“It’s not about doing a job,” says Santa Cruz County Symphony music director Larry Granger. “It’s about dedication.”
How much dedication? Even the fully subscribed ticketholder who sees a conductor at one concert a month is unlikely to fathom the full extent of the work Granger does. That will all change for him after the 2011-12 season, his last as the Symphony’s conductor.
Opening Granger’s last season this weekend, violinist Sheryl Staples, a Granger collaborator since her teens, will play Mendelssohn’s most popular concerto in a program that also features the William Tell Overture. Prodigious local talents—pianists Aaron Miller and Chetan Tierra and violinist Nikki Chooi—each play a major concerto in the November program. In late January, organist Jonathan Dimmock gets double exposure in Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony and Poulenc’s Organ Concerto. Come March, Granger conducts Brahms’s great Symphony No. 4 and pianist Jon Nakamatsu solos in Beethoven. Cheryl Anderson’s Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus joins the orchestra in May for Mendelssohn’s Psalm 42 and the anti-war Dona nobis pacem by Vaughan Williams.
It’s a strong finish to a distinguished tenure, and the only task left will be to oversee a parade of guest conductors for the 2012-13 season, candidates to take the reins from a man who has given the orchestra the longest run of consistent artistic quality and stability in its history.
His will be a tough act to follow. And with more ticket sales than ever—those for Watsonville’s Mello Center concerts are now outpacing sales at Civic Auditorium—he leaves the organization in top shape. “Now I get to figure out what to do next,” he says with characteristic wit.
Now, Granger finds himself frequently being asked to look back and philosophize on his years in Santa Cruz. “When I came the Symphony it was a community orchestra transitioning to a professional one,” he begins. “The orchestra depended on three or four people to run it, and the support of a couple of foundations.”
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake forced the closure of several performance venues where the Symphony performed, leading to a return to Civic Auditorium, its original house. In 2007, the Good Times carried a 50th anniversary history of the Symphony written by John Malkin. For it, Granger said, “The orchestra was offering the community a rich palette of classical music, but the absence of a consistent venue was not serving the needs of the musicians or the concertgoers. It was a struggling organization.”
The small staff, and Granger himself, worked long and hard to develop foundation support. As those efforts, in tandem with the invaluable fundraising by the Symphony League, began to pay off, it showed in the orchestra’s artistic quality. In the 1990s, on the strength of KUSP broadcast recordings, the then-powerful California Arts Council—“the only entity comparing us with the rest of the state”—gave the Symphony a “4-rating,” the highest rank to any orchestra in its budget category. That shot in the arm brought in even more foundation support, until the dot.com bubble burst, in 2000, and foundation and corporate monies dried up.
Granger now sees the silver lining around that black cloud. “It’s the community that gets us going,” he declares. That means ownership by every constituency that makes and holds an investment in the Symphony’s wellbeing. It also means imaginative programming and the generous participation of talented solo artists.
Granger exudes heartfelt gratitude to the community but reserves his warmest thanks to those staffers with whom he has worked most closely. “I would love to name all the great corporate sponsors and philanthropists who have kept us afloat during tough times, especially those who have hung in over the long haul,” he says, “but I’d be mortified if I left anyone out.”
Last but not least, Granger hails the Symphony board. “The largest deficit in the last 20 years is the one I found when I arrived. Most of my years we’ve been in the black, and with the smallest staff of any orchestra I know,” he says. “That’s heroic stuff.”
THE BIG APPLE: Santa Cruz County Symphony with Sheryl Staples
Saturday at 8pm at Civic Auditorium in Santa Cruz
Sunday at 2pm at Henry Mello Center in Watsonville
Tickets $20-65 at www.santacruztickets.com
