A Dramatic Crescendo

A little more than a decade ago, Alan Valentine, now executive director of the Nashville Symphony, was asked to build a new orchestra in Oklahoma City. To avoid bankruptcy, the city’s previous orchestra had closed its doors and liquidated its assets. During the first year-and-a-half Valentine was there, the local Chamber of Commerce tried to recruit two airlines looking for a place to build a major maintenance facility. Both went somewhere else—American Airlines to Fort Worth, United Airlines to Indianapolis. Some time thereafter, Oklahoma City’s mayor and its Chamber president told Valentine that anytime they met with folks they wanted to recruit, the first question they were asked was, “What about your Symphony?”

The idea of an orchestra as an instrument for economic development is not self-evident, especially to people who don’t care about classical music. But, as the Oklahoma City anecdote implies, for some desirable neighbors, a symphony is an important indicator of the cultural quality of a city. A city’s orchestra—how good it is, how well it is supported—is, in the medical sense of the term, a significant vital sign.

Just a decade ago, that vital sign in Nashville was not strong at all: In 1988, Nashville’s own symphony filed for bankruptcy, the culmination of escalating tensions between players and management. The ensuing 10 years, prior to Valentine’s arrival in 1998, were spent trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again, first under the leadership of Steven Greil (now the CEO at TPAC) and then under Stephen Vann. The orchestra, with generous help from Amy Grant, among others, was able to pay off its debt and begin to reclaim its listeners. Still, it had a ways to go. In 1996, it made its first recording in more than 30 years, and over the next couple years made a couple more. The discs all were deleted almost at once—an indicator both of the discs’ inferior quality and of the Symphony’s total lack of a reputation outside its home province.

The Nashville Symphony did have loyal and generous supporters, however, who kept working to make it better. When he took over after Stephen Vann accepted another position, Valentine found an organization securely in the black and poised for healthy growth. Since then, the orchestra has very clearly moved forward. The Symphony’s sound, augmented by 16 new string players, has matured into authentic excellence. In the past year, the orchestra has recorded the first two CDs to be produced under a multi-disc contract with the internationally known Naxos of America. The label expects to sell 10,000 units of the first CD, featuring the works of American composer Howard Hanson, within the first 18 months of the disc’s release—twice the usual number for a classical recording. It has high hopes as well for the second CD, featuring the world premiere of a new and definitive edition of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2.

The release of this second CD is to coincide with the latest, and arguably the biggest, news for the Nashville Symphony—its forthcoming performance at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. Significantly, this trip is supported in part by “an unprecedented, strong working relationship with the Chamber of Commerce,” according to a Symphony press release—suggesting that the city has come to recognize the benefits of supporting and fostering its hometown classical ensemble. The Carnegie Hall program will be recorded for broadcast both regionally and nationally.

In short, for the first time ever, the Nashville Symphony has been prompting the nation to imagine Music City in cosmopolitan rather than provincial terms. The orchestra’s elevated profile comes at a propitious time in our city’s history. For several years now, Music City’s image has been metamorphosing. That nickname, invented by a country music promoter, still has country music as its nuclear meaning. But the meaning of country music itself is changing, as singers like Faith Hill and Shania Twain push the envelope so far that some fans think it’s been shredded. Along with the kind of attention generated by the Tennessee Titans and the Nashville Independent Film Festival, the Nashville Symphony is showing the nation and the world more aspects of our city than the Wildhorse Saloon and the Ryman Auditorium. The Nashville Symphony’s recent luminescence is one more aspect of a city becoming a noteworthy cultural and economic nexus in the nation’s eyes.

All this is good news. But it is important not to see this good news through complacent lenses. In fact, the Symphony’s excellence, the fruit of hard and committed exertion by the orchestra’s leadership and by its musicians, is a fragile achievement. If the orchestra is to become what its current supporters, including right now the Chamber of Commerce, want it to be, that support will have to broaden, and some key decisions will have to be made about what kind of music the Nashville Symphony will be expected to play.

Right now, the Nashville Symphony sounds better than it has in the last six seasons—and almost certainly better than ever before. Last year, the orchestra brought up to standard size the string section—the essential core of any orchestra. Now the formerly scrawny strings can, without strain, properly balance the brasses and woodwinds and percussion; they can play with confidence and bite instead of having to hold back. As a result, the Symphony has become an orchestra securely capable of playing Wagner and Mahler and Richard Strauss, producing a sound that, at its best, can hold its own with the very finest. Last spring’s performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, featuring the Nashville Symphony Chorus, and Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto, featuring pianist Terrence Wilson as soloist, drew strong and insightful praise from Barbara Jepson in The Wall Street Journal. And the Symphony’s newly released Naxos CD of Howard Hanson’s music has drawn enthusiastic kudos from Classics Today, a prestigious online review.