Photo by Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images
On February 2, 2026, the board of the Boston Symphony Orchestra voted to terminate its contract with conductor Andris Nelsons. Nelsons had served as the BSO’s music director since 2014, following the retirement of James Levine. The decision had nothing to do with financial matters, according to the orchestra’s president and CEO, Chad Smith; ticket sales had risen under Nelsons. Rather, the board had concluded that “Andris was not the right leader for the entirety of our institution and our community,” Smith told Nelsons’s agents.
The termination was publicly announced on March 6, to widespread disbelief. As recently as January 2024, the board had rewritten Nelsons’s contract to renew automatically, citing its “deep confidence” in his “artistic leadership.” Now, just two years later, it had decided that the BSO and Nelsons were “not aligned on future vision,” as the March 6 press release put it.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the School Info System
___________________
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal. This piece was originally published in City Journal