Orchestra names v.p. for artistic planning

You didn't like that new score you heard Thursday night? Was there a guest conductor who put you over the moon, and whom you're eager to hear again?

Jeremy S. Rothman is the Philadelphia Orchestra's new point person for all these issues and more. Rothman has been named the orchestra's new vice president for artistic planning starting Sept. 1.

Rothman, 31, held a similar job with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, but arrives with established connections to Philadelphia and this ensemble. He comes from Abington and still has family here, and is a former student of orchestra president James Undercofler's.

"I grew up hearing the orchestra. Getting a chance to work with this orchestra is a huge honor," Rothman said.

His career path has followed a route typical for his profession: He studied trumpet, received a bachelor's degree in music administration from the University of Rochester, worked a summer as stage manager for the Marlboro Festival, and was a management fellow in the program run by the American Symphony Orchestra League (now called the League of American Orchestras).

Fresh from that journeyman experience, he entered a junior-level position with the Baltimore Symphony in 2000, working his way up to vice president of artistic administration, a title he held for four years.

It was at Rochester that he made contact with Undercofler, who was dean of the Eastman School of Music. "I took Jim's course in arts leadership. I knew already in school that my interest lay in arts administration. He was a great influence for me," Rothman said.

While he may know Undercofler well, he has not yet met Charles Dutoit, the incoming chief conductor and artistic adviser with whom he will work closely. While Dutoit will be active in identifying guest soloists and repertoire, Rothman will also guide these efforts.

"Dutoit is somebody who has very strong ideas about programming, and requires someone who is a nimble administrator, and so that was one quality I was looking for," Undercofler said. "The other is, Charlie is with us only eight weeks a year plus tours, so there is a lot of advising and working with guest conductors in putting together balanced programming and using Dutoit as the adviser in that regard. And then there is the music-director search piece, and Jeremy has been through one of those and seems to be very canny and very sharp about how this process must go."

Personality, too, was important, Undercofler said. "I wanted to find somebody who wasn't so idiosyncratic himself or herself that I couldn't imagine them working well with any future music director."

His first tasks, Rothman says, are to finish planning of the 2009-10 season, and then to start looking beyond. "Getting a full understanding of the music-director search and getting involved in that process is a top priority."

He was a member of the Baltimore search committee that engaged Marin Alsop, who has just completed her first year as music director.

"The decision to leave Baltimore is a difficult one," he said, "but the opportunity to work with Philadelphia, Jim and the board was a very attractive opportunity. Of course, Philadelphia is a great, great orchestra."

His immediate predecessors are Kathleen van Bergen, who resigned in January to become executive director of the Schubert Club in St. Paul, Minn., and Simon Woods, who held the job from 1997 to 2004 and is now chief executive of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

Unlike those two, Rothman will not have the "operations" portion of the organization under his wing, and so will not be involved in labor relations, Undercofler said.