MARVELOUS MOXIE

Dallas Symphony reaches a crescendo through the daring intent of Kim Noltemy.

BY LEE CULLUM

knew she would be good,” says Cece Smith, chairman of the Dallas Symphony Association, recalling the arrival five years ago of Kim Noltemy to run the orchestra and its myriad affairs, “but we had no idea how good. I spent twenty years investing in CEOs [as a venture capitalist], and she’s the best. I had to push CEOs to stretch their goals, but not Kim.”

Congenial, charismatic, farsighted, and indefatigable, Noltemy has the stamina of a long-distance runner and the nerve of a high diver. She works with two cell phones and wakes up early to cope with emails and exercise before beginning every busy day at the Meyerson, where she now is the landlord, having acquired the house from City Hall in a 99-year lease.

You might call it the audacity of necessity. Smith certainly thinks so. By phone she describes leaky roofs, broken elevators, and seats that still need replacing after 34 years of wear at the Meyerson Symphony Center. “If one of the prior CEOs had suggested taking it over,” Smith muses, “I would have said no, [but Kim] had run the facilities in Boston,” where she was chief operating and communications officer of that symphony before coming to Dallas. In addition, “She has an encyclopedic knowledge of other orchestras [and their] business models,” adds board member Marion Flores.

Smith notes that Noltemy has recruited “terrific people.” Principal among them is Katie McGuinness, vice president of artistic operations, who came to Dallas from Ireland by way of successful stints in London, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis. With accelerating capacities for the daring and the new, she shapes the schedule for the DSO, working with music director Fabio Luisi, the orchestra’s prized, priceless asset whose contract has been extended to 2029.

Wrapping up dinner with McGuinness I ask her about Noltemy. Immediately she mentions the DSO president’s commitment to women. “She does more than talk about it,” McGuinness points out. “She makes it a part of the mission.” That is true: Noltemy has commissioned several women to write new works and brought to Dallas two female composers-in-residence. The tenure of principal guest conductor Gemma New soon will end, and “for sure a woman” will replace her vows Noltemy, who created the Women in Classical Music Symposium to encourage the cause.

When the Colorado Symphony tried to lure McGuinness as CEO, it was Luisi, she notes, who persuaded her to stay in Dallas. Together they have assembled a concert season for 2023–24 that features the full Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner, a towering work looming over “the end of the romantic era and the beginning of a new idea of music and theatre,” the maestro explains in an email.

None of this can happen without people in the hall and revenue rolling in. To that end Noltemy persuaded Terry Loftis to move over from TACA, where as president he worked miracles during the pandemic, to join her as Dallas Symphony’s chief advancement and revenue officer. In an office painted bright blue with a picture of Ella Fitzgerald behind his desk, Loftis pursues donations and presides over a group of 40 or so who do graphics, analytics, and everything else required for marketing, subscriptions, ticket sales, box office, and the shop, now rescued by Noltemy from the ground floor and happily reestablished in the lobby.

Loftis is especially excited about Kim Noltemy’s Diversity Fellowship Program, which will offer three musicians, mostly with college or graduate training, 25 paid weeks of total immersion in the DSO to prepare them for the grueling world of auditions. “Finding a job in music is super-competitive,” principal oboist Erin Hannigan tells me by phone. “Some have 50 auditions before they land a job.” Hannigan also praises the Kim Noltemy Young Musicians Program, named for the one who started it and for whom this is the “greatest honor my employers could give to me,” Noltemy says in an interview in her office. Mainly for children in Southern Dallas, it offers extensive training with an instrument.

Noltemy has accomplished a lot in her five years in Dallas. She has cut what is called the “structural deficit” in half, to $4 million. “Without Covid it would be gone,” she laments. Earned revenue almost reached her goal of 40 percent of expenses but during the pandemic slipped back to the low 30 percents. Even so, Covid could be called Kim Noltemy’s finest hour. Luisi agrees, pointing out that “the DSO [under her leadership] proved that nothing will stop them from bringing music to the community.” Finding a safe way to do concerts for small audiences, Noltemy kept the orchestra alive, also keeping alive everyone yearning for music that is neither recorded nor streamed, though she did that too, exceedingly well. Her crowning moment was on April 30 and May 1, 2021, when Luisi conducted Mahler’s First Symphony with 50 players from the DSO on the stage of the Meyerson along with 50 from the embattled Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York, whose members were locked in traumatic warfare with their management. Fabio wanted to help them; Noltemy made it happen.

“The number one thing Kim has done,” says Hannigan, “is keep us present, evolving [when] the arts are not known for flexibility.” Luisi is evolving the “Dallas sound,” which he describes as “a beauty of phrasing and a darkness of tone [that] makes the DSO a special, recognizable orchestra, far from the ‘globalist’ sound production of most other orchestras.” All this was on display in a ravishing concert at Carnegie Hall in March.

Noltemy is evolving as a master fundraiser, having just landed a $25 million challenge grant from the O’Donnell Foundation to shore up the DSO’s endowment and shield the orchestra from catastrophes to come. It’s her “sense of urgency” that makes Noltemy so compelling, Smith observes. When she comes up with an idea, “I had better think quickly [because] it’ll be done.” P