HSBC's Studzinski, Arts Supporter, Urges Wealthy to Give Money - Bloomberg News

By Linda Sandler
from Bloomberg News

July 20 (Bloomberg) -- John Studzinski, co-head of Corporate Investment Banking and markets at London-based HSBC Holdings Plc, said charities take a quarter or more of his cash income after taxes. Rich people should give more away, he said.

U.S.-born Studzinski's Genesis Foundation has spent as much as 1.5 million pounds a year ($2.7 million) of his money since he started it in 2001 to help create operas at London's Almeida theater and plays at the Young Vic and Royal Court Theaters.

Last month Studzinski set up a fundraising structure to accept outside donations from individuals, companies and foundations for similar programs to be run by Genesis. Now, he said, he's looking for a good cause -- such as poetry -- that's short of money. While donors such as U.S. fund manager Alberto Vilar and U.K. real estate investor Donald Gordon write checks for established opera houses, Studzinski, 48, set out to train young opera librettists and playwrights to produce new works of art.

There are parallels between banking and philanthropy, according to Studzinski. "Either Junius or J.P. Morgan said an investment banker stands at the crossroads of capital between the sources and users of capital," he said. "Genesis is trying to direct funds to those with young creative potential."

Working Class

Growing up in Peabody, Massachusetts, Studzinski was introduced into the arts world by his Polish parents, who had friends in theater and classical music. Being working class, he was expected to become a doctor rather than make a career in the arts, he said. "And I didn't have the talent." Instead, he decided to help people who did have talent.

Opera, which lives off productions of works by 19th century composers such as Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, was especially in need of aid, Studzinski said. "I don't want opera to be an icon of the 19th century. I want it to be contemporary. If you want that, you have to invest in it," he said.

HSBC last year hired Studzinski, a Morgan Stanley banker who moved to London in 1984 and built up European operations for the No.2 U.S. securities firm. He has been assembling a team to boost corporate-finance business at HSBC, Europe's biggest bank. The division brings in about 35% of global pre-tax profit, he said.

Because of his work for the homeless, Studzinski, a Catholic, was made a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory by Pope John Paul II in 2001. He is also vice chairman of Washington-based Human Rights Watch, whose concerns range from torture of prisoners to treatment of young offenders, and is a trustee of London's Tate Gallery.

Mixed Reviews

Some artists he has helped have had successes. Serbian Isidora Zebeljan, in her 30s, won a commission to compose an orchestral work for the Venice Biennale for 2004 and has had an opera commissioned by Genesis which was performed in Amsterdam and Vienna in 2003 and is booked to play in Serbia and Italy at festivals already. Vassily Sigarev, born in 1977, was judged one of 2002's most promising playwrights by the Evening Standard newspaper. In February, the Young Vic won the Laurence Olivier Award for its season under artistic director David Lan, who schools young directors through a Genesis project.

Genesis-backed operas have had mixed reviews. London's Financial Times last July panned Sirius on Earth, a science- fiction operetta by a Canadian composer and librettist, and Thwaite by an Irish team, about survivors of a catastrophe. They shouldn't have been allowed past the workshop phase, wrote reviewer Andrew Clark.

Studzinski agreed. Genesis from now on will spend more money on workshops and less to put on shows, he said.
The banker, wearing a blue suit and yellow tie that highlighted his pale brown hair, talked to Bloomberg's Linda Sandler at a party for the Genesis Foundation and later in a conference room at HSBC's skyscraper at Canary Wharf before going on to his next meeting.

First Commission

Bloomberg: How did you get involved with young artists in the first place?

Studzinski: I've told this story so often it bores my friends. I had one success commissioning work from a young composer (Roxanna Panufnik, who wrote a mass for Cardinal Hume's 75th birthday a year before he died in 1999) and I decided to formalize the process. I knew Roxanna socially, through her mother, and she sort of needed a break. Young artists are very fragile and insecure, and if you can give them their first break they can evolve with increasing confidence. We all need someone at some point in our careers who gives us a break and an opportunity to develop confidence.

A New Mass

I knew she had talent because I had listened to her tapes. She was also a young woman who had converted to Catholicism, and I knew Cardinal Hume would be interested in her. She created a mass for Westminster Cathedral. They hadn't had a new mass written for 50 years. It took 10,000 pounds to 15,000 pounds to commission it all through. It's still being performed around the world in local churches.

Bloomberg: You're spending about 1 million pounds to 1.5 million pounds of your own money a year. What does it go on?

Studzinski: About a third goes for opera projects. Another third goes to young directors at the Young Vic Theater. That's the program run by David Lan. And the other third goes to the Royal Court Theater. We're funding a group of young playwrights in workshops for three to five years, U.K. and foreign. Sigarev won the Evening Standard award and he bought himself a dacha outside of Moscow. The irony is, it's not a lot of money, but it is a lot of value to humanity.

In business you have this expression, "That's good value." The long-term value to humanity is very high if you find one inspiring composer in 1,000.

Mentoring

We also run a scholarship program at LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art). I'm sensitive to the fact that the young artists' pool shouldn't just be fed by the upper middle class. They have parents with money who know people on boards, so they have a way in to the artistic world. We try to help the kids who don't have that.

Bloomberg: Did you have mentors who helped you along?

Studzinski: I had colleagues who helped me when I started at Morgan Stanley in 1980. Dick Fisher, the former chairman, was an important mentor. He was one of the people who suggested I move to London. I was being asked to run a small but growing business for Morgan Stanley, focused on mergers and acquisitions. Cardinal Hume was a great spiritual mentor. He gave me a sense of self-esteem about the work I was doing for the homeless.

Bloomberg: What about your move to take in outside contributions for Genesis? Who will the money come from and how will it be spent?

Filling Voids

Studzinski: We will formally speak to a series of trusts and foundations in September. Charities must pitch themselves. Our mantra is: we're nurturing young, fragile talent and we have a structure in place for financing young artists. Two people have written just in the past week saying, "Can you send us a proposal and tell us how much you'd like?"

We would like the new money to go into areas that will fill voids. We have music and theater, and now we're looking at doing something for young poets. Maybe we'll create a poetry prize. We're also looking at the visual arts, but they're pretty well covered. We don't want to compete with the BP Portrait Award (presented annually at London's National Portrait Gallery).

Bloomberg: Not much is known about how the arts are financed. What does it cost to fund an opera, and how do you shell out the money?

Studzinski: To get the first draft of an opera libretto and 10 minutes to 15 minutes of music costs about 5,000 pounds. We commission it from a writer and composer team. Then if you go on and commission the whole opera it's another 10,000 pounds to 15,000 pounds.

Workshops

Then there's the workshop phase. Composers, singers and musicians talk to each other in the workshop about what it's like to play the role and so on. We're used to working in teams in the banking business, but that's not true of artists.

(The workshop phase costs as much as 80,000 pounds, according to Mel Cooper, a Genesis deputy director. Genesis then writes checks for an estimated 20,000 pounds to pay professional directors to work with the young artists, he said. Studzinski attends every workshop and listens to "every bit of music" by opera teams on a short list of 35 culled from 220 applications, and is on the panel that picks the winning teams, Cooper said.)

The next phase is production. That's most of the cost. The first time Genesis put on operas, they cost as much as 40,000 pounds each. For the second opera project, we had a press night at the Almeida and people came from all over the world. It cost about 75,000 pounds for two days of production for five or six operas.

Useful Critics

Bloomberg: What kind of changes are you making to your opera projects?

Studzinski: This year we won't have an opera season. This time we'll focus on creating good operas and not on producing them. We will do semi-staged workshops and we won't cram the performances into two to three weeks. We'll spread out the debuts and put on the operas when they're ready to be seen.

The press has been sympathetic to the need for new opera, but they highlighted problems with some of our works. The criticism has been useful to us. When you get over the feeling that you're being attacked, you go home and think about it and you say, 'I can take that on board.'

We're trying to keep the running costs for Genesis at 5 percent to 10 percent of the money coming in. And I'm starting to audit where the money is going. It's supposed to get to young artists and I want to make sure it's not going on unnecessary parties or administration.

Hiking and Wagner

Bloomberg: Do you think you're likely to have more success funding theater than new music, which not everybody likes?

Studzinski: New music is difficult. I remember as a child going to Tristan and Isolde (Wagner's opera) in New York with my music teacher. I had to listen to it four or five times before I grew to like it. Once I was on a hiking trip in Israel -- in about 1986 -- and I went to see Parsifal and Tannhauser. You don't appreciate how beautiful Wagner is the first time you hear it. The extremes hit you but it's only after five or six times that you appreciate the subtleties.

Schonberg's Moses and Aaron is similar. You have to adapt your listening to its modalities. It's the same with Stravinsky or Thomas Ades (a U.K. composer of operas including The Tempest.) It's different with Mozart. We've all listened to him hundreds of times.

Bloomberg: One of your latest opera projects, called Push!, has women groaning in labor. What's the audience for that?

Next Generation

Studzinski: Contemporary music has as its purpose to make you think. The issue isn't whether you love it but are you challenged by it, and do you want to hear it several times? The first reaction to anything new is to reject it. Then you ask, "What's going on here. How much is derivative, like other composers, and how much is really new?"

Not everything new will survive. Handel wrote about 50 operas. He was the Andrew Lloyd Weber of the Georgian period. How many of his operas can you name today? Though there is a Handel revival going on. It's the next generation who will pick what music will survive.

Bloomberg: Is funding the arts a bit like venture capital? If there's too much money available some of the wrong projects get funded.

Studzinski: With venture capital you're investing on the law of averages to get a probable business success. Here, you're getting artistic capital. What would you rather have in the end: Millions in the bank or three or four artists you've helped to succeed?

Something Personal

Bloomberg: You bankroll artists and you cook meals for homeless people. Why do you do all this?

Studzinski: It's not because I'm a Catholic or I'm from Massachusetts. It's because the only thing we have in life is time or money. I believe we're resource allocators. You have to allocate your time and your funds among your family, your friends, your job and your charities.

Most charitable giving is about gaining a certain level of social acceptance. You give and you gain acceptance from your peers. Most people give to established organizations. It's like buying a Richard James suit (Studzinski's favorite tailor for the banker look, he says.) You're buying an established brand.

I'm trying to do something very personal, which is to nurture young artists. I would encourage people to set up their own foundation, rather than jumping on the check-writing bandwagon. You feel like you're creating something. It's like planting a tree instead of going to a shop and buying flowers.

Bloomberg: How do you juggle all your commitments?

Studzinski: You have to plan how you will use your time over three to six months. Most people don't plan their personal lives the way they do if they're running a business. I try to do that. So if I'm in New York for HSBC, I'll do other things, like attend a meeting of Human Rights Watch.

Warming Up Dinner

It's an exaggeration to say I cook meals for the homeless. I heat food for them some Saturday nights if I'm in London.

Bloomberg: Where do you think opera as an art is heading? You go to Salzburg so you like the old as well as the new.

Studzinski: I think there's room for the new as well as the old. I'm not an expert but I will say that with opera today I believe we're in the age of the director, not the composer or the librettist. Directing and conducting older works has become the modus operandi. The music is wonderful and the voices have never been better. But we are operating in the age of the director.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Linda Sandler in London at (44) (20) 7673-2317 or lsandlerbloomberg [dot] net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Jim Ruane in Brussels at (32) (2) 285-4309 or jruane1bloomberg [dot] net.

Copyright Bloomberg News July 2004. All rights reserved.