Back in winter 2018, orchestras around the country were celebrating the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth.
His daughter Jamie attended a few of them, but it was the Tucson celebration — 30 events (concerts, symposiums and films) from a dozen Tucson arts organizations over 18 days — that captured her attention and praise.
“Tucson, Arizona, is pulling off a marvel,” she gushed on her family’s website.
The Bernstein festival was the third for festival coordinator George Hanson, who joined the song fest in 2015, months after leaving the Tucson Symphony Orchestra following a 19-year run as its music director.
In his nine-year tenure, which comes to a close on July 1, Hanson has helped the song festival increase its donor base and build the kind of financial footing founder Jack Forsythe had envisioned when he and co-founder Cecile Follansbee conceived the festival in 2010. Forsythe had wanted the festival to have enough assets and reserves to support three or four events.
“I feel like I have done my best to help them have the financial stability that will enable them to make the financial decisions they need going forward,” Hanson said on Monday, June 17, a day after song festival board president Jeannette Segel publicly announced Hanson was leaving.
Hanson, who has juggled his part-time song fest consulting role with a full-time job as executive director of the Alexandria (Virginia) Symphony Orchestra since 2019, is stepping down to take on an expanded role with the orchestra.
“The ASO needs 100% of my attention and we can no longer afford to split my attention,” Hanson said. “Jack Forsythe made it very clear that my primary job with them was fundraising. The organization now, in my opinion, is in a better position than any nonprofit that any of us even knows in terms of performing arts.”
According to the song festival’s 2023 990 IRS tax form, TDSF had $723,575 in net assets to help its artistic partners — Tucson Guitar Society, Tucson Symphony Orchestra, True Concord Voices & Orchestra, Arizona Opera, University of Arizona, Arizona Early Music Society, Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and Arizona Theatre Company among them — pay the fees for top-tier vocalists.
Segel said the board will meet in early July to draft a job description for Hanson’s replacement. The position, while still part-time, will likely involve marketing the festival statewide, as well as tapping into small-dollar donors.
“We don’t have the bottom of the triangle filled in,” Segel said, explaining that the festival would love to have more donors in the $1,000 to $2,500 range or lower to “expand our community support beyond just our major donors.”
Hanson said that he plans to return to the festival next April when renowned violinist Joshua Bell and his soprano wife Larisa Martinez perform the world premiere of a song cycle the festival co-commissioned with Arizona Friends of Chamber Music from composer John Corigliano.
Hanson, who has a long relationship with Bell, was instrumental in that commission.
Performers Ana María Martínez, soprano, Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor, the Philharmonia Orchestra and UC Berkeley Chorus & Volti perform "Dreamers." The music is by Jimmy Bellido and lyrics by Nilo Cruz. The composer Jimmy Lopez Bellido and tenor Michael Fabiano are performing the world premiere of “Quiet Poems,” commissioned by the Tucson Desert Song Festival. The texts are from poems written by Nilo Cruz, with whom Lopez collaborated on the opera “Bel Canto” and an oratorio “Dreamers.” Video Courtesy Jimmy Lopez Bellido.
