The 150 year old model of classical music was already almost broken before COVID19 hit. With the pandemic the music stopped. But how do you make change happen in a century-old music world? This will be the topic Vyla Rollins, Executive Director of the Leadership Institute at London Business School, and Krishna Thiagarajan, CEO and President of Seattle Symphony, explore. A practitioner meets an academic.
Vyla Lejeune Rollins is an award-winning Organisational Psychologist, who has worked as a Strategic Organisational Effectiveness consultant for over 30 years. Vyla is also a widely respected Executive Education practitioner, who has experience in design, delivery, learning facilitation and coaching for globally recognised business school degrees and Executive Education offerings.
She is renowned for combining her research, psychology, and business advisory skills in a way that develops leaders and organisations in concert by accelerating the execution of strategy and tackling organisations’ current business challenges. She is currently Executive Director of the London Business School Leadership Institute.
Krishna Thiagarajan, DMA, is the CEO & President of the Seattle Symphony and Benaroya Hall. Prior to this role he served as the Executive Director of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in New York, and as CEO of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow. A strong believer in cross-cultural collaborations and diversifying voices in classical music, Thiagarajan currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Chineke! Foundation.
He also serves on the National Alliance for Audition Support Advisory Board, a Sphinx Organization-led alliance between the New World Symphony and League of American Orchestras.
Fredrik Österling is the Managing and Artistic Director of Helsingborg Concert Hall and Symphony Orchestra in Sweden. In a career spanning nearly three decades, he has worked as a composer and a manager and consultant in the classical music world. As an adviser at the Ministry of Culture, he was tasked with investigating the financing of Swedish orchestras. He has also produced major reports for the Swedish Arts Council and the Royal Swedish Opera. He has served as union secretary of the Swedish Musician’s Association, where he helped negotiate a national agreement for orchestras and regional music. Österling has also been CEO of Stockholm County Wind Symphony Orchestra and CEO of Musikaliska Concert Hall in Stockholm. He grew up in a multilingual environment in the northern Swedish town of Gällivare, where Meänkieli, North Sami and Swedish are spoken, and is himself of Sami descent. He lived for several years in Paris as a child and has maintained close ties with France. Married to the Irish Baroque musician Kate Hearne, he has also spent a lot of time in Ireland.
Markus Bruggaier has been a classical horn player at the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Staatsoper Unter den Linden since 1998. He played and taught with the “Polyphonia” chamber music ensemble of the German Symphony Orchestra in various countries around the world. Since 2001 he has been teaching successfully at the renowned Hanns Eisler University of Music and at the orchestra academy at the Staatskapelle Berlin and has given master classes in Italy, Slovenia, Japan and China. His students include numerous solo horn players and professors. Because leaving his children with a planet worth living in is a matter close to his heart, Markus Bruggaier founded the initiative “Orchester des Wandels” (Orchestra of Change) in 2009 as a board member together with colleagues of the Staatskapelle Berlin.
With their self-financed foundation “NaturTon” the musicians support various environmental and climate projects. Their most important project, an ebony project in Madagascar, serves to protect ebony wood used in the making of string instruments. For this purpose, they founded the association “Eben! Holz e.V” together with violin and bow makers in 2014, which over a hundred violin and bow makers have now joined.
In June 2020 he founded the association “Orchester des Wandels Deutschland” as a board member together with musicians from other orchestras, which has set itself the goal of making the orchestral landscape in Germany sustainable. Around twenty orchestras from all over Germany have now joined the initiative.
Sam Goldscheider has worked in classical music management for over a decade, since 2016 as the Orchestras Manager at the Verbier Festival. In 2019 he started the Green Project there, to work on ways of reducing the Festival’s negative impacts on the planet, and inspire its participants to make more environmentally-friendly decisions. Alongside his work at Verbier he set up in 2020 an industry-wide project, Harmonic Progression, to inspire more care for people and the planet in the classical music world.
Harmonic Progression gives people simple and meaningful ideas of what they can do to help, and organises campaigns so that more positive action takes place in our industry. It’s run by volunteers and anyone can get involved – the more the better 🙂
Sarah Wedl-Wilson is the President of the Hanns Eisler Academy for Music in Berlin. She is also the Board Chair of the Salzburg Easter Festival, as well as the President of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. Before that she was the Artistic Director of Schloss Elmau in Germany, Managing Director of the Camerata Salzburg, and Vice-Rector of the Mozarteum Salzburg.
Dana Denis-Smith is the CEO and founder of Obelisk Support, a legal services provider offering flexible legal solutions to FTSE100 and law firms delivered by highly-skilled legal freelancers. Obelisk Support was listed as one of the fastest-growing businesses in Europe in 2018 by the Financial Times and in 2020 was one of a handful of UK legal businesses to secure grant funding from Innovate UK. In 2014, she founded the First 100 Years to celebrate the first 100 years of women in the legal profession in the United Kingdom. As of 2020, the campaign is now replaced by the Next 100 Years, focusing on the future of the legal profession for women.
Nadine Benjamin is a creative empowerment thought leader who uses her art through singing, writing, composing, mentoring and coaching to create an impact on the world around us. Through her mentoring Nadine helps people step up from self-sabotage to self-mastery and really believe in themselves, whilst also making new work. In 2020 she made her Royal Opera House Main Stage debut as a soprano soloist in “New Dark Age” – a premiere by Anna Meridith, Missy Mazzoli and Anna Thorvaldsdottir.
Sholto Kynoch is a sought-after pianist specialising in song and chamber music. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of the world-renowned Oxford Lieder Festival, which won a prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2015, cited for its ‘breadth, depth and audacity’ of programming. Recent recitals have taken him to Wigmore Hall, Heidelberger Frühling in Germany, the Zeist International Lied Festival in Holland, the LIFE Victoria festival and Palau de la Música in Barcelona, the Opéra de Lille, Kings Place in London, Opernhaus Zürich, Maison Symphonique de Montréal, and many other leading venues and festivals nationally and internationally. Sholto is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in the RAM Honours.
What if someone from the outside of the music world looks at it? What pops up? What have insiders overlooked? Meet Alex Osterwalder who has changed how executives think about strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship with his practical and very visual books and approach. In this keynote, Alex will take the approach he normally uses for large corporates and startups to the classical music world.
Bill Barclay was director of music at Shakespeare’s Globe from 2012-2019 producing music for over 130 productions and 150 concerts. Original scores include Hamlet Globe-to-Globe to every country in the world, Emilia, Edward II, Romeo & Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Pericles and Comedy of Errors. A ‘personable polymath’ according to the London Times, he is an American director, composer, conductor, writer and producer, and currently artistic director of Concert Theatre Works. A passionate advocate for evolving the concert hall, Barclay has created works of ‘concert theatre’ for the LA Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and his original music has been performed in 197 countries, for President Obama, the British Royal Family, for the Olympic Torch, at the United Nations, in Buckingham Palace, and in refugee camps in Jordan and Calais.