True Concord Voices & Orchestra opens its 2021-22 "New Day" season this weekend with "From Darkness to Light," its first indoor concert since February 2020.
Tucson newcomer Welz Kauffman likely will be sitting in the audience for all three performances, and not just because he's a big fan of the professional ensemble and Copland's soul-lifting βThe Promise of Livingβ from "The Tender Land."
Kauffman, the former longtime president and CEO of the prestigious Ravinia Festival outside Chicago, is True Concord's newly appointed managing director.
βIt's a real blessing for True Concord that someone like Welz decides this is where he wants his next chapter to be," True Concord founder and Music Director Eric Holtan said.
The Kauffman hire might seem improbable on paper. He comes here after a 20-year career with Ravinia and has held artistic leadership roles with the New York and Los Angeles philharmonic orchestras. He retired from Ravinia in summer 2020 with a slew of accolades to his credit including being named by the Chicago Tribune in 2018 as Chicagoan of the Year for programming an extensive Leonard Bernstein tribute.
But for Kauffman, the decision to join True Concord came down to relationships and inspiration.
Kauffman knew Holtan through the Tucson Desert Song Festival, which hosted the Ravinia Festival's Steans Music Institute singers for several years. In 2016, Kauffman, a classically trained pianist, accompanied the ensemble in their performance.
Kauffman also was familiar with Tucson through former Tucson Symphony Orchestra Music Director George Hanson, with whom he worked at the Atlanta Symphony in the late 1980s, and through his husband's sister and parents, who lived in Tucson.
βIt just felt that things came together nicely," the 60-year-old Kauffman said.
Kauffman is True Concord's first full-time managing director in its 17 years and his hiring comes after the ensemble has grown in local and national stature and became too big to run without a full-time manager, Holtan said.
True Concord, which has a Grammy nomination to its credit and sells out most of its concerts, was spotlighted in the January 2021 NEA report on arts organizations whose innovation helped them thrive during the pandemic. Chorus America also credited True Concord for its "bubble season" in which it took a page from the NBA's COVID playbook and isolated 18 out-of-state chorus members for five weeks so that they could perform concerts in the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021.
β(Hiring a managing director) was something the board had been thinking about for a few years and Welz happened at a very good time for us to realize that ambition," said True Concord Board Chairwoman Nancy March. "We never imagined it would be someone of Welz's experience."
Not long after Kauffman and his husband, Jon Teeuwissen, moved to Tucson last fall, Kauffman reached out to Holtan about volunteering as an usher for True Concord's "bubble" season.
βOne of the things that drew me to this was how True Concord handled COVID," said Kauffman, whose husband is the artistic advisor for dance at Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit. "I went to several performances and people were relaxed. They weren't scared. They knew this organization had the situation in hand. That was impressive."
