Virtuoso
A Portrait of Leila Josefowicz
I have a dear old friend, an impresario by vocation, who calls at the last minute to say he’s off to the opera… the ballet… the symphony. Do I want to go? I do! (He riffs about going to the opera because it makes him feel young. And he is a septuagenarian.) I am charmed by this man who knows so much about music yet irredeemably pronounces Mozart as “Mo’s art.” When he does, I genially suggest a visit to the Leaning Tower of Pizza.
Robert Friedman and I were introduced in 1980 by a mutual friend when he and his then-wife Suzanne gave me a place to stay in their San Francisco home during a visit from LA to photograph the Symphony’s then-music director, Edo de Waart, whom we dubbed Edo Divorce because he’d been married six times.
Before I moved to the Bay Area, seven years later, I photographed five conductors who had been or would later become San Francisco’s maestro: de Waart, Seiji Ozawa, Herbert Blomstedt, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. I photographed Salonen in 1984 when I was thirty-two, and he was a twenty-five-year-old wunderkind making his guest-conductor debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Leaping ahead to February 29, 2020 (the leap year is merely coincidental), San Francisco’s MTT has just retired after twenty-five years and passed the baton to Salonen, whose honorifics…
