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Conducting Business

Dallas Symphony Orchestra President and CEO Fred Bronstein (CFA'78) keeps the faith in great concert music

 

Sometimes when Fred Bronstein (CFA'78) talks about his work, he sounds more like a management guru than the head of a symphony orchestra. And that's appropriate, because running a major orchestra calls as much for business skills as for the musical discernment that Bronstein - with three degrees in piano performance and a lifelong love of music - has.

Indeed, as president and CEO of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra since 2002, Bronstein speaks about segmenting audiences, branding, marketing on the Web, and the need for innovation. But he also waxes rhapsodic about Bach's Goldberg Variations and talks fondly of his eight years' playing piano in the new music trio Aequalis. Uniting these artistic and business sensibilities, Bronstein now is pushing his orchestra in new directions that augur well not just for the DSO, but for classical music itself.

Considering his role as head of a nationally known orchestra, it's surprising to find out that Bronstein hadn't even planned on a career in music administration, or for that matter, even one in performance. When he was studying piano as an undergraduate with Bela Nagy at the College of Fine Arts, his goal was to teach. But while working on a doctorate at SUNY Stony Brook, he started playing with colleagues, and they soon formed Aequalis. The trio "gave me the opportunity to play in places I'd never dreamed I'd be playing - it was great," he says. "It was a full-time performing career, and we were also very involved in residencies, seminars, and all those kinds of things - there was a pretty strong educational component to it."

It also provided education about the management side of music. "We were not only the performers, we were also creating a business. Each of us had specific areas of responsibility - fundraising, booking, programming." He quit performing, received a one-year management fellowship with the American Symphony Orchestra League, and considered a career shift. Soon he was executive director of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, affiliated with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. "I was able to run my own branch of the business, but within this larger institution," he says. From there Bronstein was recruited to become president of the Omaha Symphony Orchestra, "where for the first time I was running my own shop independently. It was a great experience." He instituted changes in the board, got the community more involved, and began a fundraising effort to build a new hall, which was completed in 2005.

His success was noticed. He got a call from the much larger Dallas Symphony Orchestra when it was looking for a president and CEO, and he pulled up stakes again. Now, almost four years into his tenure, Bronstein seems like an old hand in Dallas. His ten-year plan calls for the DSO "to move to the highest tier of American orchestras, to be a magnet culturally for Dallas, and to be ubiquitous in the community."

It's the DSO's mission as a cultural institution that Bronstein keeps coming back to, and programming is crucial. He and his associates spend up to eight months planning for each coming season. "We are focused on the idea of creating themes, concepts, and festivals - pockets of activity that people can gravitate to," he says. "I'll give you an example: in spring 2004, we programmed a very successful Rachmaninoff festival. It was all of the piano concertos; we were recording them for Hyperion Records. We also programmed composers who were doing very different things at the time - Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Bartók. We created a three-week festival all tied together by these performances of the Rachmaninoff piano concertos, and it was a fantastic success. It's a good example of trying to capture people's interest for a finite period of time and building excitement around an event."

He believes success demands innovation. In June the DSO is presenting a ballet it commissioned with the Dallas Black Dance Theatre. "We're going to perform it in our hall with their dancers," Bronstein notes. "Finding those kinds of projects that are culturally unique, that bring in new and different kinds of audiences, that take the orchestra out of its traditional kind of framework, I think all of those things are important ways of reinvigorating the experience."

Bronstein isn't shy about bringing contemporary music to the hall, either. "I think it's very important to weave new works into what we're doing and to find that right balance. We're doing more commissions this season than we've ever done before. Over the course of two seasons, we'll do six commissions for the DSO, which is a pretty good number. But again, they are programmed in the right way, woven into the themes and concepts of the season to be compelling for people - you hope!"

Being a musician certainly helps Bronstein in his job, and it's worth noting that many symphony orchestra presidents don't have that background. "I have an appreciation for what it's like to get up on stage and put yourself out there," he says. "I spent a lot of my life doing that. The more intimately knowledgeable you are about what we do, the music that we make, I think the more effective you can be working on programming issues."

It certainly must be coming in handy with one of Bronstein's biggest challenges: finding a new music director. He's already spent a good deal of time on the search, having made some forty trips to see conductors in action. "It's going to be a fantastic position for the next music director, because the orchestra is really poised to take another major leap in the next ten years," he says.

The programming, the cultivation of audiences, the emphasis on education, the community support - all are crucial to the success of an orchestra. Some are pessimistic about the future of symphony orchestras, but not Bronstein. "Maybe I'm not realistic or not practical, but I really believe that orchestras have survived for a long time, and there is a very important place for them in people's lives. I think it's up to us, as leaders of institutions, to find a way to reinvigorate, to refresh, revitalize, without losing the core sense of who we are," he says. "I think the kinds of things that we play and how we present them may continue to change. But I think the essence of what we do - create and play great music - is a really important thing for people, and that's our job." - Taylor McNeil