Here is the full version of my Wednesday July 7, 2010 Chicago Sun-Times story on William (Bill) Mason's announcement that he will retire as head of Lyric Opera of Chicago in two years time. We'll be visiting Mason's career at Lyric in more detail in the paper in the coming season.
Lyric's longtime GM to yield reins
Leaving in 2012 | Mason to aid search for successor
BY ANDREW PATNER
William Mason, only the third manager of the Lyric Opera of Chicago in its 54-year history, has announced that he will step down as general director of the company in the spring of 2012.
Except for brief periods in the 1970s, Mason, like his predecessors Carol Fox and Ardis Krainik, spent his entire adult career with Lyric, in his case more than 40 years. He had also been a chorister and a boy soprano soloist with the company in its first three seasons in the 1950s. Mason, who will be 70 at the end of the 2011-12 season, became general director following Krainik’s death in 1997, having long been her number two on the artistic and production side.
"I think two years from now will be the right time to turn the reins over to a new general director," Mason said in a statement, "and I look forward to working with the board [of directors] on finding a successor to lead this great company."
Never one for ceremony or grand statements, Mason emphasized that he will remain fully active with the company over the next two years. The 2011-12 is essentially in place and will be announced in January 2011, he said, and planning is ongoing through the 2014-14 season as it must be in today’s international opera world.
A native Chicagoan who attended O’Keeffe Elementary School on the South Side, Senn High School on the North Side, and Roosevelt University downtown, Mason very much followed Krainik’s emphasis on fiscal stability as well as artistic aspirations. As Krainik did in the 1980s and 1990s following the sometimes reckless spending of the Fox era, Mason always worked closely with his board of the city’s top business leaders to raise money and control costs under a structure where the general director holds only the title of chief operating officer and an attorney or business figure is president and CEO of the opera company.
He often turned to others for artistic leadership in areas outside of the Italian repertoire that was always closest to his heart and which he had learned at the elbow of his mentor, one of Lyric’s longtime artistic chiefs, the late Pino Donati. He kept Krainik’s artistic adviser, New York agent Matthew A. Epstein, after her death, and later elevated him to artistic director before dismissing him in a falling out over contemporary repertoire. Mason paid tribute to Epstein in his statement although he curtailed, for economic reasons he said at the time, much of Krainik and Epstein’s adventurous programming.
Mason also saw Lyric’s radio broadcasts over Chicago’s WFMT Radio Network, end in 2001 in a pay dispute with the Lyric Orchestra’s union musicians and resume again beginning in 2006.
And Mason hired Andrew Davis as music director to succeed podium fixture Bruno Bartoletti in 2000. Mason gave Davis his head, allowing him to lead Verdi and Puccini as well as the German, British, and Czech works for which he was known.
By the time of his retirement, the Lyric statement said, Mason will have produced more than 120 productions including more than 40 new ones.
Lyric president and CEO Richard P. Kiphart said a search committee for a successor, led by board vice-president Kenneth G. Pigott, had already started its work.
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