music in other parts of the country.
Grin points to the heavily attended Boston Pops concerts every summer along the city's Charles River. Nakamatsu recalls one of his recent performances in front of a packed house in Roanoke, Va. (population 94,000), on a Monday night.
"They have a great history, and local businesses see some benefit in giving to the symphony," he says.
Grin refuses to accept that the Silicon Valley business community's limited involvement in his orchestra means that the area needs a scaled-down symphony, an idea that has been bandied about recently and has been employed by other cities in the country.
"We have to bring the corporate world together, and we have to think what kind of community would they like their employees to have," he says. "It cannot be a [cultural] vacuum."
He frowns when thinking about how the symphony hit dire financial straits just as the economy was bottoming out. But he reckons that even with the blow the high-tech world has sustained in the last several months, there are still enough resources in the South Bay to sustain an orchestra.
"The whole world is looking up to these companies," Grin says.
In the front hall of Grin's home, a montage of pictures of Leonard Bernstein shows him during the last concert he ever directed in 1990. Outfitted in a crisp white jacket, Bernstein's face is contorted with emotion in several shots of him standing before the orchestra at a jammed Tanglewood, Mass., outdoor amphitheater.
Grin knows what Bernstein would have done now, in his shoes. Stay put. Rebuild. "He was such an advocate for the arts," Grin says.
And as much as Grin is itching to get back on the podium, for the moment, he'll be San Jose's own passionate advocate.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
