I’ve been overseas for the past two weeks, but apparently folks are still up in arms about Andris Nelsons’ dismissal from the Boston Symphony three weeks ago. Reports are that Andris’ concerts at Symphony Hall these past two weeks have been greeted with raucous standing ovations, with the musicians all wearing red flowers – the color of the Latvian flag – to show their solidarity with Nelsons. Some local activists have even started a petition in the hopes of getting a public forum with BSO leadership to discuss Nelsons’ dismissal, a petty gesture which has so far fallen on deaf ears.
Last Thursday (3/19), several players from the BSO players committee met with members of the BSO board and CEO Chad Smith in an effort to receive some clarity about the decision. Instead, they wrote in a statement released earlier today that, “the meeting itself was very difficult for the Players and, ultimately, frustrating….We received no reassurance that there is a path to rebuilding trust.”
The following day, the board released a statement acknowledging that, while the announcement of Nelsons’ departure had been “challenging” for many in the community, they felt compelled to take the BSO in a new direction due to falling revenues and increased operating costs. Reportedly, Boston has been playing to half-full houses for some time now: a gross failure of marketing and promotion which is potentially more damaging to the orchestra’s psyche than it is to its bottom line. As previously noted, the BSO has by far the largest endowment of any orchestra in the world, currently around $700 million.
“What must change is how we bring classical music to life for 21st-century audiences,” the statement read, “reimagining how orchestral music reaches reaches broader audiences, deepening our roots as a civic institution across Boston and the Berkshires.”
That has incited fears amongst some in community that board chair Barbara Hostetter and Smith are conspiring to dumb down the BSO like so many other orchestras who have replaced Beethoven and Bartòk with popular music and Movie Nights. (Newsflash, the Boston Pops basically invented movie concerts under their former conductor John Williams.) As one longtime patron suggested, “Educate and build audiences for what the BSO already offers instead of reshaping the institution to chase audiences with programming they can find elsewhere...My observation is that places trying to offer something for everyone end up blurring into an interchangeable sameness, a forgettable mush.”
That might be true of most orchestras. But, I’m prepared to give BSO leadership – and in particular Smith – the benefit of the doubt here. In more than 20 years at the LA Phil – first as artistic planner, then as CEO – Smith was responsible for some of the most innovative programming at any orchestra in the world, working closely with music directors Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel to perform not only new music by John Adams, Gabriela Ortiz and Hildur Guðnadóttir, but engaging collaborations with everyone from Herbie Hancock to Björk. And that doesn’t even include everything Smith programmed at the Hollywood Bowl.
At the end of the day, this is all just a tempest in a teapot. Despite the earnest pleas of musicians, critics and ticket buyers, Nelsons’ job won’t be saved. Nor are Hostetter or Smith going to step down. And, like it or not, they don’t owe you or anyone else an explanation: the board can terminate their music director for whatever reason they want, whenever they want. That’s the way things work at most orchestras, unless you happen to be one of those select self-governing institutions. As YouTuber Dave Hurwitz recently commented, “I don’t think the orchestra itself should determine who their music director is, because…they’re going to pick the person they like. And the person they like is going to be the person who encourages them to do the least amount of work.” I don’t have any evidence that was the case here, other than a rehearsal I saw at Tanglewood several years ago where Nelsons ran through an entire movement of a Sibelius symphony without saying a single word.
The whole problem here, as I see it, is Nelsons. Despite wanting to stay in Boston and continue collecting his $1.8 million annual salary, Nelsons should have had the good grace to go when he was initially asked back in September, as reported by the NY Times. Instead, Nelsons stubbornly refused to see the writing on the wall: that he was never going to be the conductor of the BSO’s future, someone willing to venture outside of Symphony Hall or the Koussevitzky Shed, someone broad enough in their musical taste to have at least heard of people like Dave Longstreth and Dan Deacon, both artists from the indie music world who’ve ventured into symphonic music. Nelsons is very good at what he does, but his limited musical scope isn’t what the BSO needs in 2026, regardless of what the musicians and some noisy patrons think.
“Of course I wish this had played out differently,” Smith told the Boston Globe “and that we could have landed at a more amicable resolution, but the negotiations led to this outcome.”
It’s not like we haven’t seen this movie before. Back in 2021, Jaap van Zweden announced he was stepping down as music director of the NY Phil after only six seasons, having spent much of the prior 18 months cloistered at home in Amsterdam during the Covid shutdown. At the time, Jaap rationalized that he wanted more “freedom” so he could spend more time with his family. Since then, he’s taken on directorships with both the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, in addition to guest conducting slots which kept him away from home all but three weeks last year.
Hmm.
I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of the situation, but is it not possible that Jaap – a talented, if occasionally brusque maestro – and former NY Phil President Deborah Borda “weren’t aligned on future vision,” and he was quietly shown the door? (This scenario seems all the more likely taking into account Borda’s longstanding relationship with Jaap’s successor, Dudamel.) Unfortunately, controlling the narrative is one lesson Smith apparently didn’t absorb from his former mentor, Borda, and now he’s paying the price in the public forum.
The awkward coda to all of this is that the BSO musicians’ contract comes up for renewal in August. Will they make a principled stand and go on strike in favor of their beloved music director? Or will they bend to the will of the board and the comfortable lifestyle their board-approved salary affords them? We shall see.
Meanwhile, I’ll be eager to hear the reportedly-reinvigorated BSO with Nelsons when they arrive at Carnegie Hall on April 9 and 10. And this summer at Tanglewood, where Nelsons will be in residence July 10 – August 2. And then all of next season, at which point the musicians and audience will likely have acclimated to this new reality, hopefully with a new music director in place everyone can feel good about.