Matthew Guerrieri, of Soho The Dog fame, has made a substack post about the situation. Here is some of what Matthew has to say in his post called "M[r.] Nelson[s] is Missing"
I, too, have spent the past week wondering just what is going on at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. To recap: on March 6, the BSO Board of Trustees and president and CEO Chad Smith released a fairly terse statement announcing that the contract of music director Andris Nelsons would not be renewed, as conductor and organization “were not aligned on future vision.” The move apparently caught Nelsons by surprise (“not the decision I anticipated or wanted”) and was made without consulting the orchestra’s musicians. Theories as to why have coalesced around two possibilities:The Substack has links, images, and charts, plus a look at Portillos as an economic entity. I think I have eaten at Portillos in Chicago, and I have not eaten at the one that recently opened in Champaign, Illinois. If I did eat there, I don't remember much about the food, and I certainly do not have the wherewithal to analyze the financial stuff concerning the business.
a) Nelsons, who is also the Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and, of late, has been spending a lot of we’re-just-good-friends quality-time with the Vienna Philharmonic, had stretched himself too thin to keep adequate eye on the store in Boston, with a corresponding drop-off in focus and quality (we’ll call this the “David Allen conjecture”)
b) Smith, who was hired away from the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2023, has been itching to revamp the BSO’s programming into something more like LA’s, with more pops-leaning crossovers and post-modern, audience-friendly new music, but has been stymied by Nelsons’ insistent devotion to the European canon (we’ll call this the “you’re-not-from-here postulate”)
You can debate these on the merits (Allen’s diagnosis of decline, for example, might be a bit of correlation-causation confusion; from the start, Nelsons struck me as a kind of Reggie Jackson of conductors—lots of home runs, lots of strikeouts). To be sure, there have been hints that a Smith-Nelsons partnership was not built for the long-term. But that still doesn’t explain the abruptness of the announcement. (Pure speculation, but my own wager would be that this has a great deal to do with the imminent departure of vice president of artistic planning Anthony Fogg, who is retiring in September, leaving an enormous hole in the BSO’s administrative apparatus. If CEO and music director were in a high-noon standoff over Fogg’s replacement, I could see the board panicking and turning an “ease him out” situation into a “rip the band-aid off” situation. But again: pure speculation.)
Among the Nelsons-friendly and more Boston-centric comment boards I’ve been perusing, Smith already has been cast as the heavy in this drama, a top-down corporate outsider imposing an unwelcome agenda. (This take assumes that the unaligned future vision mentioned in the board’s announcement is option b) up there.) Out of curiosity, I went back and took a look at the trustee-board committee that picked Smith to be the CEO. It looked like this: medical research institute administrator, foundation director, arts administrator, corporate governance lawyer, private equity partner, philanthropist, and arts administrator (and former BSO member). It’s a group, I think, symptomatic of the tension at the heart of American orchestra governance, where governing boards are expected to be fundraising machines, fiduciary watchdogs, and artistic stewards all at the same time. On the one hand: if you’re hiring an administrator, that’s the kind of expertise you want in the room. On the other hand: that’s a largely corporate crowd, making a corporate decision-by-committee—not exactly a recipe for out-of-the-box innovation. It’s probably going to land on a corporate candidate.
(Incidentally, lest you think that a gathering like that is some sort of 21st-century late-capitalist perversion of the BSO’s mission, here’s the lineup of BSO trustees ca. 1950: lawyer, judge, investment banker, paper executive, real estate broker and philanthropist, church administrator, car dealer and politician, investment banker, advertising executive, lawyer and academic, media executive, education administrator, lawyer, judge, lawyer. That there were at least three people on Smith’s hiring committee with professional-level musical training is significant progress, for what it’s worth.)
Still, if Smith really is aiming to plug-and-play some facsimile of the LA Phil ethos in Boston, he might want to sit down over a two-hot-dog combo with one of the people who hired him.
Joshua Lutzker—the private equity guy in that list—has been a BSO trustee since 2014. He is a managing director at Boston-based Berkshire Partners. In 2014, Berkshire Partners, in a deal worth right around a billion dollars, acquired Portillo’s, a Chicagoland chain of hot-dog-and-Italian-beef stands. Lutzker was part of the team than landed the deal, and he has served on the Portillo’s board of directors ever since, shepherding the company through both an IPO and a nationwide expansion. (Though it was announced just this week that, with the appointment of a new CEO, Lutzker will be leaving the board. History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, etc.)
I am very grateful to Matthew, who grew up in Chicago, understands a great deal about music, and understands a great deal more about how the financial world works than I do, for offering his far more than two cents about this situation.
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