Photograph by Dan Dreyfus, courtesy of SLSO
Earlier this week, news broke that Fred Bronstein, President of the Saint Louis Symphony, would be leaving his post on June 1 to take a position as dean of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. And St. Louis hates to see him go: under his presidency, the Symphony widened its audience; improved labor relations; and, after years of struggle, became financially stable enough to tour nationally and internationally. There were also world premieres, recordings for Nonesuch, and continued tweaking of SLSO’s programming, which balanced crowd-pleasing shows like “Bugs Bunny at the Symphony,” with more experimental shows at the Pulitzer. In fact, in January, one of those more avant-garde concerts put St. Louis on the larger music map once again, when Maestro David Robertson led SLSO musicans through the U.S. premiere of John Cage’s Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras.
We chatted with Bronstein by phone about his time in St. Louis, his new job, and his omnivorous taste in music.
So, just to start—can you explain what you’ll be doing in your new position? I saw your title was “dean,” but wasn’t sure how that would translate as far as what you’d actually do from day to day.
Well, I will effectively be the CEO of the Peabody Institute, which is comprised of the conservatory, which is college graduate and professional musicians who are being trained, and then the preparatory division also, which reaches out into the community. There are, I think, about 2000-plus students in that, and that’s obviously pre-college, but also everything up through but also adults, so lifelong learning, and that sort of thing. My role will be to run the organization. And that’s within the context of Johns Hopkins—technically this is the first time that they will have the dean titled as a dean. The position was director before, and that really was, I’m surmising, a throwback to when the conservatory was independent, before it was merged with Johns Hopkins, which was in the late ’70s. The reason that they wanted to change it was because they wanted it to be on par with the other deans at Johns Hopkins. The dean of the medical school, the dean of the business school, so you are one of the group of deans that run the various schools at Johns Hopkins University.
You’d mentioned to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that part of your new role will be preparing young musicians to enter a completely different world than they have in the past.
Yeah, it’s one of the things that the whole music world is grappling with—the whole way music is delivered, the world has changed so radically, right? And how people consume music, how they listen, live performance, all of these things, that continues to evolve and change. I think one of the more interesting questions for conservatories that are training the musicians of tomorrow is how do you get these artists ready for that? Because you on one hand have to train people in the same way you’ve always trained them, which is to be great performers and musicians and they learn their craft, and obviously that’s first and foremost. But I would go so far as to say it’s not enough to do that anymore. People need to be prepared to be, in addition to all of those things, entrepreneurial and creative; [they need to] have business savvy, [and also be] educators, really good communicators, community-minded—these are all things that I think are increasingly important for musicians that are coming into orchestras, because they are being asked to do things that they were not before, and will continue to be increasingly important. So I think how you prepare young musicals for all of that is one of the great challenges and interesting things to think about when you’re at that point of getting these people ready for careers.
And of course, classical music is undergoing some interesting changes of late, with new music being more and more of a thing—is preparing students to play different kinds of classical music part of this, too?
I think that you always want to, as a musician, be as flexible as you can be. And to have a broad-based set of skills. You may be trained as a classical musician, but you certainly want to have an understanding of other kinds of music, and vice versa.
When you came here from Dallas in 2008, what did you hope to accomplish with the symphony? And how does that mesh up with what actually happened?
I was, of course, familiar with the long history of the orchestra, and what a great orchestra it was. It’s why I came here. And I was also familiar with the fact that at the beginning of the decade, the orchestra had had what I call a near-death experience, and it came close to going out of business. It was a very traumatic time for the institution. And there was great work done at that point to really try to save the St. Louis Symphony, and indeed that happened. In the years that followed, there were audience challenges—we saw over those years through 2008, big declines in audience, a narrowing of the programming product—and this was for a variety of reasons. I think there were marketing and branding issues. There had also been, as you probably know, from 2005, lingering relationship issue with the orchestra.
So when I came, what I saw was an organization that was out of imminent danger, that needed continued financial stabilization, but also really urgently needed to think about how to broaden the breadth of the programming, how to build new audiences, and improve the relationship with the orchestra, and all of those things. So those were the things that we really focused on. We also focused on building our annual contributions, and saw similar growth there as well, moving it in the right direction. The labor partnership, maybe it’s because I am a musician, but I’ve always felt very in tune, no pun intended, with the musicians. I’ve head the experience of what it is to go up there and get up on a stage, and put yourself on the line. So it was clear to me that we really needed to focus on strengthening that relationship. To me, the orchestra is your product—that is the whole thing. That is what makes it happen. So it needs to be collaboration and a partnership, and happily we have an orchestra that is naturally oriented to wanting to work like that…and the result of it is we’ve been able to generate these long-term labor agreements. The one we’re in now is the first of a four year agreement that was reached a year in advocate of the expiration of the last agreement. This is ideally what you want, because that gives you the kind of labor stability to really do the important work of the organization, which is building the audience and how you’re going to sustain everything.
So I think that was clearly really important to us here to do that, and the other things I think really the result of just as the orchestra’s continued to reemerge on the national and international stage through the tours, the Carnegie visits, with David Robertson, the recordings, that’s all been really I think great for the brand of the orchestra. Both in St. Louis, and outside of St. Louis, to ratchet up the visibility of the orchestra in a significant way out in the world. So, I mean, all of things, I always sort of see, when you come into an institution hopefully what you are doing is building on all the work that’s been done before you get there and ideally you want to leave it in a better place than you found it, and hopefully that is what happened. And it’ll be for the next person to continue to do that work and build and take on new challenges.
So was there anything that totally popped up out of nowhere, or surprised you during your years here, despite all that good planning?
There was one huge thing. (Laughs.) And that was the thing that nobody expecte—which was the recession. I came in March of 2008, and of course nobody knew where we were going to be in the fall of 2008 at that point, what was going to be faced…but the interesting thing about it was it did not really in any way change the strategy that we needed to undertake. Because our strategy based on what had happened in the years prior to this, and needed to be focused around building audience, needed to be focused around working on the labor relationship, needed to be focused around the contributions, around financial stabilization. All of those things. All that did was make it, I suppose, in some ways more difficult, but happily we were still able to make significant progress despite the economic environment. But nobody of course could have expected that. The interesting thing is, during that time, we drove ticket revenues up 36 percent. We drove our annual contributions up 26 percent. There were things that were difficult—for example, the endowment dropped, because of the market collapse. Happily now it’s been rebuilt, and coming back, and is really surpassed where it was, but that has an impact on what money we could take out of the endowment during those difficult years. But these were challenges everybody faced, obviously. Both in the music world and the business world.
I think sometimes people think of you as the business guy and forget you are a musician, too; I’ve seen you Tweet about certain symphonies—what classical music do you love best?
I consider myself to have a really, really—and when I say really, I mean really eclectic musical taste! I was trained as a classical musician, so I guess when you talk about classical music, I have tremendous love for Bach. I have a tremendous love for Beethoven, and Shubert, and Brahms. And some of the second Viennese school, Schoenberg. And I played a lot of that during my career as a pianist. But I also, I grew up listening to all kinds of music. Jazz, rock and roll. I have loved everything and everybody from Art Tatum to the Rolling Stones to Queen to ABBA. I will admit it, yes! (Laughs.) They were brilliant songwriters, those guys. Just absolutely brilliant songwriters. So my taste is really wide-ranging, and in terms of what I really enjoy and have grown up listening to, and continue to listen to all kids of music. I’ll go on YouTube and I’ll watch all the stuff.
You go down the infamous YouTube rabbit hole.
I do, I do (Laughs.)
Did you manage to get out to concerts much during your time here?
I tried to get to as many things as I could, but I must confess I was not able to get to as much as I would have liked to. That’s really strictly a function of the fact that we have during our own season, we’ve got 120 concerts a year, and I go to most of those. Not every single one, but most of them. So what I realized was that I wouldn’t be able to do that, and do my job, and go to everything else that I wanted to. I had to be pretty selective about it.
It sounds like you’ve enjoyed your time in St. Louis?
Oh, yeah, St. Louis has been a lovely place for our family to be. Our son, when he was born, I had already come up to St. Louis, so this is where he’s always been; he’s 5 and a half now. It’s been just a very accessible, livable city to be in. And it’s always been a city, and I’ve said this since I got here, that has never done as good a job as it needs to tell its own story. Because there are remarkable things here, the orchestra but lots of other institutions, great institutions here, and it just makes it a really wonderful place. The challenge for St Louis is for more people to know about that.
Well, it seems like there have been five or six national articles about how great St. Louis is, just in the last month…
The Huffington Post thing was a good example. Yeah, I think that is what the city really needs. And what needs to happen is that St. Louisans need to really believe it. That’s been part of the challenge, I think. And they should believe it. So, it’s I can say that as someone who isn’t from here! It’s been really a lovely place for us to be.
To view the Saint Louis Symphony’s current schedule, visit stlsymphony.org.
