Robert Cole must be the most connected man, with the classiest Rolodex, in all of show business. Cole has been the artistic director of ever expanding Cal Performances for 22 years. By now, if every other Bay Area entertainment outlet—clubs, theaters, movie houses—suddenly disappeared, you would still be able to fill all your weekends with memorable performances by the artists he lures here. He’s the one who first brought world-class cellist Yo-Yo Ma to Berkeley. And the Mark Morris Dance Group. And performance artist Laurie Anderson. And jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, Ireland’s Druid Theatre Company, and the National Acrobats of China. The list goes on and on and on.

An orchestra conductor with a jazz background, Cole clearly has a talent scout’s gift. In many cases, he spotted a future artistic superstar early on—theatrical genius Peter Sellars before he was considered a genius, renowned Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli before she was world renowned. Then there’s Robert Lepage. A boundary-breaking Canadian writer, director, and actor—he’s been called his country’s “creative genius”—Lepage had never even been to the West Coast before Cole brought him here seven years ago to perform in his captivating, unclassifiable show The Far Side of the Moon. Now, Lepage is directing the Ring Cycle for the Metropolitan Opera, and you don’t get a bigger gig than that.

The greatest artists know when to retire, though: while we’re still admiring their skills, rather than remembering what they once were. Now 77, Cole will retire from Cal Performances next summer. It says something about his relationships with artists like Bartoli, Morris, and Ma—and something about those artists’ relationships with Bay Area audiences—that they are all venturing west once more to honor him during his last season. When I spoke with Cole in his nar­row little office far below the Zellerbach Hall stage, I could understand how he developed such strong bonds with such big stars. He is about as far from a bombastic, ego-driven showman as you can get. He’s low-key, friendly, unassuming—but he knows how to take care of business, and he never stops applauding the performing arts.

Boy, this is going to be quite a send-off. Your final season is like a greatest-hits album. How did you make it happen? Some things I was energetic about trying to make happen; others happened because someone called me up and said, “This is your last season; I want to do something.”

Like who, for instance? Peter Sellars, for example. We did things with Peter way back, before he got so famous. As soon as I got here in 1986, I commissioned Peter to do a new chamber opera with John Adams [I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky]. We premiered it, which was one of the great privileges, because look where John is now, and look where Peter is now. Anyway, last year Peter was doing a wonderful two-character drama with soprano Dawn Upshaw that had been in New York—it’s called Kafka Fragments, with music by György Kurtág, a very great European composer—and Peter said, “Here’s what we can do.”

In that respect, this whole season is a kind of retrospective. I had the very great fortune to have been here at a time when certain artists’ careers really took off. I was fortunate—I won’t use the word lucky, because it was more than luck—to connect with these people at a time when no one had an idea that would happen.

Cecilia Bartoli—there hasn’t been a career like that since Pavarotti. She is a superstar, and she was 24 years old when she came here. I knew her manager, and, of course, nobody knew who she was, and he couldn’t sell any dates. I heard her on tape and said, “Oh, my god.”

So you had good timing and a very good ear. [Nods modestly.] That’s one example of a career going off the charts. The other, of course, is Mark Morris. There’s a career that is unbelievable in its scope and magnitude. Here’s a guy who had a small dance company when I first saw him in ’85 in New York. We got him here for one performance, and then he went to Brussels, where he created a lot of great work, and we brought it all back here. Now he’s directing operas for the Metropol­itan Opera—this is inconceivable for a modern-dance choreographer. It has never happened before and probably will never happen again, in anybody’s lifetime.

How big was the lineup when you got here? I would guess it was 40 to 50 performances a year, and now we do about 130 to 140 a year. We are the biggest university presenter in America, and we’re probably the biggest multidiscipline presenter in America, period. I mean, the Kennedy Center is very big, but it doesn’t do a lot of the stuff we do. It doesn’t have regular recitals with Cecilia Bartoli.... The budget was roughly $4 million when I got here, and now it’s $14 million. My own theory is, the most expensive thing is an empty theater. If it’s full, you might lose a little bit, you might make something, but you’re not losing everything.

In the early days, were you the one to get on the phone and ask the performers to come? I still am.

What would you consider your first big coup? Really big coup, I guess, was Cecilia.

But you said nobody knew who Cecilia was, so booking her was smart on your part, but— I knew it was a coup [laughs]. And the people who were there knew. That’s not the way it works, you know; it’s incremental. For example, this is the fourth year in a row that Yo-Yo Ma has been to Cal Performances. That’s very unusual. When he conceived of the Silk Road Project [a multi­national program of music, dance, and art] some years ago, I was invited to observe the first iteration. When Yo-Yo said, “Would you like to do this?,” I said, “Yes.” “What would you like to do?” “Everything.” It lasted for two weeks. That sort of solidified the relationship in a very special way. Coups don’t come, in this business, in a moment.

Now that you’re leaving, is part of the reason because— I don’t want to compete with myself. It’s too difficult [laughs]. These things happened; they’re not going to happen again.

Do you feel there are fewer artists of that caliber to discover or choose from? Things change. For example, when I was very young and conducting, I had a little ballet company in L.A., a totally unknown company. I was the manager, fundraiser, conductor, music director….

Everything but a dancer. And I wanted to be a dancer! Anyway, on Monday nights, you could rent the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I could and did hire Edward Villella and Violet Verdy, of the New York City Ballet, and it sold out—the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with 3,400 seats. No one thought it would sell out, especially in L.A., where you have to have a star. And Eddie Villella was in a company where there was no star system, remember? But Eddie could sell tickets.

You can’t do that now with one particular dancer. If that’s changed so much in 20 years, it’s obvious that other things are gonna change. And it’s a 5- to 10-year project, doing what I’m trying to do [planning the seasons, finding the artists, and booking them]. And I don’t want to give five more years to this.

Because it will just get harder? Well, it’s harder, yeah, because I’ve had such good fortune. And the artistic initiatives that I think would be valuable going forward are ambitious and would take years to realize.

Can you give me an example? I would want to get on a plane to North Korea and see what’s going on there, because I’m so hyped about what the New York Phil­harmonic did there [playing in insular Pyongyang in late February]. It was amazing. Of course, the admin­istration will never give them credit for doing what they did, but it had an effect in improving relations. I mean, there was a time, and I’m old enough to remember it, when you could not see a Russian com­pany in this country. And we’ve been bringing the two greatest Russian dance companies here. The same thing with China. And the potential with, say, North Korea is very enticing.

When you talked about the job getting harder, you implied that the audience is changing, too. We are so hooked on pop culture, through TV and the iPod and all that stuff, it’s really dispersed the cultural focus. How did it happen?

It does seem as if the public was once more familiar with the big cultural stars, maybe because people like Carl Sandburg and Maria Callas were in Life magazine, or— Yeah, that’s right. There was Baryshnikov, Nureyev, Maria Callas…. Look at Itzhak Perlman. One reason Itzhak became so famous—besides being the greatest violinist living at the time—was that he was on Johnny Carson’s show, quite often.

Earlier than that, families saw all sorts of entertainment on The Ed Sullivan Show. Right—popular culture still embraced high culture. There was an intermingling that no longer exists. The upside is we have an international reach now. I mean, Johnny Carson was watched only by Americans. Now, if something happens in Barcelona or wherever, everyone knows about it instantly.

So there’s been a kind of narrowing in the audience, but also a deepening of knowledge or sophistication. Yeah. The downside is popular culture excluding the so-called high art, but the upside is we now have an international culture—and the upside is we survived.

What do you plan to do after next August? My wife, Susan Muscarella, directs the Jazzschool over here. She works about 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s not a job to her, it’s her life—it’s even more of her life because she mortgaged our house. So there’s a lot of incentive to make it successful [laughs]. I’ve become sort of an obsessive tennis player, so when I can get off the tennis court, I will help her out. I was a jazz guy when I was 16, so I’m going to be her assistant or something. We haven’t worked that out yet. It’s sort of like what Bill said about Hillary: “I’ll do anything she asks me to do.”

And we all went, “Yeah, right.”

---

Pamela Feinsilber is a San Francisco contributing writer.

Main photo: Check out this season’s lineup at Cal Performances: It’s Cole’s last, so giant talents are booking flights into Oakland.