Ten Minutes With Mark Volpe

BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

PRESIDENT AND CEO

Mark Volpe has served as president and CEO of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) for the last 23 years. As he approaches his retirement, Berkshire Magazine’s owner and publisher Dr. Joshua Sherman had the privilege of speaking with him about the return of live performances at Tanglewood, the lessons that he learned over the course of his career, and the future of the BSO.

We’re incredibly excited that Tanglewood is reopening for live performances this summer! Over the last year, the BSO pivoted by necessity. Tell us about that.

It’s been a long and eventful journey, but we are also very excited to be reopening at Tanglewood. When the pandemic first reached America in March 2020, we realized that if we wanted to stay connected with our audience, our donors, and the broader cultural community, we had to morph into a media company. There was no other alternative. We were able to pivot to online distribution very effectively, because we had already built an audio studio and video studio here in Boston in Symphony Hall over the course of my tenure at BSO. Long before the pandemic, we had already strengthened our media production capabilities. In the earliest stages of the pandemic, it was impossible to have musicians come together to do freshly captured performances. We had to rely on our extensive inventory of previously captured performances. We had our archival staff and our curators put together some of those performances to create our “BSO at Home” series and our “Pops at Home” series with the Boston Pops, which ended up getting over two million views. As time passed, we started thinking about what we could do for Tanglewood 2020. It became clear that although we couldn’t bring the full orchestra together at that time, we could bring various subsets of the orchestra together at Studio E at Tanglewood to capture their performances on film. We realized that as long as we followed strict health protocols, we could also bring up some of the artists that had been closest to Tanglewood, such as Emmanuel Ax, Pinchas Zukerman, Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo-Ma, Midori, and Gil Shaham. After we were able to successfully record and disseminate the captured performances at Tanglewood 2020, we started to think about what was possible in terms of bringing the orchestra back together in Boston to film some performances. In the fall of 2020, we were able to bring in a good part of the orchestra into Symphony Hall in Boston. We extended the stage into the auditorium so that the wind players were all ten feet apart and the string players were six feet apart, and we placed the percussionists and the harpist in the balcony. Over the course of several months, we captured fifteen different thematically-organized performances. Those are currently on our online platform, BSO Now, and have been seen by tens of thousands of people on six different continents in over eighty countries. It’s quite amazing what we’ve been able to do.

When did you first start planning your return to live performances?

In the advent of the vaccination initiatives in early 2021, it became easier to imagine having an in-person audience. That being said, Tanglewood 2021 is still somewhat of a hybrid combination of live and captured performance. The Saturday concerts will still be captured and disseminated through our online platform. We have state-of-the-art robotic cameras that will capture amazing angles. We want people who are still reluctant to congregate with others to be able to enjoy an amazing Tanglewood experience from the comfort of their homes. For those who wish to attend in person, we’ve established health protocols that will create a safe and enjoyable environment. In the Tanglewood Shed, we intend to fill 25 percent of the normal seat capacity, and we’re going to fill the lawn with spaced ground coverings to keep everyone socially distant. We recognize that although a good percentage of the population will be vaccinated by then, we do encourage children to be on the lawn at Tanglewood as part of the experience, and they will not be vaccinated. Our main objective is the collective safety, enjoyment, and well-being of our audience.

Do you anticipate that the BSO will continue to produce new online content and remain an active media company moving forward?

Absolutely. Moving forward, our aim is to gradually reintroduce in-person performances while continuing to disseminate digital content. The Saturday concerts at Tanglewood this summer will be broadcast online in real time. They will then be available six to seven days later on the BSO Now platform for a period of thirty days. The Sunday performances will not be streamed in real time, but they will be captured on film. There’s going to be a period later this year in September where the orchestra is not performing at Tanglewood or in Boston. We intend to fill that time with a series of performances that are released on BSO Now.

You’ve been managing the BSO as President and CEO for the past 23 years. Looking back, what are the greatest triumphs that you have experienced, and what are the biggest challenges that you have dealt with?

In a general sense, I think that the greatest thing I have done here as President and CEO is help to maintain a sense of universal respect in the work environment. I think that attitude of respect is manifested in an orchestra that is among the healthiest in terms of labor dynamics and how the various internal constituencies relate to each other. Other obvious positive developments for the BSO— and the Berkshires—are the realization of the four winterized buildings at the Linde Center at Tanglewood. They enable us to have a year-round presence in the Berkshires in the future. During the course of my tenure, we have also had the great fortune of having incredible artistic leadership. I think Andris Nelsons has had an incredibly positive impact on the BSO. He has won us several GRAMMYs®. That kind of external validation is always nice, but more than that, the sense of purpose and focus that he has brought to the orchestra is just phenomenal. In terms of challenges, the pandemic was certainly difficult to navigate. We couldn’t have people in the hall in Boston or at Tanglewood, which was something we had never dealt with before. However, even in the time of this global tragedy, we were able to use the technology and facilities that we had previously invested in to broaden our audience in ways that we never dreamed to be possible. Obviously, there’s a large amount of work that remains to be done in terms of equity and diversity inclusion. In order to address this, we’ve invested millions of dollars into reaching out and engaging with underserved populations, primarily here in Boston. In terms of disappointments, we wanted to renovate our 120-year-old building here to build out the social spaces for the audience and create facilities for educational uses, but we didn’t quite get that done. To end on a positive note, however, I’m incredibly happy with how the BSO’s endowment has grown significantly over the course of my time here. When I first came here, our endowment was around $140 million. Currently, our endowment is $510 million. We raised $61 million during the height of the pandemic last year. We built a $20 million fund to cover losses in activity during the pandemic on top of the annual fundraising that we were doing. This orchestra is the best financially positioned orchestra in the country by a significant margin, and I’m proud to have that be a big part of my legacy.

One of the most impressive things about your job is the sheer breadth of your responsibility. You’re not just responsible for the Boston Pops, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood —you’re also responsible for all of the BSO’s real estate holdings in Boston and the Berkshires. Can you enlighten us as to how you have structured your organizational process, and how it has helped you maintain a successful cultural organization?

There are certain CEOs that come in and turn everybody over and bring their own people in. That has never been my style. For me, and also for a good part of my employee base and orchestra staff, this isn’t just a job—this is a cause. Therefore, I build my approach around the premise that this organization is something that’s greater than any singular individual. The corporate name of the institution is the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I always make a point of reminding the board about that. Before there was Symphony Hall, before there was Tanglewood, before there was the Boston Pops, there was the BSO. Obviously, you need venues, you need fiduciaries, fundraising and all of those things, but it all comes back to the orchestra, the content, and your content creation strategy. I’ve put the orchestra first and foremost throughout the duration of my time here, and that has served me incredibly well. I’ve also had the good fortune of working with talented and hard-working people. I trust the people that I work with to make the right decisions. I’ve had a good deal of influence and input on the structure of the organization. I’ve modulated it several times over the course of my time here, but I don’t like to excessively micromanage. It all comes down to making sure that you delegate correctly, and that you hire fantastic fundraisers, curators, artistic administrators, and finance people. It’s an incredibly complex operation. I think there are 8,000 line items on our budget, and we have a phenomenal financial staff to handle it all. I also am a firm believer in continuity and institutional memory. I want to make sure the culture of respect and professionalism is translated from generation to generation. Another big part of the challenge of running a symphony orchestra is balancing tradition and innovation. There are inherent tensions in that, but I think we have managed to strike a wonderful balance.

BSO LEADERS Mark Volpe, far right, with BSO Conductor Andris Nelsons, hired in 2014.

The pandemic has put both employers and employees in difficult positions. How have you managed to navigate those complications, and what advice would you give to other business managers and CEOs who might come across similarly challenging complications?

When I was working in Detroit, I had to go in front of the orchestra and tell them that we couldn’t pay them because of budget complications. That was incredibly difficult. However, the toughest day of my career was when we had to lay off and eliminate 80 positions at the onset of the pandemic. Letting go of front-of-house staff was also hard. You try to keep people on the payrolls for as long as you can, but when reality sets in and the board starts putting pressure on you, it’s hard to balance financial prudence with emotional sensitivity. Personnel issues are always the hardest to deal with, but I’ve always been a “gut-instinct” type of manager. I like to think that there is no such thing as a perfect plan. In business, things are always ever-changing and dynamic. I think that the pandemic has reinforced that. Resilience, flexibility, and all of those traits can be learned, but a lot of it comes from innately-born instinct and intuition. If I could give any advice, I would tell people to rise to the challenge even when it seems overwhelmingly difficult. People tell me that I should have retired before the onset of the pandemic, but as painful as some of the more emotionally challenging moments were, I’m glad I was here to oversee this pivotal period of transition. I’m happy that I can leave with Tanglewood returning to live performances, and that I can help my team plan out some other performances further down the line. In line with that spirit of personal growth, I find myself reluctant to give any direct advice to my successor. I told her that she is going to have to find her way, but she shouldn’t be encumbered by me. I like to think we all learn from our own respective experiences.

You are a talented and accomplished musician yourself—and you come from a family of professional musicians. Do you have any favorite classical composers or non-classical musicians?

It depends on the mood. There are contemplative times when I just want to listen to Bach, and there are other times where I want to be thrilled by the roaring brass section of a Mahler symphony. I also love classic jazz music like Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Lena Horne. When I was out in Detroit, I had the opportunity to attend some amazing musical performances at the churches out there. The legendary Motown executive Berry Gordy once said that the best places to find undiscovered talent in Detroit were its churches. There are still a lot of incredible vocalists who are members of Detroit’s larger congregations to this day.

Tanglewood is an integral part of the BSO organization. What is it that you think makes Tanglewood so special, and why are the Berkshires a great location for the BSO’s summer concert series?

If you think about it, every large symphony orchestra is typically headquartered in an urban environment. What makes the Boston symphony absolutely unique is Tanglewood—and the spirit behind it. In a greater historical context, it’s amazing what was happening when Tanglewood was first founded in 1937. It was the second wave of the Great Depression, and America was in the midst of a deep unemployment crisis. I look at Tanglewood as the ultimate expression of optimism. You can be in the middle of a depression, or the middle of a war, or in the middle of a pandemic, and Tanglewood will still be there in some shape or form. Tanglewood is known throughout the international community as the preeminent classical music festival. It’s also incredibly well-known for the Tanglewood music center and the Tanglewood education program that trains the next generation of musicians. This year, we can only host around 60 fellows due to pandemic restrictions, but there are usually around 150 fellows, and 800 high school kids that come up as part of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Program and the Days in the Arts Program. We hope that 2022 will be a different story and that we can resume our normal educational programming at Tanglewood then. To me, the Berkshires is a great location because it’s a beautiful place that is conducive to music, art, and learning. It provides the perfect setting for the classical music community to come together.

You’ve spent a lot of time in the Berkshires. What are your favorite things to do when you’re up here?

There are so many incredible restaurants up here, and the natural scenery is beyond beautiful. My kids are currently both in their 20s, but they first came to Tanglewood as young children. They were raised in the city, and they couldn’t really play outdoors safely in the streets. Whenever we came to Tanglewood, they had free rein to explore 500 acres of land, so they loved every minute. The winters are beautiful there, too. There’s always something to do in the Berkshires, no matter the season. The hiking is incredible. The trails are gorgeous. The cultural scene is also wonderful. You have three major theater companies in the Berkshire region that put on phenomenal productions. In terms of visual art, the Berkshires is home to amazing collections at the Clark Museum and MASS MoCa, and of course the artistic legacy of Norman Rockwell. The Berkshires is known as the premier cultural resort in America, so it makes perfect sense that it would be the ideal location for the world’s premier classical music festival. I’m looking forward to visiting the Berkshires during the Tanglewood season this year, and I’m also looking forward to enjoying some golf and tennis games with my good friends.

—Dr. Joshua Sherman