Orchestra CEO bringing 'velvet hammer' to Philadelphia

Some people say she's brassy. Others think "abrasive" is more accurate. The Philadelphia Orchestra's newly named president and chief executive officer quibbles with neither characterization, nor would she argue if anyone wanted to call her tough and passionate.

"I suppose that all sounds correct," says Allison Beth Vulgamore, 51, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra leader, who will move north this winter to start her new job by Feb. 1. "I am fully present with people. What you see is what you get. I work hard, and I play hard. I've already been heard singing in the office at the Philadelphia Orchestra, and I am a determined leader for the art."

Determination is just one quality Vulgamore will need to run the $45 million-a-year organization successfully. Charisma wouldn't hurt, either, given the orchestra's $3.4 million deficit last season and a predicted shortfall this season as high as $7.5 million; an endowment market value of $120 million, half of what was hoped for by this time; a musical-leadership transition requiring great finesse; and, already in this young season, thousands of empty seats.

Among the first of several delicate issues to be settled is whether Charles Dutoit will become music director for the remainder of his three-year contract while the search for his successor continues, or whether the 73-year-old maestro will serve out the three seasons in his current, lesser capacity of chief conductor.

Despite the toughness, Vulgamore, the orchestra's first female chief, says she wants to begin a collaborative process through which the entire organization - board, staff, musicians, and donors - can arrive at a "reinvention."

"I also convene group thinking and believe in that completely, and I hope that with every year my velvet hammer gets a little softer," she says.

Opinions vary, of course, but if there is an industry consensus, it leans toward Vulgamore's being a good match for Philadelphia.

"There's not a whole lot of talent out there managerially, and they could have ended up with someone who was totally charming and ineffective," says Cathy Barbash, an arts veteran who worked with Vulgamore at the Philadelphia Orchestra in the early 1980s.

In fact, says former orchestra chairman Harold A. Sorgenti, "She has wonderful presence." At a meeting of the search committee, "she was in total control. And she knows the business."

The six musicians on the 20-member committee recommended Vulgamore unanimously, says cellist John Koen, chairman of the members' committee.

"I think the opinion from the musicians is that we have someone we can respect, someone who will deal with us in an honorable way and who has the skills to put this organization back where it belongs in every sense of the phrase," says Koen.

Vulgamore - whose iPod contains O.A.R. and the Eagles, as well as Elly Ameling singing Schubert - has been praised for successes in Atlanta including an artistic-leadership model that had music director Robert Spano, principal guest Donald Runnicles, and Vulgamore teaming up in "war room" meetings to make decisions on artists, repertoire, and special projects.

She spearheaded the building of a new summer home for the orchestra in the suburbs, kept the orchestra recording to the extent that any American orchestra still is, and stitched back and deepened management's relationship with musicians in the years after their 1996 strike.

Several Atlanta musicians say she was smart, fair, and innovative.

"A more conservative, hard-line union member I talked to said she was actually pretty good, and I knew who I was talking to, so that was high praise," Koen says.

Vulgamore also took her share of lumps there.

While Atlanta ran deficits, her compensation increased. She was paid $597,669 by the Woodruff Arts Center, the Atlanta Symphony's parent organization, for the nine months ending May 31, 2008, according to forms filed with the IRS.

Vulgamore says that year's compensation included a delayed payment to her retirement plan; without that, her salary would have been $496,000.

"It's less than that in 2010," she says, citing the furloughs she and other employees are taking to help out a battered balance sheet.

She declined to say what pay her two-year contract in Philadelphia promises.

"I feel that the orchestra has been very responsible to me and made it clear that they want a candidate who is coming to work for a major orchestra, which has sometimes been a question at this institution," she says.

In a move that raised some eyebrows, just after she took over as president in Atlanta in 1993, her husband at the time started performing with the orchestra as an occasional substitute. In 2000, keyboard player Peter Marshall was one of three musicians to win an audition to become a regularly engaged substitute. Vulgamore and Marshall are now divorced.

She says the appointment was made without her influence or involvement: "Peter auditioned for the orchestra. He won the chance to be the regular player, and deservedly so. He's very talented."

Early in her tenure, she was criticized for an administrative shake-up; a substantial portion of the staff was gone within a year. "When there's a new coach, there gets to be a new team," she told a reporter at the time.

Now, in a conversation from Atlanta, she says: "I was very young when I came here as number one; it is my only other leadership position until Philadelphia. I would say I came from New York and had that New York moment in my blood when I met magnolia. I hope to be a blend of both as I come to Philadelphia. I think I am."

If she is part New York - having worked at the New York Philharmonic for six years - it is only a small slice of her personality. Born in Boston and raised in Ohio, she is one of two daughters of Melvin L. Vulgamore, former president of Albion College in Michigan and a onetime Methodist circuit minister, and Nan Vulgamore (née Oyer), a music teacher who has been active on various arts boards.

"I come from a wonderful background in southern Ohio of farms and the tradition of hymn singing, and so holiday time it would be very familiar to have 30 of us singing in four-part harmony around the fireplace. And that was a pivotal part of my loving singing."

Ohio remained a base, but the family culture "grounded me in international living, which has remained important to me." She spent fifth grade in Heidelberg, West Germany, while her father was writing theological papers, and eighth grade in Beirut, Lebanon, where her father was visiting a professor of cultural studies at the American University of Beirut.

The name Vulgamore is German, a corruption of Volkmar. "It got Appalachianized," she says. "It means having to do with the people."

In addition to German, she has Scotch-Irish and Cherokee in her blood, she says.

She took Suzuki violin for about 10 years as a child and went to Oberlin College in Ohio as a "dime-a-dozen" soprano with the intention of becoming a professional singer.

Her ear, though, was better than her voice.

"I loved it. In the end I knew that I had a fine voice but not a great voice, and I knew what it takes for our artists to succeed, and in my final year I discovered this world of art management."

Why arts management?

"I had organizational skills, I wanted to make a difference, and believed in the power of music as a gathering institution."

She entered the inaugural class of an orchestra-management program run by the American Symphony Orchestra League (now the League of American Orchestras). The first orchestra job she landed was at the Philadelphia Orchestra, as assistant to executive director Seymour Rosen.

She remembers shuttling repertoire lists between Riccardo Muti and Eugene Ormandy in the latter's final days. She recalls being in the Academy of Music when Muti and the orchestra recorded Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, and when the orchestra played the national anthem after the U.S. hostages in Iran were released.

This time around in Philadelphia, she isn't sure where she'll live, but wants to be within walking distance of Broad and Spruce Streets. She says she hasn't decided whether to sell her house in Atlanta. In Philadelphia, she will be closer to family; her sister and family are in Baltimore, and her parents divide their time between New Hampshire and Washington, D.C.

After her start in Philadelphia, Vulgamore became artistic administrator and general manager at the National Symphony Orchestra, where, she says, she learned a great deal about music from music director Mstislav Rostropovich. Her next move was to the New York Philharmonic, where, during a gap between leaders, she found herself as acting managing director for 18 months.

In 2007, after 14 years in Atlanta, Vulgamore went on a sabbatical - an unusual perk in the orchestra world. She worked her last day at the Atlanta Symphony not knowing how she would spend the next six months.

"I purposely decided to not have a sabbatical plan, so first I wanted to go west and pull my health together for the first month. Then I came back to Atlanta and let the universe tell me where I was going.

"My [now] 17-year-old niece was telling me about volunteer work she was doing in Costa Rica, and the weekend of the Academy Awards I was watching TV, and Turner was playing Academy Award-winning movies, the way it always does. I think I watched for 24 hours - Out of Africa, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia. I was searching for something to do with international volunteerism, and I was gone two weeks later to open a base camp in Morocco."

She had expected to teach business concepts to young women, but on her third day the program director asked her to change assignments - "I swear he said women's prison," she says - but in fact she ended up teaching music in a boys' prison, with no instruments and no language skills.

"I had 60 boys twice a day for 90 minutes. I had my body to hit and make hissing sounds. The long and the short of it is, we made music."

They put on a concert, singing Dona nobis pacem as a round, and "Country Roads."

As a finale, the boys told Vulgamore they wanted to sing a traditional wedding song honoring the bride.

"What they didn't tell me was that the big surprise at the end is to lift up the bride, and so they lifted me up over their heads. I was overwhelmed."

After that, she took a driving tour of Morocco, visited Greece, stopped to see conductor Roberto Abbado in Milan, Italy, and came home.

Vulgamore was close to coming to Philadelphia once before - three years ago, when the job went to James Undercofler. She discounted it at the time because, she says, she had unfinished business in Atlanta.

Even now, she does not leave with closure on every front: The new concert hall she promoted and raised money for has not yet come to fruition; financial troubles are brewing, as they are for most orchestras; and ticket sales are flat, she says.

The Atlanta orchestra has benefited from increased earned income, with revenue from an additional new summer venue and the Woodruff Arts Center's acquisition of a telemarketing firm, though it's a modest boost to a $50 million budget. (The Philadelphia Orchestra's budget, unlike Atlanta's, does not include any of its summer homes.)

"Together, the two summer homes and the telemarketing firm approach $2 million" or more in annual net revenue, she says.

Developing new sources of earned revenue in Philadelphia is part of her charge.

"It's on the list, absolutely."

What reinvention ultimately means in Philadelphia no one can say just yet, though it's clear the orchestra needs to grapple with the fact that its 100 or so concerts in Verizon Hall attracted just 80 percent of capacity last season.

"I think that when you have an ensemble that is such an incredible talented gift - and a global brand - certainly what's not at risk here is the music. What's at risk is the ability for people to hear the music and have access to it," she says.

Will that mean concerts in the suburbs? More touring? An additional summer home? A regular presence at the Academy of Music again? Will the orchestra start its own pops series, and if so, where will that leave the Peter Nero-led Philly Pops, absorbed by the orchestra several years ago? Is there a role for the orchestra to play in the opera pit?

Vulgamore arrives as all these possibilities have been put on the table in recent months by concerned board members, staff, and musicians.

What lies ahead is a mediated discussion of such ideas and, once specific initiatives are approved, a plan for setting things in motion.

That, and an ardent new leader - a velvet hammer, perhaps a degree or two softer than it once was.

"If people can accept her for who she is, and the lack of sugarcoating," says her old colleague Barbash, "it could be a very exciting era for the orchestra."