Batiquitos Directors Upbeat About 1989; Others Incredulous

The first season of Carlsbad’s troubled Batiquitos Festival of the Arts is now history. In its wake is a pile of broken promises, reams of bad publicity over public-event and student-program cancellations, and a debt that totals about $100,000. Although none of its biggest donors has abandoned it, several say they are adopting a wait-and-see attitude before committing any more funds.

The bleak evidence to the contrary, the Batiquitos board of directors says it is more heartened than discouraged. After all, the five-week event was completed. Rather than shelve the festival as an honorable failure, the board is planning to pay off its debts and raise more funds to produce a second festival next summer.

“It’s been a hell of a five weeks,” said Dr. Thomas J. Sergott, the festival’s newly elected board president.

A combination classical music concert series and training program for student musicians, this summer’s festival ran June 19 to July 24 and was plagued with staff, faculty and student defections after the money ran out and promises regarding salaries, housing and transportation could not be met.

Sergott, who became the festival’s chief spokesman when the administrative staff resigned two weeks into the festival, puts a positive face on matters.

“We were at a point of crisis,” he said. “I think we met that crisis and got through it. No matter what was happening in terms of administrative problems, the students were making music. That’s what was most important. We’re looking forward to an even more successful season in 1989.”

Sergott, a plastic surgeon who has been on the board of directors since March, said the board has learned from past mistakes and will take advantage of local administrative and arts resources and expects to put on a first-rate festival next year, although it may be scaled back.

“We are enhancing the board as we speak,” Sergott said in an interview last week.

The board will be augmented by a president of an accounting firm to help with financial forecasting, as well as men and women with arts fund-raising experience, he said.

The directors plan to form an advisory board of arts administrators and directors from other cultural groups from San Diego and Los Angeles. They are talking with creditors and “actively pursuing” fund-raising activities to wipe out this season’s debt and to underwrite next season, Sergott said.

He said next summer’s festival will be “at least” the quality of this summer’s and will be announced by the end of the year.

Some faculty members have a less than optimistic view about the festival’s hopes for continuing next year. The flotsam and jetsam of this year’s event could be unassailable obstacles, they say.

Michael Carson, director of opera at California State University, Long Beach, came to Carlsbad to conduct Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” but said he departed after three days of confusion and broken promises on the part of the festival management.

When reached at his office at the Lake George Opera Festival in Upstate New York, where he directs a student opera festival, Carson’s first comment was that the Batiquitos Festival had no right to continue.

“At very least it would need a complete administrative restructuring,” he said. “You simply cannot take advantage of people the way they did. If you cannot trust a festival, how can teachers encourage their students to attend?”

Carson criticized the festival management for not providing adequate rehearsal space and virtually no practice area for the institute’s student body.

“What good is it to coach a student if he has nowhere to go to work on what you’ve taught?” Carson said. He also faulted the festival for advertising a lengthy and impressive faculty listing, but coming through with only a fraction of the promised teachers.

Carson reserved his heaviest criticism for festival artistic director Michael Tseitlin. Tseitlin, a highly respected violin teacher, lives in Del Mar and teaches at California State University, Los Angeles. Considered the artistic visionary behind the Batiquitos Festival, he is now at a music festival in Italy.

“Tseitlin can be very personable and charming, but . . . if the festival is to continue, they need to get rid of Michael Tseitlin,” Carson said.

Marian Liebowitz, a San Diego State University professor, expressed incredulity at first when told that the Batiquitos Festival is planning a second season.

“With or without Tseitlin?” she asked. “It will be very hard to attract students or faculty for the festival after what happened this summer.”

Liebowitz was head of the woodwind section of the Batiquitos Institute, but resigned when the board announced it could not honor the financial obligations of the contracts it had with faculty members.

Bertram Turetsky of the UC San Diego music faculty came to the aid of Batiquitos during the height of its financial crisis. While other institute faculty were resigning, he agreed to act as dean of students, arranging classes when faculty did not appear and keeping the administrative end of the institute functioning.

Turetsky said the institute must pay outstanding faculty salaries before considering a second festival.

“My main concern is getting the faculty paid, and, although Sergott gave no time line for payment, he is sincere and I trust him,” he said.

He Sergott said the board’s “first priority at this time is to make sure the faculty receives all the salaries they were guaranteed and as much as we can muster for the non-guaranteed portion of the festival.”

He explained that salaries were guaranteed only for the first two weeks of the festival, adding that the faculty was well aware that nothing was guaranteed for the third through fifth weeks.

Liebowitz said that came as a surprise to her.

“Faculty members were guaranteed to be paid for whatever number of weeks they were contracted to teach,” she said. “No one would sign something that promised only two weeks of pay!”

Sergott expects to attract funding to pay off the debts, including salaries, from both private and corporate donors and local, state and federal agencies that traditionally fund the arts. When reached by The Times, several corporate donors who supported this year’s festival said they would consider contributing to a festival next year.

“We’re aware that they’ve had some problems associated with the program,” said Pamela Beckworth, director of marketing for Carlsbad-based Pea Soup Andersen’s, which donated five weeks’ worth of rooms for musicians. Beckworth said it is “hard to say at this point,” but she thinks the company will support another festival.

Dick Haack, public relations director of Home Federal, one of two donors in the $3,000-to-$6,500 “guarantor” category, said the bank would “like to be aware of what their plans are for the next year, and then we would review (the festival) . . . as we address the new year. It would be difficult at this point to say either yes or no.”

What exactly caused this year’s woes remains a matter of debate. Although former staff members blame Tseitlin, Sergott says it was the staff itself that caused the problems and believes that any negative fallout should be blamed on first-year inexperience.

“I think any festival in its initial stages has problems,” he said. “The administrative staff hired to support the artistic director, unfortunately, was not of the same caliber. That’s not to take away from the artistic director.

“It’s just too big a job for any one person to accomplish,” he said. “If we had had (the right) administrative staff in place, I think the festival would have gone much smoother.”

Sergott acknowledged the board’s responsibility for having hired the staff and said that next year, the board will retain a smaller, more mature staff, supplemented with volunteers.

One of the resigned staff members disagreed with Sergott’s proposed solution. She pointed out that not one but two separate staffs resigned: one in March headed by Kimberly Fox, another two weeks into the festival, headed by Catherine Messiere.

Messiere called Sergott’s plan to cut the staff from three to two people “ridiculous,” saying a minimum of four is needed. Even when the staff was at its full complement of three, running the festival “seemed an impossible task,” she said. “We all had to be going in three different directions, and there was no one to man the office.

“I think anything can continue to limp along. That was the problem I saw from the last staff that continued with our staff (and) wasn’t rectified,” Messiere said. “I don’t see (the board) really willing to sit down and wrestle with the horns of the problem.

“Nobody wants to believe that the artistic director was not following through with what we all believed to be policy,” she said. “If this one person who is the artistic director is saying, ‘I’m in charge of the staff and they are my right arm,’ then you have to let the right arm know what the left arm is doing.”

Fox, Messiere’s predecessor, resigned in March. Although her financial projections forecast a big debt, the directors were unwilling to scale back the festival. The other two staff members also resigned at that time and, within a few weeks, so did nine members of the 14-member board of directors. However, some of the vacancies on the board were soon filled.

Carson, the Cal State Long Beach opera program director, gave Fox a solid evaluation as an arts administrator, having observed her run the Cal State Long Beach summer opera institute as well as a chamber music institute at the university.

“She has fine administrative skills and is completely trustworthy. The festivals she ran were very successful,” Carson said.

The festival’s $100,000 debt includes a $75,000 bank loan, unpaid staff salaries and bills to various vendors, Sergott said. Although he would not name the creditors, several vendors contacted said the festival was either current or that they were willing to wait for payment.

“We still have not received money. But I’m not worried too much,” said Stavros Kondilis, owner and manager of the Corinthian Apartments.

Kondilis set aside 40 rooms for students at the request of festival officials, but only 17 were used, he said. The festival still owes Kondilis money on the 17 rooms, but he would not say how much.

Although Kondilis took a loss on the rooms that were not used, he does not fault the festival.

“It was a verbal agreement,” he said. “It’s very hard for me to know what went wrong. Nobody wanted to take any responsibility. There is no one to blame. I felt it was my fault from the beginning. I cannot blame anybody.”

Kondilis periodically ferried stranded students to and from the airport, to rehearsals and concerts throughout the festival’s five weeks.

“I realized there was a mess,” he said. “I have played in the theater myself . . . and I knew these people had to be where they had to be, so I helped as much as I could. I don’t want to give the (festival directors) pressure; they’ve run into a hard time.”

The directors’ hopes for putting on a second festival are also bolstered by those students who remained for the full five weeks--there were about 175 students participating during festival’s peak third week--and by the 25 faculty members who remained, working without pay.

“As the festival went on, I heard more and more positive comments and less negative comments,” Sergott said. “It was a very good experience for the vast majority of people who were there. Many members thanked me (and said) they wanted to come back.

“We’ve learned a lot of lessons from this festival. . . . We think the festival was a success the first year. We’re proud to be associated with it.”

Staff writer Elaine Pofeldt contributed to this story.