When members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra were summoned to meet with the organization’s chief executive last Friday, they were stunned to learn that their music director, Andris Nelsons, was being dismissed. They were even more stunned to find that they were learning of his departure at the same time as the public.
“We were blindsided,” Todd Seeber, a double bass player and chairman of the orchestra’s Players’ Committee, said in an interview this week.
The decision by the Boston Symphony to fire Nelsons, declaring that the orchestra and its music director “were “not aligned on future vision,” has plunged the organization into one of its biggest crises since its founding in 1881, and since its previous president and chief executive, Gail Samuel, resigned without explanation several years ago, after just 18 months on the job.
Within moments of the announcement, members of the orchestra issued a statement affirming their support for Nelsons, 47, who has been with the Boston Symphony for a dozen years. Nelsons wrote a letter to the orchestra saying his dismissal was not “the decision I anticipated or wanted.” And over the past few days, orchestra members have sent letters to members of the orchestra’s board assailing the decision and proclaiming their loyalty to Nelsons.
“As far as I am concerned, the decision not to renew Andris’s tenure is a form of artistic suicide,” Lorna McGhee, the principal flute player, said in a letter to the board. “It represents the greatest squandering of artistic capital I have ever witnessed.”
The orchestra’s board and its chief executive, Chad Smith — who came into office in 2023 declaring that “now is when we have to take the big swings” — are facing questions about why Nelson was fired, as well as about the jarring manner of the dismissal. And they are now struggling to reconcile two competing forces. The first is a concern by board members, as well as Smith, that Nelsons often seemed a mail-it-in conductor, paying a price for spreading himself thin. The second is the outpouring of support for him by players and some members of the public.
Orchestra officials said talks with Nelsons began last September in an attempt to negotiate a quiet exit. And Smith, in an interview on Friday, disputed the notion that the decision was sudden.
“While this feels abrupt, and we sense the anger and frustration at the moment,” he said, “this was a very deliberate process that the board went through and the decision was very deliberate.”
Smith said the board decided to fire him once they were unable to come to agreement with Nelsons on what Smith described as serious challenges facing the orchestra, including a 40 percent decline in attendance over the past decade, mounting deficits and a need to deal with $90 million worth of deferred maintenance at Symphony Hall and the Tanglewood campus in the Berkshires.
“We are, like many arts organizations, facing an inflection point where what has worked in the past is not working going forward,” Smith said. “The decision that the board made to not renew was about focusing on looking ahead.”
Smith would not elaborate on where the board and Nelsons disagreed. Nelsons, through his agent, declined to comment.
The seemingly abrupt decision, and the initial reluctance of the orchestra’s leaders to elaborate, has raised questions about the future of one of the most storied orchestras in the country. The relatively short roster of guest conductors who have led the Boston Symphony in recent years suggests the organization may not be adequately prepared for this kind of transition. Even some orchestra supporters have said it might be difficult to attract a top-tier successor considering the circumstances of Nelsons’s departure. Complicating things even more: He is still in the job until summer 2027.
“This crisis at the Boston Symphony is part of a much larger crisis,” said Joseph Horowitz, a historian and former music critic for The New York Times. “If classical music is to move forward, all eyes are on the Boston Symphony to see who they pick and how their mandate is shaped.”
At the heart of the matter, officials close to the orchestra said, were indications of turmoil at the upper ranks of the Boston Symphony. An effective working relationship among an orchestra’s music director, chief executive and head of the board of directors is essential for an ensemble to thrive, said Thomas W. Morris, a previous leader of the Boston Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra.
Smith was previously chief executive at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he worked — harmoniously, by most accounts — with its two most recent music directors: Gustavo Dudamel and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
“Chad has a track record of working creatively with great conductors,” Morris said. “If there is any orchestra that is held up today as one of the truly creative orchestras that are doing really good music, it is the L.A. Phil. They have had very strong C.E.O.’s and great conductors.”
He said that concerns about Nelsons — or any conductors — being spread too thin was “absolutely a real issue.” Nelsons also serves as the leading conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, Germany, and he recently toured with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Horowitz said that Nelsons’s termination “came as no surprise.”
“A lot of people thought it would happen sooner,” he said. Horowitz said he saw Nelsons conduct Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” with the Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall two years ago. He said he found the orchestra’s lack of preparation and focus “literally shocking.”
Still, under Nelsons, the Boston Symphony Orchestra has received six Grammy Awards. And other observers and critics have been more positive about him.
“No one is proclaiming him heir to Serge Koussevitzky, the orchestra’s revered lodestar,” David Mermelstein wrote of Nelsons in The Wall Street Journal this week. “But he has served this orchestra well, if — like most music directors — imperfectly. His unceremonious exit falls beneath the standards of an ensemble typically acclaimed for its grace.”
Adam Nagourney is the classical music and dance reporter for The Times.
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