In the end it was fitting that the Boston Symphony Orchestra announced that its music director, Andris Nelsons, would leave his post next season just a few days after he had brought another ensemble to Symphony Hall: He is touring with the Vienna Philharmonic, and was on the road when the news of his departure broke on Friday.
In a terse statement, the Boston Symphony said the orchestra’s leadership had declined to renew Nelsons’s contract because he and they were “not aligned on future vision.” This has always seemed a plausible outcome since the Symphony appointed Chad Smith, a renowned innovator, to be its president and chief executive three years ago, even though Nelsons is an avowed traditionalist.
The Boston Symphony said Nelsons and its leadership share a “desire to ensure our orchestra continues to perform at the highest levels.” But the implication is that the orchestra under Nelsons cannot.
Nelsons, 47, has become one of the most unfortunate symbols of all that is irresponsible about the overstretched, overtired, overindulged modern music director. It has been not only deeply frustrating, but genuinely sad, to witness his trajectory.
He was 34 when he signed his first Boston contract. He was young, but his work at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England and elsewhere suggested an already mature artist, one with unusual interpretive depth and a sincere appreciation for Old World style. In his first few years in Boston, you could trust Nelsons to conduct almost anything well. There was a fine Brahms cycle and an “Elektra” of shocking power; the first installments of a recorded survey of the Shostakovich symphonies won Grammy Awards. At the time, I wrote that there was “probably no current music director in the country I would rather hear conduct on a weekly basis.”
But the Boston Symphony — with its glorious hall, its Tanglewood retreat, its prestigious heritage, its esteemed players, its immense resources — was seemingly not enough for Nelsons. Not long after the Berlin Philharmonic reportedly ignored him and selected Kirill Petrenko as its chief conductor in 2015, he took on another prestigious post, with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, Germany.
The temptation must have been immense. Who wouldn’t want to join a line of conductors that runs back past Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler to Felix Mendelssohn? Mark Volpe, the Boston Symphony’s leader at the time, said that a second music directorship would ease Nelsons’s burdens, that it “made so much more sense than him bouncing around.”
As it turned out, though, even the Boston Symphony and the Leipzig Gewandhaus combined were insufficient. Nelsons told me in 2016 that he would be “hugely cutting guesting,” that he would do “a week with the Vienna Philharmonic, a week in Berlin.” A year later, he took the Vienna Philharmonic for two weeks in Asia. More punishing tours with that orchestra followed, on top of trips with Boston and Leipzig, and all his other duties.
Every year since 2017 that Bachtrack, a leading listing website, has ranked the busiest conductors in the world, Nelsons has finished either first or second. Is it any surprise, then, that he has not fulfilled his potential?
Certainly, Nelsons has not achieved what he could in Boston. The shine of the early seasons soon dimmed. He still has his admirers, and he remains capable of real quality. But he has also proven himself able to conduct as if he has barely seen the score at hand. The Shostakovich survey did not end nearly as impressively as it began; remakes of Strauss tone poems that he had previously recorded in Birmingham testify to just what a sluggish and patchy interpreter he has become. Fundamentally, it has become hard to trust him in much music anymore.
There have been wider consequences. It took five years for Nelsons to approve the hiring of a concertmaster, delaying a needed revitalization in the strings. Some of the Boston players look oddly disengaged, and it is difficult to discern a collective identity in the playing like that so palpable with, say, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony or the Minnesota Orchestra. For the ensemble that once defined symphonic mastery in the United States and beyond, this is troubling.
The Boston Symphony’s board has done the right thing in parting ways with Nelsons but has a challenging period ahead. Its stalwart vice president of artistic planning, Anthony Fogg, will soon retire. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus needs a new director. Keith Lockhart, alas, cannot conduct the Boston Pops forever.
Outwardly, the organization would appear to be drowning in capital — in its 2024 fiscal year, it drew more from its endowment ($26.8 million) than the entire budget of the London Symphony Orchestra — but it needs more to renovate its aging facilities. It runs persistent, eye-watering deficits. All that, and the inconsistent standard of guest conductors over the past several years means that Nelsons has no readily apparent successor.
Smith, the orchestra’s chief executive, already had work to do to realize his expansive, progressive vision for the Boston Symphony’s future. Now he has more.
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