Out of tune
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Festival, he’s true prodigy. “Some people tell me that I am born to do this,” he says. ISO is a hodgepodge of players from several states, only some of whom have one-year contracts with the ISO. To field a full orchestra, Petkov usually had to bring in extra musicians, or “subs.” He lured them here with a reliable paycheck (he always made sure musicians got paid on time), personal charm, and, if necessary, vodka and cigarettes. He felt that he was personally responsible for making each player’s ISO experience a positive one.

Petkov says his troubles with Deal began in October 2006, when he arrived at a rehearsal to discover that the maestra had rearranged the seating chart, abruptly assigning Laura LaCombe — a contracted violinist who for 11 years had played near the top of the second violin section — to sit at the last stand, behind subs who had never even auditioned for the ISO. LaCombe, who also taught orchestra and violin at Lincoln Land Community College, walked out of rehearsal and never returned. “It was just my turn to get hit on, I guess,” she says.

A few months later, Deal tried to seat a violinist who had never played with the ISO ahead of the assistant concertmaster, and stood on stage arguing with Petkov about it loudly enough that other musicians could hear.

This obsession over where a musician sits might seem strange to anyone who hasn’t played in an orchestra or wind ensemble, but the etiquette is as ingrained in musicians as the intervals of a diatonic scale. Principal (or “first chair”) players are positioned closest to the front of the stage and handle all solos. The violin section is divided into two blocks (Petkov calls it “two acres of strings”) — the first violins, who occupy the front rows, and the second violins, who sit farther back. Any musician, whether on stage or in the audience, can look at the seating arrangement and immediately understand each player’s rank. Moving players who have never auditioned ahead of players who have is a blatant insult.

The seating-chart dispute led to a series of squabbles between Petkov and Deal. She criticized the way he filled out forms and missed office hours; he reminded her that he played ISO functions for free in exchange for time off. By April 2007, Deal was talking about demoting Petkov. In March 2008, she sounded exasperated.

“I am routinely ignored by Kamen. Either I am the music director or I am not,” she wrote, in an e-mail addressed to both Snyder and Petkov. “Perhaps now is the time to consider hiring an operations manager and using Kamen as an hourly employee.”

They had a major clash over the 2008-09 season contracts when Deal asked Petkov to use a new method she thought would reduce the percentage of subs. She made that request days before Petkov was scheduled to travel to Bulgaria for six weeks to produce a music festival. He couldn’t complete the task before he left, so Deal did it herself, imperfectly, while he was gone. When he returned in August, he says, he began scrambling to fix the contract mess, which only increased tensions with Deal. In October, when a violinist called in with a family crisis hours before a chamber orchestra rehearsal, Deal fired Petkov on the spot for seating a contracted ISO violinist who hadn’t auditioned specifically for the chamber group.