When the Boston Symphony Orchestra announced in March that it would not renew the contract of its music director, Andris Nelsons, the news set off a storm of anger and protest. Patrons greeted him at concerts with pointed, rousing ovations, while musicians wore red roses in support of their embattled conductor.
Now, three months after the crisis erupted, the leader of the Boston Symphony acknowledged in an interview that it mishandled the termination of Nelsons’s contract, which plunged the orchestra into one of the most tumultuous periods in its 145-year history, as it approaches the start of its pastoral Tanglewood season.
Chad Smith, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said that the Boston Symphony’s board initially sought to “navigate these challenging times and challenging conversations with the orchestra internally,” after the news became public, despite “the difficult feeling that the orchestra has for me and the board at this moment.”
“I probably kept my head down too long in trying to deal with this internally, but I recognize now that these questions are not going away,” Smith said in his most extensive public remarks on Nelsons’s dismissal yet. “We have to be more forthcoming.”
“It was certainly not our intention for this to be rolled out in this manner,” he said, adding: “This is a difficult time.”
Nelsons remains the Boston Symphony’s music director after the 2026-2027 Tanglewood season.
Even as Smith seemingly sought to strike a conciliatory and transparent tone — recently making a personal appearance for contract negotiations with the Players’ Committee, which represents the musicians — he said that the board would not yield to demands by orchestra members to reappoint Nelsons.
“That’s off the table,” said Smith, who also said, in response to a question, that he had no intention of stepping down.
Smith defended the decision to end Nelsons’s contract, saying that the board and Nelsons were not able to come to terms on fundamental changes that Smith thought were necessary to re-establish the Boston Symphony as one of the leading orchestras in the nation — in particular, to be more adventurous in its programming. Smith said an attempt that began last September by him and the board to negotiate a contract extension with Nelsons had collapsed by January, and that the next months were spent negotiating Nelsons’s termination, which was then announced in March.
Nelsons declined a request to be interviewed.
Orchestra members have been outraged about Nelsons’s termination, saying they’ve been happy under his baton and that they should have been informed in advance — expressing frustration with the leadership of Smith and Barbara Hostetter, the board’s chairwoman.
The termination of the contract “was done behind our backs,” said Elizabeth Klein, the orchestra’s associate principal flute, adding that “Chad has said in the press that his priority is rebuilding trust with the musicians, but he hasn’t done anything to rebuild trust with the musicians.”
Todd Seeber, the chairman of the Players’ Committee and a member of the orchestra’s double bass section, said that the musicians are seeking “co-determination” in the future and want to ensure more substantive input in decisions regarding the music director.
“There has been this huge shattering of trust and belief in management after this,” Seeber said. “That they would blow this up without consulting us shows they either didn’t know how we would react or didn’t care.”
The turmoil at the orchestra has coincided with contract negotiations between management and the musicians, whose contract expires at the end of August.
Deborah Borda, a former chief executive at the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic, said she was startled by the bitterness in Boston, and noted that the departure of a music director is typically negotiated in an “outwardly amicable” way.
“The ongoing intensity of the upheaval is unlike anything I have witnessed over many years,” she said. “It isn’t serving anybody.”
In one sign of how much Nelsons’s relationship had deteriorated with the board, the two sides failed to even agree on a joint statement announcing Nelsons’s departure. The board issued a statement, and Nelsons soon followed with his own.
“That was not our intention,” Smith said. “Our intention was to have a joint statement, but that wasn’t agreed to.”
He also said he understood the general shock at the news. “I can see that it was an abrupt announcement externally,” he said. “It didn’t represent abrupt decision-making, though. It was a very considered conversation that has been going on for some time.”
Smith’s remarks come less than two weeks before the opening night at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony’s summer showcase in the Berkshires.
Since March, red roses have become a common sight at Symphony Hall in Boston, part of a vigorous “Stand With Andris” campaign. (Nelsons is from Latvia, and red is the dominant color in the Latvian flag.) But not all the musicians have been wearing the roses, a sign that support for him is not unanimous.
Prominent solo artists and ensembles around the world have expressed their support for Nelsons, including the pianists Lang Lang and Evgeny Kissin, and the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra.
In a leaked “State of the BSO” memo sent in April, the leadership said “some within the BSO resist suggestions for changes to business-as-usual” and “will use any means at their disposal in their drive to thwart efforts aimed at reversing the BSO’s long downward spiral of declining audiences and persistent budget deficits and at making the BSO a more welcoming and inclusive place.”
A response sent on June 1 and signed by “Current and Past Members of the Education Committee,” countered: “Again and again, we have been patted on the head and asked to wait for the bigger and better fix at the expense of our audiences. How can we be asked to trust in a vision, as so articulated by BSO Leadership and Trustees, that is vague and undefined?”
Smith said he was hopeful that the Boston Symphony leadership would be able to restore trust with the orchestra and patrons, but that such healing would likely not begin until the symphony had settled on the next music director. That search, he said, would not begin until the fall.
Much of the ire toward Smith and the board has been about its lack of transparency in Nelsons’s dismissal. “It’s very disorienting because of the lack of communication and it’s destabilizing for the organization,” said Lorna McGhee, the principal flute. “It’s almost a kind of vandalism.”
Smith defended the organization’s process, which he said had been restricted by nondisclosure agreements.
“Certainly, the outcome has been regrettable in some ways — in that we are in this place where there is such tension within our communities,” he said. “But I still stand by the intention of the process, which was to honor all parties, to celebrate Andris’s legacy and to move the BSO into a place where we can finally begin addressing some of the significant challenges that our organization has faced.”
Nelsons has made no public statements since his dismissal, though he, too, has worn a red rose at performances. His supporters — including musicians — have repeatedly assailed the leadership of Smith and the board, portraying the decision as sudden, vindictive and musically indefensible.
“It’s extremely rare to find this kind of relationship between an orchestra and a conductor — in our industry, it’s almost unheard-of,” McGhee said. “That’s been recklessly broken.”
Smith said the board initially sought to extend Nelsons’s contract last September, but came up against irreconcilable differences on a number of issues, including how much the orchestra should move beyond classical standards to attract a new and younger audience.
The musicians say they are merely guarding against what they refer to as “pop creep” — the addition of more pop music — and that they have long welcomed innovation. They say that the players and Nelsons are open to contemporary work, and have been throughout his tenure.
But Smith said, “I see audiences that are at 55 percent of our hall capacity on multiple nights, and I think: ‘Something’s not working.’” The orchestra is also facing daunting capital expenses, including $150 million to maintain both Symphony Hall and Tanglewood — during a time of declining ticket revenues and contributions.
“The BSO for 100 years had been the most innovative orchestra in the world,” he said. “Somewhere along the line, we lost that spark of imagination, or we lost that sense of momentum pushing us forward and breaking boundaries. That’s something that we have to get back.”
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