At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony displays its heritage and uncertain future

LENOX, MASS. — Ah, Tanglewood. What a pleasure it remains to spend a weekend here: to stroll the green lawns, to sniff the flowers, to guess the music that some earnest young student is learning, as the sound of that laboring drifts through the trees from a practice room. And what a reminder a few days spent in the Berkshires can be of the fundamental, enduring quality of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which enjoys Tanglewood its summer home.

Visitors last Friday through Sunday might have recalled the grand old heritage that this ensemble calls its own, as they found an old wooden seat in the Shed or listened as Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was played with almost proprietary command, nearly eight decades after this orchestra gave the work its premiere.

They might have admired the group’s enduring prestige, too, as one distinguished musician after another graced the stage. Anne-Sophie Mutter reprised a violin concerto written for her by John Williams, who was in the audience to hear it and took the podium for a couple of encores. Seong-Jin Cho, among our more urbane young pianists, offered some delightfully vivacious Mozart in partnership with the conductor Susanna Mälkki, who amply demonstrated there and in her thrillingly exact Bartók why her star burns ever brighter. Andris Nelsons, the Boston Symphony’s music director, was supposed to accompany Yo-Yo Ma in a Shostakovich concerto, but a positive Covid test and a cancellation by the cellist led the orchestra to place a call to Renée Fleming instead. The empress of the sopranos obliged.

As a display of professionalism, of power, of permanence, all of that was clarifying, even formidable. And you could have been forgiven for needing that demonstration, given the Boston Symphony’s dysfunction of late.

After the retirement of Mark Volpe, who served as the orchestra’s president and chief executive for 23 years until 2021 and amassed an endowment of around half a billion dollars, the Boston Symphony turned for inspiration to Gail Samuel, the chief operating officer of the daring Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she had worked for nearly three decades. Hints of a progressive Californian spirit were soon in evidence, as composers started appearing onstage at Symphony Hall in Boston to introduce their works, and the atmosphere began to feel more engaged. But Samuel lasted a mere 18 months, stepping down in January for reasons that are still not clear. Nelsons, conspicuously, offered no public comment when her departure was announced; much of the senior staff had already left in alarmingly short order and are yet to be replaced.

Filling out those ranks will be one of the tasks that falls to Chad Smith, who, in a peculiar case of déjà vu, will start work as the orchestra’s next president and chief executive in mid-September, after more than 20 years at, yes, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Smith, who for a long time was the adventurous Philharmonic’s programming guru, is hugely respected, and his hiring is cause for excitement, if some trepidation. Whether the Los Angeles model, or anything like it, can be applied to an institution that takes such pride in its past remains to be seen, although the Samuel debacle offers a clue; whatever else the Boston Symphony may be, it is not an organization known for its agility.

But this is not the only problem that Smith needs to solve. The orchestra itself, which recently signed a three-year labor agreement that will add flexibility to its concert schedule, has not had a leader on paper since 2019, when Malcolm Lowe retired as concertmaster; in practice, the matter has been unstable for longer than that. Auditions to fill a chair that, since 1920, has been occupied only by Lowe, Joseph Silverstein and Richard Burgin, reached a final stage this season, when several violinists competed for the post in concert, including Alexander Velinzon and Elita Kang, internal candidates who have admirably held the fort while the first associate concertmaster, Tamara Smirnova, has been away. Incredibly, the search remains ongoing. So, too, the slackness that can sometimes be detected in the first violins.

In addition, Elizabeth Rowe, the principal flutist whose distinctive, ever-so-slightly melancholy tone has defined the sound of the modern Boston Symphony, has announced that she will leave her position next year. She sued the orchestra in 2018 to secure pay equal to that of the oboist who sits to her left, John Ferrillo. She has drawn on the experience of that lawsuit, which was settled in 2019, to fashion a new career as a career coach and gender equality advocate. She returned from a period of leave with these concerts, and her immaculate, expressive playing was so exquisite that it brought back to mind the view of Ferrillo, as it was quoted in legal filings, that she is “the finest orchestral flutist in North America.” She should be celebrated, and will be missed.

These issues speak not only to a lack of leadership, but to the Boston Symphony’s struggle to chart a course from its storied history to an unclear future. It is finding its way, slowly. Four years ago, I wrote that it seemed complacent, “content simply to abide” while equally traditionalist ensembles were starting to experiment. Happily, it would be wrong to level the same charge now.

Since its return after the pandemic, the orchestra has tried to connect with a wider swath of Bostonians, enlisting Mayor Michelle Wu in the cause, and its artistic concerns have become more varied and more connected to our time. There was a three-week festival in March that, although miserably attended, posed important social questions about race and gender. The two concerts I heard, which included a brilliantly raucous staging of Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story” with the singers of the Lorelei Ensemble, were bolder than anything I had previously witnessed at Symphony Hall. Even the ensemble’s standard repertoire concerts are no longer so beholden to the standards: In January, Karina Canellakis led a fiery account of the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra just a few days after Alan Gilbert had found a way to get Stenhammar’s glorious Serenade onto a program.

Where does Nelsons fit into this? Oddly, the Boston Symphony seems to be at its most creative when its music director is away. He continues to do his duty by new music: For Sunday’s concert at Tanglewood, he programmed Julia Adolphe’s “Makeshift Castle” for the third time in a year or so, granting beautifully evocative detail to its memories of a childhood sunset, and on Friday he was a sincere advocate for Williams’s wistful Violin Concerto No. 2, which Mutter played with her trademark commitment. Nelsons remains an enviable accompanist, too, drawing a strong roster of soloists to his side; Fleming can rarely have received such sensitive support as she did in her six Strauss songs here, which ended with a touching “Morgen.”

But over the course of a subscription season, Nelsons is frustratingly inconsistent. His readings can come off as run-throughs rather than proper interpretations, and for every score that he conducts in a manner befitting his stature — a mighty, tensile Mahler Sixth in October, for instance, or his searing double bill of Britten’s Violin Concerto and Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony in May — there is another that exasperates. He was in typical form last weekend: perfectly satisfactory in Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” on Sunday, when he seemed to celebrate the intense virtuosity of his principal players, but desperately sluggish in works by Strauss and Ravel on Friday.

His contract is likely to be extended, but as of today it has not been renewed past the end of the 2024-25 season. In classical music, that is no time at all. Count it as another decision that Smith has to make.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.