Cleveland dumps conductor
NewsDisgraceful cowardice from the board of the Cleveland Institute of Music.
The board have not even had the courage to make a public statement. They just capitualted to the mob.
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Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Pathetic. We STILL don’t know what exactly he did except to be demanding.
So go research it. Ask around.Just because you personally don’t know what caused this doesn’t mean nothing happened.
Garbage. It’s impossible to research an issue, where people are either trafficking in vacuous innuendos, arrogantly telling you to “research” the vacuous innuendoes, or maintaining radio silence. In the face of such attitudes, I can only conclude that nothing happened.
I hope the true vics sue the pants off of CIM.
And you feel qualified to make this judgement about students at an institution in another country, a different culture than yours, reckoning with a conductor who’s barely ever set foot in the UK?
Dang, that’s some serious British entitlement right there.
Agree with your assessment: Disgraceful cowardice. And giving in to the noisy voice of mob rule.
Increasingly, thugs rule while decent, differentiated people try to do the right thing and get decapitated, sacrificed, discarded in the process.
There are too many good conductors out there who are also decent human beings for students to have to put up with Kalmar.
I don’t know the details of this particular situation, but I’ve followed Kalmar’s career for years. He’s a bully. He destroys careers. He attacks musicians in an effort to bolster his own mediocre skills as a conductor. He’s done this consistantly in several different professional orchs. over the past 2 decades. To inflict that kind of behaviour on a student orchestra is inhumane.
This “leave of absence” is exactly what he did when he was Music Director of Madrid’s RTVE orch a few years back. He was nearing the end of his contract there. He’d gone after enough musicians & behaved badly enough so that the musicians and administration just wanted him out. He was excused out of the last months of his contract with a “leave of absence”, then replaced immediately the minute his contract was up.
Madrid said “good riddance” to Kalmar & CIM should, too.
“Good conductors” and “decent human beings” – You actually think there are a lot of those out there?
Do all the students feel the same?
Indeed. They brought conductor Pablo González (excellent conductor and lovely human being), and then for some reason they let him go.
I hope he sues the living crap out of them.
Nope. The musicians whose careers Kalmar has harmed or destroyed should sue the living crap out of him. Don’t inflict someone like Kalmar on a student orchestra. I’ve got no dogs in this race, but I say stop him now.
…and loses.
Students voiced their concerns, and the institution responded in favor of the overwhelming majority of the students and faculty. How’s that disgraceful, exactly?
All students? No defenders? Everyone disliked him?
What I’d like to know is who organized this conspiracy of “students” (read: activist thugs). Whoever it is, almost certainly wanted to steal Kalmar’s job. And I have no doubt that many of the activists are people who never belonged in higher ed, to begin with.
Someone that goes by the initials T. K. who lusted after this job so badly I hear that CIM maintenance crew are still mopping up his saliva.
Your comment is pure ignorance. I guarantee you that musicians anywhere – be they students or pros – who complain about a bad conductor, do not “want his job”. That’s an idiotic comment. They just want a conductor who can lead them competently & fairly. Students uniting against a tyrannical conductor who has been imposed on them by a corrupt administration are in no way “tyrannical thugs”. The are tuition paying customers who deserve better for their money. They are simply asking for it.
Your comment is pure arrogant dishonesty. At reddit, the gauleiter are shadow-banning anyone who challenges the anti-Kalmar conpiracy. But you knew that.
My name is Tony Spaghetti, and I’m the one gunning for Kalmar’s job. Under the pretense of “making the school a better place”, I assembled these dirty little activist thugs to do my bidding. We meet in the CIM boiler room every night, where we discuss sabotaging the orchestra program with woke protests. My takeover of the program is imminent! You got me and my conspiracy, Nick Stix.
Sadly, CIM is not the school it once was. Such decline due to poor administration.
Time to let Jesus take the wheel!
Why would anyone want to keep a cruel, tyrannical conductor in power?
You’re making a joke, right?
Soft, pewling, narcissistic, egotistical, spoiled.
These types are now in control and want all rigor dissolved in favor of colorless, flavorless, odorless pap.
Just kill the arts already. Plenty of great recordings and visual arts available. These babies couldn’t create a solid stool sample. Pathetic.
With all due respect, Norman, it is unfair to characterize this decision as capitulating to the student rabble because their poor little feelings are hurt. Students have very fair concerns about Kalmar’s behavior, as do several faculty members. Really, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. This is part of a larger, multi-year campaign by CIM’s president to get his way and mold CIM to his vision. Anyone who gets in the way or dares to insinuate that it’s not only his school is forced out. So there’s plenty to be upset and dissatisfied about. Kalmar just has made it very easy for them, with his old-world autocratic behavior. As author of “The Maestro Myth,” surely you can see where they’re coming from too.
If I had an orchestra I’d hire him to be the conductor quicker than you can say titleIX infraction!
If this is all it takes for CIM admin to fold, things are going to become much tougher for them very soon. Further, Kalmar’s replacements are noticeably less accomplished.
Anthony is an incredibly accomplished conductor- it’s quite shocking he has time in his schedule to conduct at CIM.
However he’s quite willing to be incredibly direct and demanding with those he conducts.
Conservatories generally have very minor conductors.
I don’t know the specifics of this case and, therefore, don’t know whether the students’ grievances are legitimate or not, or whether the department investigation was thorough, or a whitewash. However, characterising the students as ‘a woke mob’ is wrong.
This is not about left-wing identity politics, but a consequence of the right-wing establishment turning students into customers. We see this in the UK with the NSS, where petty student grievances are treated as word from God, because the comments can be made anonymously and, because the survey is conducted by Ipsos Mori, universities have no effective right of reply and the results feed into league tables etc which, in turn, can affect funding and jobs. Of course, student views need to be heard, but the NSS, and the situation in Cleveland quite possibly, are good examples of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
Malcolm, I think that if a few students had objections, but the vast majority of the ensemble were supportive of CK, I might agree with you. But if, as reports suggest, a large majority are objecting to his presence, there might be something substantive that needs to be addressed.
The old adage, ‘Where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire’ might apply here. Neither of us knows the reality of what’s happening there, but I’m thinking that his ‘leave of absence’ suggests there’s a lot more to this than meets either of our eyes.
Carlos who?
Honestly, I don’t see what the fuss is about, either way, when he was hired or when he was fired, whether he was brilliant or whether it was mob rule, it has zero impact on classical music, not even in Cleveland, and quite frankly, not even in the non-orchestra departments of the Cleveland Institute itself.
The only known cure for student hysteria is the real world.
The extreme partisanship with which Slipped Disc has “reported” on this affair until now, and the blatant refusal to even attempt to find out what has been going on, is simply disgusting.
If you want a lead a team, you need to earn, or at the very least, not squander the respect of the team. Kalmar has clearly failed and it is quite right that he is gone.
This is unprecedented. 400 highly talented, highly motivated, accomplished, hard working students have collectively put their foot down and said enough is enough. It tells you all you need to know about Kalmar’s disastrous regime.
The petition was signed by alumni, educators and performers, not students. Either Kalmar has made a lot of enemies in his long career, or some serious organizing to get rid of him has been going on. Or both. But agreed, his situation has become untenable. I trust the two replacement conductors are at his level of experience and expertise. They certainly hit the ‘diversity’ button.
400 whiny soy babies you mean. I repeat: orchestras, reject all resumes from CIM, absolutely no one wants entitled commie colleagues like these students.
Agreed. As anyone who has ever attended music school can tell you, every single student is highly talented, motivated, and accomplished.
That is such a nice fantasy. Not true anywhere.
That was meant sarcastically, right? You forgot the /s.
Funny, CIM officially states that it has 325 students. So, 325 students signed a petition 400 times? Sounds like Democrat voting in Philadelphia.
Sameer Paetel is an excellent. Hooves. Watch the video of him leading the first movement of Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 with the orchestra at the Manhattan School of Mucic.
From Pacer1:
Please correct my submission to read “Sameer Patel is an excellent conductor. Watch the video………..”
And how many students, faculty, administrators, and board members did you interview to come to this conclusion from 3,700 miles away?
Sometimes you do a lot of opining about the inner workings of organizations on another continent without any kind of thorough investigation.
And as a journalist, you should know the risks of relying exclusively on the information that’s publicly available and/or provided to you.
They didn’t “capitulate to the mob,” they realized that their continued disrespect of the faculty and student feedback was no longer viable. Sorry, I’m a witness to one incident of outrageous disrespect to a female musician. He was even wrong about the musical issue to boot. Good riddance.
But you give no specifics, and identify as a “Woman conductor.” Since I’m neither a feminazi nor a mangina, I refuse to blindly submit to your authority.
In this age we really ought to have some cell phone video or audio of the alleged poor behavior.
Indiana is said to be a one-party consent state for recording so surreptitiously recording a teacher in a rehearsal would be possible.
Um, Cleveland is in Ohio, not Indiana.
Yes, and Ohio is also a one-party consent state.
The students good luck in the real world. They are definitely going to need it!
Had Kalmar not received tenure? I have no idea what he did or didn’t do but I am surprised that he was let go so easily.
Tenure? At CIM? ha ha ha
Anthony Parnther is a brilliant conductor and an outstanding person. They are lucky to have him.
They were incredibly luck to even snag such a great name conductor.