I, too, have spent the past week wondering just what is going on at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. To recap: on March 6, the BSO Board of Trustees and president and CEO Chad Smith released a fairly terse statement announcing that the contract of music director Andris Nelsons would not be renewed, as conductor and organization “were not aligned on future vision.” The move apparently caught Nelsons by surprise (“not the decision I anticipated or wanted”) and was made without consulting the orchestra’s musicians. Theories as to why have coalesced around two possibilities:

• a) Nelsons, who is also the Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and, of late, has been spending a lot of we’re-just-good-friends quality-time with the Vienna Philharmonic, had stretched himself too thin to keep adequate eye on the store in Boston, with a corresponding drop-off in focus and quality (we’ll call this the “David Allen conjecture”)
• b) Smith, who was hired away from the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2023, has been itching to revamp the BSO’s programming into something more like LA’s, with more pops-leaning crossovers and post-modern, audience-friendly new music, but has been stymied by Nelsons’ insistent devotion to the European canon (we’ll call this the “you’re-not-from-here postulate”)

You can debate these on the merits (Allen’s diagnosis of decline, for example, might be a bit of correlation-causation confusion; from the start, Nelsons struck me as a kind of Reggie Jackson of conductors—lots of home runs, lots of strikeouts). To be sure, there have been hints that a Smith-Nelsons partnership was not built for the long-term. But that still doesn’t explain the abruptness of the announcement. (Pure speculation, but my own wager would be that this has a great deal to do with the imminent departure of vice president of artistic planning Anthony Fogg, who is retiring in September, leaving an enormous hole in the BSO’s administrative apparatus. If CEO and music director were in a high-noon standoff over Fogg’s replacement, I could see the board panicking and turning an “ease him out” situation into a “rip the band-aid off” situation. But again: pure speculation.)

Among the Nelsons-friendly and more Boston-centric comment boards I’ve been perusing, Smith already has been cast as the heavy in this drama, a top-down corporate outsider imposing an unwelcome agenda. (This take assumes that the unaligned future vision mentioned in the board’s announcement is option b) up there.) Out of curiosity, I went back and took a look at the trustee-board committee that picked Smith to be the CEO. It looked like this: medical research institute administrator, foundation director, arts administrator, corporate governance lawyer, private equity partner, philanthropist, and arts administrator (and former BSO member). It’s a group, I think, symptomatic of the tension at the heart of American orchestra governance, where governing boards are expected to be fundraising machines, fiduciary watchdogs, and artistic stewards all at the same time. On the one hand: if you’re hiring an administrator, that’s the kind of expertise you want in the room. On the other hand: that’s a largely corporate crowd, making a corporate decision-by-committee—not exactly a recipe for out-of-the-box innovation. It’s probably going to land on a corporate candidate.

(Incidentally, lest you think that a gathering like that is some sort of 21st-century late-capitalist perversion of the BSO’s mission, here’s the lineup of BSO trustees ca. 1950: lawyer, judge, investment banker, paper executive, real estate broker and philanthropist, church administrator, car dealer and politician, investment banker, advertising executive, lawyer and academic, media executive, education administrator, lawyer, judge, lawyer. That there were at least three people on Smith’s hiring committee with professional-level musical training is significant progress, for what it’s worth.)

Still, if Smith really is aiming to plug-and-play some facsimile of the LA Phil ethos in Boston, he might want to sit down over a two-hot-dog combo with one of the people who hired him.

Joshua Lutzker—the private equity guy in that list—has been a BSO trustee since 2014. He is a managing director at Boston-based Berkshire Partners. In 2014, Berkshire Partners, in a deal worth right around a billion dollars, acquired Portillo’s, a Chicagoland chain of hot-dog-and-Italian-beef stands. Lutzker was part of the team than landed the deal, and he has served on the Portillo’s board of directors ever since, shepherding the company through both an IPO and a nationwide expansion. (Though it was announced just this week that, with the appointment of a new CEO, Lutzker will be leaving the board. History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, &c.)

How’s that expansion going? It’s going… just okay. On paper, the Portillo’s acquisition must have seemed like a slam-dunk. Founded in the 1960s, the chain only had a handful of outposts until the 1980s, when it aggressively expanded throughout Illinois. With all locations under central management, rather than being franchised, processes and quality-control were locked-down and consistent. And Portillo’s made a heap of money. At the time of the sale, the Chicago Tribune reported that the average Portillo’s location was pulling in 7 to 8 million dollars in annual revenue, three times your average McDonald’s. Berkshire Partners looked at those margins, thought of all the ex-pats that had fled Chicago winters for warmer climes out of state, and signed the check.

It turns out, however, that the concept is not quite as portable as all that. Newer Portillo’s locations outside of the Chicago area make money, but nowhere near as much money as those in Chicago. Here’s some per-location numbers from around the time of the company’s 2021 IPO (source):

That’s a nearly 50% drop in revenue once you leave Chicago. And here’s a revealing graph from a Portillo’s investor presentation in 2022:

That graph seems to me to be as good an illustration of how an LA-style revamp of programming might fare in Boston. And it’s for similar reasons. The off-the-charts revenue of Portillo’s in Chicagoland is not just an indication of quality, or value, or even long-term brand awareness, but of just how much demand there already was in the area for what Portillo’s is selling. (Both Chicago-style hot dogs and Italian beef sandwiches have been around since at least the Great Depression.) Likewise, the audience the LA Phil has been cultivating for the past 50 years is not quite the audience that the BSO has been cultivating for the past 50 years. Would there be an audience for what the LA Phil is doing in Boston? Absolutely. Would it be as large and enthusiastic as the audience there already is for what the BSO is doing? That, I’m not sure. You could build that audience, but that is a long-term project.

Anyway, spending all this time with Portillo’s financial data has made me realize the true scandal here: Lutzker has been on the board since 2014, but there’s still not a Portillo’s at Tanglewood? Come on, people.

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What Have I Been Practicing?

My writing procrastination has been formidable this winter, so I came up with this conceit as a way to prod myself into writing more, since I’m always working on some piece of music, which means I’m always thinking about some piece of music, and, given the way my skull-bound hamster wheel tends to turn, those thoughts often lead to something divertingly weird. And then, as soon as I decide to put this plan in motion, what do I end up having to practice? One-handed hymns.

I tripped and fell last week—overconfident American face-planting right in front of H-Mart, I am a metaphor for something—and busted my hand. (Avulsion fracture with dislocation of the fifth metacarpal, if you’d like to wince along at home.) Fortunately, a merciful stretch of the church calendar means I can get by for the time being on five fingers, two feet, and some creative registration. I will hope for a more practical splint in time for Holy Week.

Is there anything to learn from such ad hoc accommodations? Yes, as it turns out: a real physical sense of the origins of gospel music. Because if you take the bulk of 19th-century Protestant hymnody and shift the top three voices into the right hand—as you would do if you were, say, at the piano and wanted to bang out the bass line in octaves—a lot of typical gospel voice-leading starts to happen without even trying. I had sort of made this connection, theoretically, but there’s nothing like accidentally recreating a genre from first principles to drive it home.

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What Am I Listening To?

Naomi Akimoto’s album One Night Stand, released in 1982. I always find dealing with medical things to be a little surreal, so some surreal music felt appropriate. As with Akimoto’s debut album, Rolling 80’s (also from 1982), the track list of One Night Stand—all old-time jazz standards—might suggest that it is an exercise in retro torch-song nostalgia. (The original label on One Night Stand called it “teen-age romantic jazz.”) And, as with Rolling 80’s, it is not. Akimoto’s languorous voice, the glass-and-neon production (by pop mavens Tetsu Hoshika and Daiko Nagato) and the arrangements (uncredited, but I suspect by composer and saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu, who did the similar arrangements on Akimoto’s first album) reposition all this repertoire at the crossroads of neo-big-band swing, gleaming 80s Tokyo city pop, and experimental electronica. When it works, it’s kind of amazing.

Here’s the thing, though: even when it absolutely, objectively shouldn’t work, it’s somehow equally amazing. Turn up the volume, click this link, but DO NOT LOOK AT THE TITLE. I promise you will never, ever, ever guess what song you are about to hear. (Even well into the verse, I was still not quite able to bend my mind around it.)

Akimoto made six more studio albums in the 1980s before embarking on a long and ongoing acting career; beyond a handful of jazz flourishes on The 20th Anniversary (also from 1982, full marks for work ethic), those later efforts abandoned the Your-Hit Parade-Julie-London-with-synths recipe. Her first two albums remain strange, singular outliers. I am glad they exist. Anytime I want to hear a “Tennessee Waltz” that sounds like a newly-sentient Speak-and-Spell glitching out on designer drugs, I know where to go.