“I’m going to sound like such a dork,” Chad Smith said as he drove a golf cart around the grounds of Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s pastoral summer home in the Berkshires. “I love Tanglewood so much.”
He stopped the cart, and looked out beyond the manicured campus to rolling, tree-covered hills and the still waters of Stockbridge Bowl. It reminded him, he said, of the environment at the prestigious Salzburg Festival in Austria. But Salzburg isn’t attached to an orchestra and a music institute like Tanglewood has been since it’s founding in 1940.
“This is the sense of innovation that is at the core of the B.S.O,” said Smith, who became the Boston Symphony’s president and chief executive in the fall. “The orchestra was not yet 60 years old, and it changed its identity again by becoming a symphony orchestra, a pops orchestra and an educational institution.”
Gesturing to Stockbridge Bowl, he added: “And it has a beach. What other orchestra has a beach?”
Smith has big plans for Tanglewood, whose Boston Symphony season begins on July 5, just as he has a long to-do list for the ensemble at home. History would suggest that he isn’t just dreaming: He came to Boston from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where for two decades he played a crucial role in building the orchestra’s reputation as one of the most innovative, important ensembles in the country.
When he announced that he was leaving for Boston last year, Smith, 52, had risen through the ranks of the Philharmonic to became its chief executive in 2019. His departure was a shock to Angelenos, and to some signaled a crisis for the Philharmonic, which shortly before had found out that it was losing its starry maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, to the New York Philharmonic.
The Boston Symphony was also in a state of crisis. It had seen a period of comfortable stability, even complacency, under Mark Volpe’s leadership for 23 years. When he retired, in 2021, he was succeeded by Gail Samuel, another Los Angeles Philharmonic veteran, who resigned after 18 months.
“We had gone through a lot of tumult,” said Barbara W. Hostetter, the chair of the Boston Symphony’s board. “So we decided that we no longer had the opportunity to look outside the box. We needed an experienced orchestra C.E.O.”
Hostetter knew Smith, and was encouraged to see his name on a search firm’s short list of candidates. The Boston Symphony may have once shaped American classical music, but it had become old-fashioned compared with the country’s other top ensembles. She thought that he might be exactly what it needed to recover, if not thrive.
“More recently there’s been an emphasis on tradition,” Smith said, “but innovation was the founding principle. In the first part of the 20th century, I don’t know that there was an orchestra that commissioned a body of work as enduring as the B.S.O.’s.”
Smith visited Boston and met with Andris Nelsons, the orchestra’s music director. They spoke “about the necessity and the mission to embrace the tradition,” Nelsons said, “and to continue that, but bring it forward.”
By the end of his trip, Smith was, to his surprise, open to taking the job. “I was comfortable with the arc of the work I had done in L.A.,” he said. “I was excited by the opportunity that this orchestra put in front of me. The B.S.O. is probably the only other orchestra I would have left L.A. for.”
It’s Smith’s job to say things like that, but his feelings about the Boston Symphony come from personal history. Los Angeles may have been his home for more than 20 years, but he grew up in Pennsylvania, before moving to Boston to study voice at the New England Conservatory and Tufts University. The Boston Symphony was the orchestra he heard as a student; he performed at Symphony Hall; he was even a fellow at Tanglewood.
He knows Boston well, and he knows that Boston isn’t Los Angeles. Smith isn’t looking to replicate his work at the Philharmonic, but elements of its spirit will inform the changes he has planned for the Boston Symphony.
For example, he and his colleagues in Los Angeles tapped into the city’s distinction as a creative center. During the pandemic, streamed performances features included a conversation between Dudamel and the film director Alejandro González Iñárritu. With the experimental opera company the Industry, the orchestra presented John Cage’s “Europeras 1 & 2” at Sony Pictures Studios.
Boston, on the other hand, is an academic center. As the conductor Thomas Wilkins, who holds a conducting post at the Boston Symphony and has worked with Smith at the Hollywood Bowl, said, “He’s got the luxury of now living in one of the most intellectual towns in America, if not on the planet.”
Smith has already announced plans that tap into the city’s concentration of academic institutions. Among them is the creation of the Boston Symphony Orchestra Humanities Institute, an initiative to develop programming with people beyond the walls of Symphony Hall, and beyond music.
“Orchestras aren’t just about music,” said the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who lives in the Boston area. “At its best, an orchestra is a meeting place for ideas, for democratic exchange, for creating the shared meaning that makes our communities strong. This belief — that music is service — is in the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s founding DNA, and it’s a purpose that I see guiding the B.S.O. today.”
(The humanities institute was unveiled in a wave of news that included the move of Nelsons’s contract to a rolling, evergreen one and his added title as head of conducting at Tanglewood. Smith also founded a composing chair, which will be occupied by Carlos Simon starting this fall.)
Smith’s leadership will trickle down to programming; he is especially interested in festivals that, he said, “explore topics and trends in a way that are meaningful, over multiple years.” But, because of classical music’s long planning cycles, his stamp won’t be entirely felt on the orchestra’s repertoire until the 2025-26 season. Still, he is already working with the Boston Symphony to shape its ethos and marketing.
“I’m being asked a lot, ‘When will we get back to prepandemic?’” Smith said. (In fiscal year 2023, attendance for Boston Symphony concerts was down 23 percent from 2019.) “We’ll get there, but I’m aiming for something a lot healthier. We have to re-center audiences in our decision-making, and retool programming.”
Part of that work is a fresh look at the subscription model that long provided financial security for orchestras, but which has failed in recent years. “The pandemic just ripped the floor out,” he said. “It’s a massive impact, financially, but it’s also a huge opportunity.”
In a subscription model, programs need to have broad appeal, with a trusted formula. But if an orchestra shifts its focus to single-ticket sales, concerts can become “more curated experiences,” Smith said. A niche evening that wouldn’t sell out three performances might find success as a one-night event, while a Rachmaninoff war horse played by a star virtuoso might receive three or four shows.
Targeted programming could allow for the kind of risk-taking that has been somewhat absent at the Boston Symphony. Smith said he hoped it would make for a kind of sandbox that artists could “come and play in”: people from the city’s various communities, say, or Simon in his composer role.
Gabriela Ortiz, a composer whom Smith and Dudamel championed in Los Angeles, and whose ballet score “Revolución Diamantina” is coming to the Boston Symphony next season, described Smith as a leader who is truly engaged with artists. In Los Angeles, she said, he sat in on as many rehearsals of her new music as he could. And they would talk about how to take classical music out of the concert hall.
“He was very aware that to expand the audience, you had to be open to risks and experiments,” Ortiz said. “That’s why I believe L.A. is one of the orchestras that looks to the future. I don’t know Boston yet, but Chad invited me. He wants to bring new voices.”
Ortiz’s music was included in the Boston Symphony’s Concert for the City in May, a free event that brought in community organizations and young artists to share Symphony Hall’s public spaces, and its stage, with the orchestra. (The first Concert for the City, last year, included a piano appearance by Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu.) Before the concert, Smith ran up and down the stairs of the building to see pop-up performances; in one room, where children were invited to take up instruments themselves, he tried to scratch out some notes on a quarter-size violin.
He posed with Nelsons, Wilkins and Keith Lockhart, the music director of the Boston Pops, along with leaders of local organizations, shouting, “1-2-3, say ‘community!’” as their photo was snapped. During the main performance, he leaned against a wall and listened, as students from Boston Arts Academy’s Tina Turner revue sang “Proud Mary” and the Boston Symphony played Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto, with Nathan Amaral, a winner of the Sphinx Competition for young musicians of color.
The next day, Smith was on the road to Tanglewood. During the drive, he said that he hoped for the Boston Symphony to develop a reputation as New England’s orchestra; he has ideas to add the region to its touring diet. But he also pointed out that the drive to Tanglewood from Boston was about the same as from New York, where a significant portion of the audience comes from every summer.
“We need to have a presence in both cities,” he said. Recently, there have been Tanglewood billboards on the West Side Highway in Manhattan, with a photo of Nelsons and the phrase “Let summer sing.”
At Tanglewood, Smith is planning to restore two historical buildings: Seranak, the home of the influential Boston Symphony music director Serge Koussevitzky; and the theater, where Britten’s “Peter Grimes” had its American premiere in 1946. Both places have fallen into disrepair, but both have potential for the festival’s future.
Seranak, Smith said, will be used for faculty and fellow housing. The theater, once renovated, will provide a proper stage for opera and ballet, whether for new works or visits from international companies. “I want Tanglewood,” he said, “to be the classical music destination for the world.”
The question, though, is when that will happen. Smith said that infrastructure follows mission, and that “the need to renovate the theater is not just about the stewardship of that building but a programmatic dead spot in our work.” On a more practical level, he will work with the orchestra’s board to order the list of changes that need to be made, in Boston and the Berkshires. The Humanities Institute will start this fall, but reaching a consensus on other projects, he said, will take about a year.
“Internally, change is hard,” Smith said. “But change happens by making change. It’s going to take investment, and a lot of listening and experimenting. But now is when we have to take the big swings.”
