Boston Symphony Orchestra’s retiring CEO and president, Mark Volpe. Marco Borggreve photography
The Boston Symphony Orchestra should be a leader for diversity in repertory, inclusion in its ranks, and foundational support for education. The orchestra has the money, the artistic acumen, and the international standing to make those changes happen.
Mark Volpe has made certain of that.
The BSO’s president and CEO, who joined the orchestra in 1997, retires this summer. He leaves an organization that the music industry marvels at.
They marvel at the BSO’s endowment (around $510 million). They envy its three robust income streams: the orchestra at Symphony Hall, the Tanglewood complex, and the Pops. They talk about the BSO like some giant corporation.
But don’t compare Volpe to any business tycoon. He started like everyone in the music industry—trying to get a good gig playing his instrument. For Volpe it was clarinet, but after studies at Eastman and Indiana, prospects changed when he “lost eleven or twelve auditions in a row.
“At the last one the jurors said, ‘Next.’ ” he says. “I thought they meant ‘Next excerpt.’ They meant ‘Next clarinetist.’ So I went to law school.”
A law degree did not diminish his love of music. “I grew up backstage,” he says—Volpe’s father played French horn in the Minneapolis Orchestra for 43 years. “I missed music. I wrote to 15 orchestras, and got a job in Baltimore.”
Soon after Volpe began with that BSO, the executive director had brain surgery. “Three weeks out of law school I got a leadership role,” he says. His stay in Baltimore was blessed in many ways—he met his wife Martha there. They now live in West Newton.
Re-building in Detroit
At Volpe’s next position, with the Detroit Symphony, fortunes were not as kind—at first. “It started with having to tell the orchestra we couldn’t pay them,” he remembers. Non-musical initiatives were needed to save the symphony. Volpe spearheaded a large-scale renovation project near the DSO’s Orchestra Hall home, transforming the neighborhood. “It was all about urban renewal, not Brahms or Beethoven or even Ellington,” he says.
He came to Boston in 1997. Volpe oversaw the final years of Seiji Ozawa’s tenure, and then seemingly secured the orchestra’s artistic future with the hiring of James Levine in 2004.
Levine’s seven years in Boston were a disappointment on every front. But the hiring of Andris Nelsons in 2014, and Nelsons’s quick rise as an international music celebrity, have left the BSO as an artistic force despite the year-long lockdown.
The pandemic, as well as the nationwide soul-searching after last summer’s social unrest, obscure fundamental changes that Volpe has facilitated in Boston.
“We turned over more than half the orchestra,” he says of his tenure. “The BSO was first to implement blind auditions. You started to see more woman, and Asians, in the orchestra. This happened too in Detroit. The orchestra is certainly more diverse now.
“That said, it’s a real question, how to address equity issues. We were called out, and appropriately so.
“If you look at programming in the pandemic period, we focused on balance, on providing for composers of color. It needs to accelerate—what we’ve been doing, we should do more urgently.”
The BSO will emerge from the lost year in solid financial shape, but the shutdown took its toll.
“We had to cancel Shanghai,” he says of last spring’s tour of China. “We had a Pops tour of Japan postponed. A festival tour playing the Proms, Salzburg and Lucerne—cancelled. These weren’t hard decisions—not going to Shanghai or Hong Kong in 2020?—there was no decision to make.
“The hardest was having to lay off 50 people,” he says. “All incredibly committed human beings. I didn’t sleep for two days.”
With those BSO layoffs last spring, Symphony Hall closed, the virus running rampant, and the country in turmoil—including deadly unrest in his home town of Minneapolis—this was not the exit Volpe had envisioned.
“All we’ve been through,” he says, without completing the thought. “We have 1300 employees, and only five that got the virus. And no one catastrophically. When we started to capture again in Symphony Hall, I thought after the first three we would get shut down.
“But we’ve done 4,000 tests, and had only two positives. We lost only two weeks.”
A Live and Virtual Future
Excluding audiences from Symphony Hall created different audiences. “The irony is we’ve reached millions, on six continents,” he says of the virtual programming.
The BSO’s online presence evolved from last summer’s Tanglewood presentations—“basically anyone who could get there,” he says—to the season-long BSO NOW performances, with a stripped-down orchestra streaming weekly. This summer’s streamlined Tanglewood season will mark the BSO’s return to live audiences.
Volpe believes that for those organizations with resources, live streams will become part of the normal concert experience.
“The cost of entry is only an iPhone, and it’s pretty damn impressive,” he says. “But it’s a niche market in a niche world. There’s a proliferation of media. Orchestras with local audiences—not only do they have the expense, but when they bring the audience back and still stream, they get overexposed. Only a handful of orchestras can cut through the noise.
“I see a hybrid going forward—Saturdays at Tanglewood, maybe—in real time with our platform. We invested in an audio studio. We built a video studio, we have an audio engineer on staff, a staff videographer. We were better positioned than other orchestras.”
Changes to Symphony Hall
You can’t oversee an operating budget of more than $100 million without leaving some projects undone.
“What I did in Detroit, I wanted to do here,” Volpe says, referring to a makeover of the Symphony Hall neighborhood.
“Our social spaces are substandard, compared to some great halls in the world. We have no place for education. We own the block, and we own the bank building. The real estate was a great investment, but I could not get a consensus after three or four attempts.
“It’s for the next generation,” he says. Gail Samuel, executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will replace Volpe as CEO and president.
“In Tanglewood I did what I wanted to do,” Volpe says. “We built the Linde Center. As adult education becomes more important, it will have greater focus. And less visible changes—the whole irrigation system needed to be replaced.
“But when I walk that campus, it’s a spiritual experience,” he says. “I didn’t want to leave this gig without the orchestra coming back to Tanglewood.”
Keith Powers covers music and the arts for Gannett New England, Leonore Overture and Opera News. Follow @PowersKeith; email to keithmichaelpowers@gmail.com.