She knew they were upset, and she wanted them to know she understood why.
On Thursday, March 19, a cloudy, cold, not-yet-spring day in the city, Boston Symphony Orchestra board chair Barbara Hostetter, along with 11 other trustees and the organization’s CEO, Chad Smith, sat inside iconic Symphony Hall, facing most if not all of the esteemed orchestra’s nearly 100 musicians. The air outside was chilly; the mood inside was chillier.
Thirteen days earlier, following a Friday afternoon all-Brahms concert led by guest conductor Herbert Blomstedt, members of the orchestra’s Players Committee—the group elected to represent the musicians’ interests when dealing with management and the trustees—had been hastily called into a meeting at Symphony Hall. They had to come now; they were told it was urgent. Once they were gathered, Smith—accompanied by two lawyers—informed committee members that the board had voted not to renew the contract of the BSO’s longtime music director and conductor, Andris Nelsons. While Nelsons would continue in his role through the 2026–27 season, differences over “future vision” meant his tenure leading the orchestra would come to an end.
The members of the committee were startled—management hadn’t shown much respect for Nelsons, but they had little inkling such a move was being considered. They were stunned even more when, by the time they got to their small office just down the hall, an announcement about Nelsons’s departure was emailed to the entire BSO staff and some members of the public. There’d be no time for the committee to digest the news, share it with the players, or offer a response.
When the news landed in their inboxes, the orchestra’s musicians were also, collectively, in a state of disbelief. The 47-year-old Nelsons, originally from Latvia, was not only one of the world’s finest conductors—six of the BSO’s 13 Grammy Awards had come during his tenure—he was beloved by most of the players, who appreciated both his deep musicality and kind, occasionally even childlike manner. When Nelsons issued his own statement addressed to BSO musicians and staff, in which he said that leaving the BSO was “not the decision I anticipated or wanted,” the musicians’ disbelief turned into something darker: anger.
The anger only deepened over the following week. It wasn’t merely that their artistic leader was, in essence, being fired; it was that the musicians—who saw themselves not just as members of the BSO, but as the BSO itself—had in no way been consulted or included in conversations about the decision. As for being told the news at the same time as the public? There could simply be no greater sign of disrespect.
Now, here they all were, staring down Hostetter, Smith, and the trustees who’d shown up. The musicians didn’t hold back, with several getting up and unloading about what had taken place. Among them was Todd Seeber, the current chair of the Players Committee and a nearly 40-year veteran of the BSO. Seeber vented about the decision and the secrecy around it. He fretted about the abruptness of Nelsons’s departure—the transition to a new music director normally takes years—and wondered if world-class conductors would even be interested in the job. He despaired about the overall direction the BSO was moving in, despite the musicians’ lack of buy-in.
“How can we go on with the artistic body being so completely ignored?” he asked. “This orchestra, this collective organism, has thrived for 145 years and plays the way it does because of its unity of purpose, the embodiment of that legacy. That legacy must be respected, not defied, in any action or transformation being considered.”
The powers that be listened respectfully, but after a time something shifted. Hostetter—the understated 68-year-old cofounder of the Barr Foundation and arguably Boston’s most influential philanthropist—acknowledged the difficult emotions the players were feeling but said the decision about Nelsons had been made; it was now time to move forward.
At least one musician recoiled. Move forward? They hadn’t even begun to get to the bottom of what happened.
“When you were in that room, just the emotion was palpable,” remembers Elizabeth Klein, a BSO flutist who’s been particularly outspoken about l’affaire Andris. “I was sitting next to a colleague who was just weeping the entire time. It was so emotionally draining for us, and this just seemed like a really stunning failure to read the room.”
Andris Nelson conducting in the ’24-’25 season image. / Courtesy
Months later, the musicians of the BSO are no more ready to move forward than they were on that chilly day in March. And they’re not alone. Nelsons’s firing—or, technically, non-renewal—has generated a storm of media coverage, with everyone from the Boston Globe to the New York Times to various classical music websites continuing to weigh in on what happened. Meanwhile, a full-on resistance has emerged. Musicians at orchestras around the world have announced their solidarity with the BSO’s players. A group of passionate patrons has organized the #RedFlowerCampaign, a social media and IRL protest movement. Even donor relations have been affected, with annual giving taking a hit and some major gifts being put on hold.
One day in June, not long before the entire orchestra and staff will pack up and head to Tanglewood, the BSO’s summer home in the Berkshires, for several months, Chad Smith is sitting in his Symphony Hall office, attempting not only to explain what happened, but to wrestle back a story that’s clearly gotten away from him. “I get a lot of criticism for how this was rolled out, as if it was our plan to surprise the world,” says Smith, a polished and still-youthful-looking 54-year-old who came to the BSO from the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2023. “It wasn’t.”
On the contrary, he continues, he’d actually hoped to extend Nelsons’s contract, beginning negotiations with the maestro’s representatives last September. (A New York Times article reporting separation talks had begun that month was incorrect, Smith tells me. The conversation, he says, began as an extension discussion, and later devolved into exit talks.) The discussions continued through the fall; by December, with the BSO’s board having officially approved a new strategic direction, Smith insists it became clear they were at an inflection point.
“I had expressed that we were at a critical juncture,” Smith says, characterizing talks with Nelsons’s team. “This is where the institution is going. These are the things we need to do in order for the organization to be healthy. And those conversations did not lead to agreement. They led to objection of that plan.” Though Nelsons declined to comment for this story, a letter his management team sent to the Players Committee in July disputes some of these details, saying it’s still never been explained to Nelsons how he is not aligned with the strategic vision.
Immediately after the board of trustees officially voted in early February not to renew Nelsons’s contract—there were 32 voting trustees present either in person or virtually, and the vote was unanimous—Smith says he hopped on a plane to London to meet with Nelsons’s team face-to-face and perhaps forge an “amicable” breakup.
“I said, we want to celebrate him. We want to honor him. Thirteen years is an extraordinary run. Let’s do it the right way,” Smith says, claiming that he and the board offered Nelsons residencies in the 2027–28 and 2028–29 seasons, as well as an honorific title, continued touring, and special projects. (In the letter to the Players Committee, Nelsons’s management team disputes this.)
While the situation has blown up in the ugliest of ways, Smith doesn’t sound like a man with many regrets. Far from it: He describes the situation he walked into at the BSO three years ago as needing “a turnaround,” noting that he was the second reform-minded CEO the board had hired. (His predecessor, Gail Samuel, lasted only 18 months.) What’s more, he’s adamant that, for the BSO, standing still is not an option.
“We’re going to have to pivot,” he says. “We’re going to diversify our programming from a content perspective to appeal to and reflect the reality of our audience today. And we’re going to dig in and really become a valued civic partner to the diverse communities of Boston.” He adds, in a nod to what he says is the organization’s less-than-rosy financial situation, “We either fix things, or we fail.”
People who meet Smith are invariably struck by his intelligence. “He’s one of the smartest, if not the smartest, person I’ve ever met from an intellectual standpoint,” says one former BSO employee. At the same time, plenty of people who’ve worked for Smith will tell you they can’t stand him, calling him full of himself, aloof, autocratic. (The person who complimented Smith’s smarts went on to describe his management style as based on “wrath and intimidation.”)
In fairness, Smith is not the only player in this drama whom participants criticize. While Nelsons is generally portrayed by his fans and defenders as a victim—“Andris is playing the blessed virgin Mary in all this,” one observer notes wryly—not everyone is convinced that’s fully accurate.
And then there’s Hostetter. Save for an internal memo she sent that was obtained by the Globe in April, which stated the BSO could no longer afford a “business as usual” approach, she’s mostly kept quiet throughout all of these events, though it’s clear from conversations with those close to the organization that she’s been a crucial driver of what’s happened.
The BSO is, without question, one of our city’s most iconic cultural institutions—145 years old, deeply embedded in the life of Boston, regarded as a truly great American orchestra. Which makes the saga of what’s happened to it—a saga that goes back not just a few months, but several years—a case study in the challenges legacy organizations face in a changing world. This particular account of the BSO’s saga is based on more than 30 interviews with people associated with the orchestra—including musicians, donors, and current and former staff—many of whom requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. (And that fear seems well founded, given that a BSO staff member was fired this spring after speaking without authorization to the Globe.)
It’s a story about many things, including music and money; excellence and equity; tradition and change. But mostly it’s about two questions: What should an orchestra be in a city like Boston in 2026? And even more important: Who gets to decide?
When Hostetter was announced as the Boston Symphony’s next board chair in January 2020—she’d officially assume the position the following year—the organization was enjoying a long period of structural stability. Susan Paine, the philanthropist and socialite whom Hostetter was to succeed, had been board chair since 2017 and a board member since 2007. Mark Volpe, the BSO’s CEO, had been in his position for 23 years. Nelsons had been music director and the face of the orchestra for six. And then there were the dozens of musicians—most of whom had been studying their craft since childhood—who’d given decades of their lives to the BSO.
BSO board chair Barbara Hostetter / Courtesy photo
That stability had upsides, starting with the close-knit, almost-family-like atmosphere that enveloped Symphony Hall. While there were occasional tensions, the players liked and trusted Volpe, a former musician himself who understood their point of view and represented their interests to the board. The board, too, was not a distant body ruling from on high, but people who, while deep-pocketed, truly loved classical music. The musicians and trustees knew each other’s names, had each other’s phone numbers.
Such closeness bred easy alignment about how the BSO saw itself—an elite institution comprising the best musicians in the world, playing the best music ever written, as well as it can be played. Longtime patrons planned their lives around the rhythms of the BSO calendar: the canon-heavy Symphony Hall season in fall and winter, the lighter Pops in spring, the summer pilgrimage to Tanglewood in the Berkshires.
But constancy, it seems, also had a cost. While once upon a time the BSO had been known for innovation—the orchestra had been ahead of its peers in making records and embracing television—in recent decades the organization had come to be viewed as staid and safe. Its musicians were excellent, but little about the BSO felt particularly cutting-edge. What’s more, it didn’t seem to be quite in step with 21st-century Boston, a city not only increasingly diverse, but also proudly innovative and progressive.
Those factors, combined with changing audience habits over the past 20 years, had led to an audience problem. Patrons for core classical offerings were dropping, with the orchestra often playing to nearly half-empty houses. That, in turn, was undercutting the BSO’s financial health. Even with the largest endowment of any American orchestra—roughly $600 million in 2025—it had begun running annual deficits and deferring maintenance at its two glorious but aging assets, Symphony Hall and Tanglewood. The board recognized that it would need to raise significant money just to keep its crown jewels in playing shape.
All of which is to say that, as she prepared to become board chair, Hostetter (a member of the board since 2014) had plenty of challenges awaiting her—and she made clear to everyone that she wasn’t going to be shy about shaking up the organization. Her first big task, taken on while she was still technically chair-in-waiting, was to replace Volpe, whom she was said to be no fan of and who had announced his retirement. Among the places Hostetter and the search committee looked was the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which had built a reputation as the most dynamic American orchestra of the 21st century. Financially sound and artistically adventurous—its programming ranged from the classical canon to art rock to Mexican-themed pop-classical mash-ups—the LA Phil was seen as the very model of a modern music organization.
Such a profile was very much in keeping with the way Hostetter had approached her own work at the Barr Foundation, the philanthropy she cofounded with her husband, Amos, in 1999 after the sale of his company, Continental Cablevision. (The Hostetter cut was well over a billion dollars.) At the foundation, Barbara, down-to-earth, espoused trust and listening—“Humility is a really important piece of the work in philanthropy,” she said during a 2018 forum at Duke University—but she also advocated bold, progressive solutions to big social problems, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to climate change work, education reform, and the arts, all while centering racial equity. Under her, Barr soon became one of the most respected foundations in the country, and Hostetter one of the most transformative philanthropists Boston has produced—someone who, time and again, stepped up when the city’s institutions needed her.
Philanthropy wasn’t the only place she displayed her boldness. As board chair of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, she teamed with director Anne Hawley to build a $100 million-plus addition. At one point, it was derided by traditionalists as a violation of founder Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will—Gardner had stipulated that her collection be preserved precisely as she left it. But the addition opened in 2012 to crowds and acclaim, and is now widely regarded as a triumph. She had, in other words, made a career of upending the status quo—and making it work.
As the BSO looked to Los Angeles for a potential new chief executive, among the people it eyed was Smith, who’d gained renown at the LA Phil as the head of programming. Smith had ties to Boston—as a dual-degree student at Tufts and the New England Conservatory, he’d snuck into numerous concerts at Symphony Hall—but the opportunity wasn’t right for him: He’d recently ascended to the CEO job at the LA Phil, and his partner, an entertainment attorney, was committed to a job at Netflix.
Gail Samuel, the reform-minded CEO who preceded Smith—and lasted just 18 months. / Photo by Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff
Ultimately, Hostetter and the BSO turned to another key executive at the LA Phil, Gail Samuel. If Samuel didn’t have Smith’s artistic chops—her focus was operations—in at least one way she looked like an even better choice: She would be the first female chief executive in the BSO’s history. When her hiring was announced in early 2021, with the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements dominating the cultural conversation, it was hailed as a smart, timely, and culturally aware choice—a signal that even the traditional BSO was ready to remake itself.
While COVID was still a factor when she took charge, Samuel, with Hostetter’s backing, forged ahead quickly in pushing the BSO in a new, more modern direction. She shook up the management structure and staffing, including installing one of her close friends from the LA Phil, Asadour Santourian, as the new vice president of Tanglewood. It was a significant position, with power over education and artistic initiatives, but one source inside the BSO says that Samuel (whom I was unable to reach for this story) didn’t consult with Nelsons, the unquestioned artistic leader of the BSO, about it. What’s more, it didn’t take long before Santourian was clashing with BSO staffers and musicians. One described him as having “an incredibly poor social IQ” and behaving “offensively with people up and down the line.” (Santourian didn’t respond to an interview request.)
The new regime also moved aggressively on equity and inclusion. “Barbara’s thoughts about DEI were so strong, she was willing to go to extraordinary measures to enact a huge change within the organization in a short amount of time,” says one person at the BSO. Programming was one front—there was a push for more works by women and people of color, and plans were made for a festival entitled “Voices of Loss, Reckoning and Hope” that centered Black composers and artists.
The chatter in the air also suggested change, with musicians coming to believe that both Hostetter and Samuel were unhappy with Nelsons. To begin with, Nelsons—who since 2018 had also been the conductor of the Leipzig orchestra in Germany—had never had a particular presence in Boston. What’s more, though he was young, he was seen as a traditionalist when it came to music, most comfortable with the work of the European masters. And then there was the question of whether he was out of step culturally. In 2017, Nelsons had done an interview with Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on Boston Public Radio, during which he was asked if the classical music world had a sexual harassment problem. “No,” he said, adding that sometimes such problems could be “exaggerated.” (When an uproar ensued, Nelsons issued a clarifying statement, saying he’d never seen sexual harassment personally, but that such offensive behavior occurs in all fields, including classical music.)
The notion that Nelsons might not be the favorite of the new regime only gained momentum when people heard previous board chair Susan Paine—who was still close with Hostetter—muse openly about how wonderful it would be to have a woman as music director. An orchestra run by a female board chair, a female CEO, and a female conductor? That had never been done before in American music.
Though on the whole the BSO’s players are politically liberal—“heart on their sleeve progressive,” says one musician—it didn’t take long for them to start resisting the changes the new regime wanted to make, and certainly the forceful way it was trying to make them. Several musicians told me they want the classical music world to be more inclusive. But they were also adamant that a push for diversity couldn’t trump artistic excellence, the BSO’s longtime North Star. More broadly, there was concern that creative control at the BSO was being wrested from the musicians.
Relations between Samuel and the orchestra’s two artistic leaders—artistic planning executive Anthony Fogg and Nelsons—grew particularly fierce. Nelsons, who had been close to former CEO Volpe, had no significant voice in Samuel’s hiring, and grew increasingly frustrated that he was being left out of key decisions. Samuel, in turn, came to view Nelsons as uncooperative or worse, telling one person at the BSO they wouldn’t believe the things that Nelson had said to her. In the opinion of another source: “Andris treated Gail very badly.”
The relationship was so strained that Samuel told at least one person the board was getting involved in the situation. But if she hoped Nelsons might be forced out, Samuel may have overestimated her own standing. Not only was her relationship with many of the musicians badly frayed by the second half of 2022, but she had lost the confidence of a faction of the board. Hostetter—who had made clear to people that Samuel had been her hire—either lost her ability to protect Samuel or lost confidence in her herself.
Things finally came to a head at the end of 2022. Complaints about Santourian grew to the point that HR launched an investigation, and in mid-December news broke that he was leaving.
At the same time, the BSO made a surprising public announcement: Samuel was moving on after just 18 months in her position. People close to Samuel say the final decision was her own—she was simply tired of being chewed up in a culture resistant to change.
For Hostetter, the departure of the person she’d chosen to reinvent the BSO was a major setback; she told one BSO employee that organizations needed to do more to support female leaders trying to make change. For the musicians who’d resisted Samuel’s idea of what the BSO should be, though, the moment landed very differently.
Among them, there was a feeling of relief, if not glee.
Step back from the particulars of the BSO’s civil war—the firing, the feuds, the philanthropist, and the maestro—and a larger and grimmer picture comes into view. The Boston Symphony is hardly the only classical music organization in trouble. Over the past quarter century, more than a dozen American orchestras have declared bankruptcy.
“The orchestra world is in crisis today” is the way that longtime arts executive Thomas Morris puts it in his book Always the Music, a combination memoir and analysis of what’s gone wrong in the symphonic world. When we talk on the phone one day, I ask Morris—who actually led the BSO as general manager in the late 1970s and 1980s before moving on to the Cleveland Orchestra and, later, the groundbreaking Ojai Music Festival in California—what’s at the root of the crisis.
“Well, it’s trite to say the world has changed, but, boy, has it changed,” he says. Morris cites several significant shifts that have hurt orchestras over the past few decades, but he zeroes in on two factors as especially damaging. One, no shocker, is the Internet, Morris says, which “all of a sudden caused all forms of music entertainment to become instantly available to anybody at relatively little to no cost.”
The other is COVID, which Morris notes brought about “a very fundamental change in human behavior and how people think about the need to get together.”
Those revolutions have affected orchestras in several ways, but perhaps the biggest is this: They’ve undercut the concert subscription model that powered the organizations financially for decades. Once, music lovers were happy to write checks to see a season’s worth of events not only performed by their local orchestras but curated by those organizations’ artistic leaders. Today, such a model has less appeal to the public. With so many possibilities to choose from—including the ever-present option to stay home and watch whatever strikes you—people are far less willing to make a long-term commitment.
Orchestras’ finances reflect the shift. Morris tells me that when he ran the BSO in the 1970s, about 70 percent of the organization’s revenue came from ticket sales, tour fees, and recording royalties; today, the percentage of revenue from such endeavors at the average American orchestra is less than half that. The new financial reality has upended how musical organizations operate and even define themselves. “Orchestras have fundamentally become organizations that are in the business of philanthropy,” Morris says, “not selling tickets.”
One orchestra that’s managed to thrive despite this new environment—that has, it seems, still managed to connect with audiences—is the aforementioned LA Phil. Under the leadership of Deborah Borda, the CEO from 2000 to 2017, the organization became both financially successful and artistically vibrant. “Los Angeles Has America’s Most Important Orchestra. Period,” the New York Times declared in 2017.
But even people who give the LA Phil mad props admit its success is hard to replicate. One reason is Walt Disney Concert Hall, the stunning Frank Gehry venue that’s been its home since its completion in 2003 and is a draw in itself. The LA Phil also operates the Hollywood Bowl, a lucrative classical- and pop-music venue that fattens its bottom line. And not to be overlooked is the fact that, prior to the 1990s, the LA Phil didn’t really have much of a tradition or reputation at all. Which is to say that when Borda created a new, more dynamic version of the orchestra, no one was attached enough to the old version to object.
Smith was a key figure on Borda’s team. A trained classical singer originally from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he became a protégé of famed conductor Michael Tilson Thomas before landing at the LA Phil, where he quickly climbed the ladder and became its main programming impresario. In that role, he won much praise for surrounding the LA Phil’s classical repertoire with more adventurous offerings, including ambitious new works, collaborations with other artistic entities in L.A., and affinity programming that appealed to diverse, nontraditional audiences.
After Samuel’s departure from the BSO, Hostetter and the board appointed Jeffrey Dunn, former head of the Sesame Workshop, as interim CEO, then restarted the search for a permanent head. Once again, Smith was on the list, and this time the timing was better. Smith’s partner was leaving Netflix, meaning the couple was no longer tethered to the West Coast. Meanwhile, the ground was shifting under him in L.A.: Gustavo Dudamel, the orchestra’s dashing star conductor, was decamping for New York, and the LA Phil faced a wrenching search for a successor. And then there was the allure of a new challenge: It was one thing to keep an organization running well; it was something else to completely reinvent an orchestra.
Assuming Hostetter and the BSO board did their due diligence, they undoubtedly heard about Smith’s intelligence, creativity, and commitment to music as an art form. They probably also heard, as I did, that Smith was distinctly disliked by a number of people at the LA Phil. Then again, maybe that wasn’t a red flag. Maybe that’s exactly what the BSO board believed it needed.
Boston Symphony Orchestra CEO Chad Smith. / Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe
Smith officially began his tenure at the BSO on September 18, 2023, his 52nd birthday. If the musicians in Boston had trepidation about another LA Phil transplant, it was balanced by the impressive way Smith presented himself—polished, sophisticated, well spoken.
Smith—who has a European history degree from Tufts—is indeed deeply thoughtful about the work he does. Talking about the suspicion, held by some in the BSO world, that he and the board simply want to turn Boston into L.A. East, he says they couldn’t be more wrong. The LA Phil works very well in southern California, but great orchestras need to reflect their cities. L.A. has a “perfume,” as he puts it, of the entertainment industry; Boston is centered on academia, innovation, and the knowledge industry. And the BSO should reflect that.
“Why isn’t the orchestra the gathering spot for academics and activists and artists who are literally shaping the future?” he says to me. “For me, it comes back to a fundamental belief—and I’m going to use my southern California background—that an orchestra can be a zócalo, a town square. The orchestra can be a gathering spot where people come together to have a sense of shared humanity. They are listening to the same thing; they are listening across differences. And the artwork and the artists that we’re presenting are posing answers to the world’s issues. That’s what an orchestra can do. That’s what an orchestra should do.”
It’s lofty, in some ways inspiring, rhetoric. But what exactly does it look like in real life? Orchestras don’t move particularly quickly—programs are planned years in advance—but Smith’s first seasons at the helm of the BSO suggest the direction he wants to go, presumably for artistic, cultural, and commercial reasons. One way to combat declining subscriptions, for example, is to create exciting one-off events that draw single-ticket buyers—symphonic cycles (an orchestra plays a composer’s complete works) and themed festivals (often wrapped in panel discussions) among them. Under Smith, the BSO has done both. In the 2024–25 season, it performed a Beethoven cycle that drew large crowds to Symphony Hall, while this summer at Tanglewood, Yo-Yo Ma is curating a weeklong residency titled “We the People” that includes concerts, events, and conversations. (James Taylor, historian Heather Cox Richardson, and social justice advocate Bryan Stevenson are featured.) Meanwhile, Smith has leaned into the kind of “affinity programming” the LA Phil is known for, including a Mexican-themed “Day of the Dead” concert performed for the last two years by the Pops.
Even as he pushed new programming, Smith devoted enormous energy to a strategic planning process meant to redefine the BSO’s reason for being. The underlying idea of the process, which took place over 18 months in 2024 and 2025, was to engage all of the organization’s constituencies—musicians, staff, board, funders—in conversation about the BSO’s future.
Unfortunately, people who’ve been part of the endeavor have been left wondering just how much of their input Smith really wants. Smith says there were an array of ways that input was gathered from the musicians, including surveys and individual and small group meetings, but the players I spoke to have not felt heard. The small groups, in particular—led by consultants who didn’t seem to have much understanding of the classical music world—were described as farcical. “They didn’t know the business,” said one musician. And another had the impression that they “didn’t know a contrabassoon from a hambone.”
A member of the board of advisers—donors close to the orchestra’s inner workings—was equally skeptical his input mattered. He described a brainstorming session held at Tanglewood last summer meant to solicit ideas. “A whole side of this big tent was covered with white pieces of paper—lots of writing,” he says, and remembers thinking, “Is anybody ever going to do anything with this stuff?”
The sentiment I heard repeatedly was that the engagement portion of the strategic planning process was really just box checking. “It became very clear that we were in a top-down situation; this was no longer a collaborative thing,” says orchestra member Cynthia Meyers. She adds that under Hostetter, there have been fewer opportunities for the musicians to share their ideas directly with members of the board of trustees. “We saw that the board was being siloed away from us. We didn’t have those interactions with them that we had in the past.” The sentiment is echoed by Jennie Shames, a violinist who ended her career last summer after 45 years with the BSO. “Barbara is the first chair of the board who really does not know the members of the orchestra or our names,” she says. “Gail was that way as well, and Chad is for sure that way. It’s not important anymore what the orchestra wants. They have an image of something they want.”
Smith’s management style only seems to have deepened the distrust. While he can be charming and engaged with donors and board members, among the musicians and staff Smith is commonly seen as anything but. Several described him as being defensive and argumentative when questions or contrarian points of view are raised; one said Smith would sometimes try to motivate one employee by comparing that person to another—so-and-so is winning right now, and you’re losing. Most difficult to swallow, several people told me, is Smith’s habit of belittling a staff member in front of their peers. Everybody knows the BSO is terrible at X, he might say, while the person in charge of “X” sits right there.
Two longtime BSO staff members in particular seemed to take the brunt of Smith’s tirades: Lynn Larsen, head of orchestras and production, and Anthony Fogg, the artistic planning head (who reportedly clashed with Samuel during her short tenure). “The beating they would take in those meetings,” remembers one person. “Primarily it would be around finances, but for Anthony, at times it would be around quality of programming. They would really take it on the chin.” (Larsen is no longer with the BSO, and the orchestra announced in February that Fogg was retiring from his artistic planning role but would continue as an adviser. Fogg declined to comment, and I was unable to reach Larsen for comment.)
When I cite the complaints I heard about his management style, Smith points me back to the reason that Hostetter and the board brought him to Boston almost three years ago. “I was hired to make change,” he says. “And when you make change, you have to make change at the top. I’ve had to move out or replace something like half the leadership team, and that’s hard. We had to begin applying real metrics and accountability, and that has been difficult for certain people to accept.”
Smith is right that change is hard, and it’s possible, as one source told me, that his style is no harsher than that of any corporate CEO. Although that in itself is a change: The musicians and staff had never thought of the BSO as a corporation.
Arguably, Smith’s biggest fault from a management perspective—and it’s ironic, given how articulate he can be—is in communication, and there may be no better example than the final stages of the strategic planning process. At the end of last summer’s Tanglewood season, Smith brought all the musicians together to present a working draft of the plan. The session went awry. Smith spoke so long that no time was left for questions and comments; a second session had to be scheduled for that.
And then there was the document itself, which the musicians I talked to described as “vague,” “corporate-speak,” and “word salad.” Someone gave me a copy of Smith’s presentation, and I can understand their critique. While early on the document laid out four pillars around which the BSO would build (programming, partnership, place, and people), as well as five “shared values” that would guide decisions (belonging, excellence, innovation, learning, and service), it was hard to decipher what all of that, well, meant. There are more specifics later in the presentation—Smith identified symphonic cycles, festivals, artist residencies, affinity focuses, and collaborations as things that would be pursued—but it’s possible that players’ eyes had glazed over by that point, particularly after seeing sentences like this:
Advancing innovation can be achieved while also centering core repertoire.
Igniting a culture of learning fuels bold, purpose-led service.
Making bold change can be done while adhering to long-held values.
While the musicians had many qualms, a specific one was registered in a late September meeting with Smith, also attended by Nelsons. The notion of artistic excellence, their guiding principle, had all but disappeared from a proposed new mission statement Smith put forward. Smith heard that critique, and in a 38-page strategic plan presentation he made to the board this past December, the word “excellence” appeared multiple times, in the context the players wanted: “making music at the highest level of excellence.”
But something else also appeared in that document. In a section headlined “A turnaround is emerging,” it stated: “Most critically, a strong and shared vision for our future has emerged and there is alignment across our constituencies.”
After nearly two years of working on a strategic plan, that must have sounded reassuring to the board. The problem was, it wasn’t true. The musicians I spoke with remain cloudy on what Smith’s vision is. What’s more, even in Smith’s own telling, by that point he was aware that at least one significant figure at the BSO was absolutely not aligned.
Andris Nelsons conducting in Symphony Hall. He’ll leave the podium after the 2026-27 season. / Photo by Robert Torres
To understand the gulf between Smith and Nelsons, you have to start with a book. In Always the Music, Tom Morris does more than bemoan the troubled state of America’s orchestras; he offers a chapter’s worth of prescriptions.
One suggestion is to bring more excitement to the programming. The current big-symphony template, he says, is “calcified”—an evening built around a European masterwork from centuries ago, beginning at 7:30 or 8 p.m., with a 20-minute intermission. To shake things up, he encourages orchestras to look to the world of sports for inspiration on how to really engage people. “Fans flock to games or watch them on live television because they don’t know how they will turn out—unpredictability motivates participation,” he says.
Morris also urges replacing the regular-season model with six-to-eight programming “modules”—half curated by the music director, half by “artists-in-residence, whether conductors, composers, soloists or even innovators from other fields.”
Perhaps most provocatively, Morris says orchestras need to bring an end to what he calls the “Maestro syndrome”—the notion that the all-powerful music director is both the face of the orchestra and the creative genius who guides its artistic direction. Most music directors, Morris argues, are spread too thin to curate the kinds of eclectic programming he advocates, which is why he calls for a position above music director—an “artistic director” who sees the bigger picture.
As it happens, Morris and Chad Smith, though a generation apart, have known each other well for years, and Smith offers a blurb endorsing Always the Music at the beginning of the book. “[Morris] reveals his undiminished curiousity, passion, and optimism for classical music’s future,” Smith wrote.
What’s more, Smith and Morris have plenty of alignment on what they believe orchestras need to do if they want to be vital in the years ahead. But when I mention Morris and Always the Music, Smith says explicitly that the BSO is not adopting the internal structure Morris calls for.
“Tom laid out in his book a vision for how orchestras could work in the future that I think many in our community, and probably many of the musicians you talked to, it scares them. ‘Oh, this is Chad’s game plan, this is what he’s doing.’ It’s not, in fact, what we’re doing,” Smith says. “We’re going to hire a music director for the Boston Symphony. The model of the BSO is that you have a music director of the Boston Symphony, a conductor for the Pops, and a CEO. And that is the model we’re going to move ahead with.”
So why is that music director not Nelsons? Smith has stayed vague, offering one version or another of “Andris didn’t align with the strategic plan.”
I ask Smith how or in what way Nelsons was engaged in the strategic planning process. “Over the course of 18 months, there were opportunities to sit down with him, get his feedback, talk about what his perspective was,” Smith says. (In the letter to the Players Committee, Nelsons’s management disputes this, saying Nelsons’s only meaningful input came in that late September meeting.)
I ask Smith if he had any inkling before the end that Nelsons wasn’t on board. “There had been some pushback on some of the initiatives we had been rolling out,” he says.
But exacerbating the creative differences was a deeply strained personal relationship between Smith and Nelsons. While early on the two men shared dinner and visited backstage after concerts, within months Nelsons made it clear he didn’t believe the CEO should be involved in artistic planning. And so meetings took place without Smith—Nelsons and his representatives would talk with a member of Smith’s team, and then those conversations would be relayed back to Smith secondhand. Hardly efficient. Hardly a recipe for alignment.
For his part, Nelsons seems to have believed that Smith—and perhaps Hostetter—had it in for him. In November 2024, during the overture of a Symphony Hall concert, Nelsons appeared woozy at the podium. The concert stopped, and moments later Smith came out to tell the audience Nelsons was ill, but that the concert would continue with assistant conductor Samy Rachid leading the orchestra. Backstage, Nelsons insisted he was fine and wanted to go back out for the evening’s second half, but he was persuaded that he should just go home and rest.
A few days later, a BSO staffer saw Nelsons and noted that he seemed upset. The staffer asked why, and Nelsons said it was because Smith had been pressing him about his physical condition, even asking to see his medical records. “Why is Chad doing this to me?” the staffer remembers Nelsons saying.
When I ask Smith whether he asked Nelsons for his medical records, he says, “That never happened. Literally never happened.” He goes on to say that he certainly took an interest in Nelsons’s well-being and noticed the conductor had gained and lost significant weight during his tenure in Boston—but that he’d only offered support.
Despite whatever personal beef existed, Nelsons’s management said in its letter to the Players Committee that an agreement to extend his contract beyond 2027 had been reached “in principle,” with only details to be worked out. Smith, however, has told a different version of events, saying negotiations were ongoing and that a lack of “alignment” became clear in December. After two meetings between Smith’s camp and Nelsons’s camp went badly in early January, Nelsons met with Hostetter and two other members of the board, to whom he technically reports. While it’s unclear what happened in those meetings, Nelsons’s management wrote in its letter to the Players Committee that “we did not have any indication a termination was imminent” until the board voted in early February not to renew Nelsons’s contract.
Where all this went bad remains unclear, but it’s safe to say control was an issue. Even as he insists that the BSO will retain its traditional structure, Smith makes it clear that whoever fills the music director role must be someone who’s willing to face outward. That is, he or she must be a collaborator and involved in “how the Boston Symphony engages in the cultural dialogue—like citywide festivals, being out at performances, getting to know artists across disciplines,” Smith says.
Smith insists the new music director will have a very large voice, but it won’t be the only one at the BSO. “We have to be welcoming more diverse people into this work, because we’ve seen the results of 20 years of not doing that…. How are we going to program in a way that grows more audiences? How are we going to continue to center our community? What does it look like to welcome diverse perspectives into our programming? This is a change in our business. I am of the belief that more voices in programming are better. That’s not decentering the music director—it’s allowing our artistic leadership to have a broader perspective.”
Yet that is, of course, decentering the music director—almost by definition. The reasons may be perfectly sound, but it doesn’t help anyone to pretend that’s not what’s happening.
If the distance between Nelsons and Smith was about power, there’s an irony there. Though it seems Nelsons dug in hard with two different CEOs on wanting artistic control, the musicians at the BSO routinely describe him as warm and collaborative. One player told me she only ever saw Nelsons get mad twice—and both times he immediately seemed to feel terrible about it, worse than the person he was mad at: “Conductors get angry all the time—that’s the caricature of a conductor. But Andris is not that way.”
That’s not to say no one at the BSO has that bearing, or the authority the maestros once wielded. But those two people do not stand at the conductor’s podium.
Smith says the BSO is changing because it has to. The old model doesn’t work anymore. Simply to maintain operations, he says, the BSO has been decapitalizing its unrestricted endowment, something that’s only sustainable for another four or five years. What’s more, he notes that a report from an outside consultant says that doing deferred maintenance on the BSO’s properties, including Symphony Hall and Tanglewood, will cost $145 million.
The BSO musicians I spoke with say they’re not opposed to change. But they do want to be full partners in shaping it. A corporation can replace its workers; an orchestra is its musicians—take them away, and there’s nothing left to sell a ticket to. What’s more, they’re not convinced that Smith and Hostetter’s direction, which they fear is a dumbing down of the art form they’ve devoted their lives to, is the right one, particularly if the real issue is the BSO’s deteriorating financial condition. Indeed, they point out that much of the nontraditional programming that Smith, and before him Samuel, put in place has not been commercially successful. The “E Pluribus Unum” festival last season was moderately attended, while the “Voices of Loss, Reckoning and Hope” festival from the season before was “the worst-selling three weeks I’ve ever seen at the BSO,” says one veteran musician. In contrast, the Beethoven cycle from that same season was a sellout. Isn’t that a sign from patrons to double down on the core classical repertoire rather than diverge from it?
Smith says such critiques miss the point. He tells me he’s heard complaints from the musicians about the “Day of the Dead” concert the Pops have played in recent years—that the audience who attended was unlikely to come back for the BSO’s more serious classical fare. “Okay, but 2,400 Latino families came and heard a performance of the Boston Pops in Symphony Hall,” Smith says. “This is meaningful.”
He continues, “It goes back to the question: Are we going to serve more expansive audiences, or are we going to be more narrow?”
That is an important question, but at the heart of this conflict is an even more crucial one: What is the BSO, as an entity? To Smith and Hostetter, it seems as though it’s not much different from a corporation, in which a board of directors and CEO set direction, and everyone else is expected to fall in line. But to the musicians, the BSO is far closer to an artists’ collaborative, one in which the CEO and the board exist to support the musicians and their creative vision.
Can all of this be resolved? Smith has made it clear that Nelsons is not coming back. Meanwhile, the musicians are proposing that their voices be taken into account far more than they have been. As it happens, the two sides are currently negotiating a new contract.
After spending many hours talking to people in this saga, I came away with two feelings. One is that the Boston Symphony is an extraordinary institution. The other is that everyone involved in this mess owns the blame. That includes a board that buried its head in the sand for too long about the issues facing the BSO. A music director—and some musicians—trapped in an earlier age. A CEO who doesn’t seem to understand that you can have the smartest ideas in the world, but you’re only a visionary leader if you can actually get people to follow you.
And, of course, it includes the board chair. Hostetter almost never speaks in public or to the media, and she made no exceptions here. More than two months after I first requested an interview with her, a communications firm representing the BSO sent me a statement from Hostetter. It said, in part: “Excellence, relevance, and inclusivity are not competing ideas. Engaging and welcoming new audiences does not diminish excellence; it secures the institution’s future. Building a stronger organization behind the scenes allows extraordinary musicians to do their very best work on stage.”
It continued: “Throughout my tenure, I have sought to approach every decision with humility and a deep appreciation for the remarkable people who make the BSO what it is: its musicians, staff, volunteers, trustees, advisers, and donors. We may not always agree on every question, but we are united by a profound commitment to this institution.”
Humility, of course, is the same value Hostetter puts forward at the Barr Foundation. It may be true in her philanthropy, but the BSO musicians see something else: a powerful woman who wants to change an organization she seems not to fully understand. I’m not sure they’re wrong.
The night before I interviewed Smith I went to Symphony Hall to see the Pops, whose guest that evening was Ben Folds. I hadn’t thought about Folds in 20 years, but the concert was delightful. The players were in good form, Folds was funny and charming, and the sound they all made when they played together was wonderful.
Toward the end of the concert, Folds stood up from his piano and said he wanted to talk about orchestras. I wondered if he was going to weigh in on the saga of the BSO, but he was referring to the National Symphony Orchestra, whose very existence has been threatened by the upheaval at the Kennedy Center. Folds said he’d been trained as a classical musician—his pop career was Plan B—and he made it clear he has deep affection for orchestras. What makes them so breathtaking, he said, quite sincerely, is that they represent “people working together for the greater good.”
This story appears in the print edition of the August 2026 issue, with the headline, “A Fight for Symphony Hall.”
