Next to the chief executive of a bank, Jonathan Martin may have the toughest job in Charlotte.

He became the Charlotte Symphony’s executive director in May 2008, just in time for the orchestra and its hometown to be sucked into the recession. The orchestra, which had already spent several years trying to escape financial troubles, now was attempting a turnaround in the midst of an epic downturn – one that has been especially hard on Charlotte’s prime resource, its banks.

After leading an emergency drive that raised more than $5 million to keep the group from going under, Martin this month helped launch an even bigger project: raising $40 million, mostly for an endowment fund, over the next decade. That’s what the orchestra’s leaders think it will take to put money woes behind – eventually.

But Martin’s real mission may be bigger than the Charlotte Symphony. After being in the orchestra business since before he graduated from college, he thinks his job is to correct a mistake orchestras slipped into long ago: contributing to the belief that classical music is an elite, rarefied product.

“You don’t need to know that Beethoven wrote nine symphonies or Brahms wrote four symphonies … or that Brahms was in the Romantic period and Haydn was in the Classical period,” Martin says. He thinks the important thing about listening to music is: How does it make you feel?

“If you can capture the essence of that,” Martin says, “that’s where you have to start if you’re going to save classical music in this society.”

‘Music moves people’

When Martin was growing up in Atlanta, he says, he had “a schizophrenic existence” – musically, that is. He played the trumpet in his high school band, worked as a roadie for a local rock group, and sneaked into jazz clubs. At Georgia State University, he began to appreciate classical music.

“I was sort of the odd kid out,” Martin says, “because I was a musical omnivore.”

Majoring in music theory and composition, he had something particular on his mind.

“What I was obsessed with was understanding … how music moves people,” Martin says. He thought – and still thinks – analyzing the melodies, harmony and tone colors could reveal the answer. It was something he could keep exploring as a college professor someday.

Or so Martin thought. He got a call from the Atlanta Symphony, which needed a part-time helper in the music library. Even though the money was lousy, Martin said yes. By the time he graduated, the job had become full-time.

“Five years in the library puts you in the belly of the beast,” Martin says. “You get to know all the players. You get to know the conductors. You get to know the music.”

Out of all those, the key was the orchestra’s music director: “the single biggest influence,” Martin says, “in my professional life.”

Music for everyone

Robert Shaw had become a celebrity in the 1940s and ’50s with his Robert Shaw Chorale. By the 1980s, as leader of the Atlanta Symphony, Shaw and the group were winning Grammy awards for their discs of chorus-and-orchestra masterworks.

Through all of that, Martin says, Shaw preached an ideal that he had developed while leading amateur choruses. It was a vision, Martin says, of “people from all walks of life, coming together to create beautiful music.”

“I think one of the mistakes orchestras have made … is to encourage the separation of music from people’s everyday lives, by building these big concert halls, pricing ourselves to a point where people can’t afford it, (and) encouraging the elite perception of classical music,” Martin says.

“We’ve stripped the connections. How do you fix that?”

The Atlanta Symphony was “growing like mad,” Martin said, thanks especially to its cash-machine summer pops concerts. Martin ended on the operations side as the orchestra manager, responsible for the nuts and bolts of the business – such as scheduling, concert production and tour logistics. By the time he had spent 14 years with the orchestra, he decided he had gone as far there as he could.

Martin’s next step took him, his wife and their young daughter across the country to Washington state, where he became the executive director of the Spokane Symphony in 1995. It was a much smaller orchestra than he had left – and smaller than the Charlotte Symphony – but it helped him learn the dos and don’ts of leading an orchestra.

One of the main lessons: No matter how important the orchestra’s chief may think the orchestra is, he can’t assume everyone else knows about it.

“They have their lives to lead,” Martin says. “They have children to raise, bills to pay and jobs to go to. They don’t wake up in the morning thinking about your orchestra.

“So a significant part of your job is to be an insistent, incessant and vocal advocate for the value that the orchestra provides the community.”

9 years of ‘insanity’

You can see how the job in Charlotte would call for that. But first, the chance to help lead one of the world’s greatest ensembles took Martin in 1999 to the Cleveland Orchestra.

Martin was the general manager – not the top job, but an even bigger version of the operations post he had in Atlanta. The pace, he said, made it nine years of “insanity.”

A typical workweek, Martin says, was 70 to 75 hours. He handled labor negotiations. He was responsible for the logistics of week-after-week concerts. He was involved with more than 20 tours – many of them overseas – and numerous media projects. His department of 45 people was about quadruple the Charlotte Symphony’s entire staff.

“Jonathan just dove in and started doing things,” recalls Thomas Morris, the orchestra’s executive director during much of Martin’s time. “He got things done. And he got things done without a lot of fuss or muss.”

There’s one thing lacking about a job in a long-established institution such as the Cleveland Orchestra, Martin says. A single person can’t put much of a stamp on it.

“I was hungry to be in a situation where I could make more of a difference,” he says.

The Charlotte Symphony offered him one.

Martin on auction block

The orchestra plays pops and classical concerts during the regular season, plus outdoor concerts in the summer that draw thousands. It performs with Opera Carolina and N.C. Dance Theatre. It plays educational concerts for battalions of students, and it spearheads a music program at Winterfield Elementary in east Charlotte.

Yet financial security eludes it.

Here’s part of what it means to lead the Charlotte Symphony: At the end of a long week of working to get the orchestra on the right track, you go from the frying pan … to the frying pan.

Cooking is one of Martin’s hobbies. After teaching himself for 30 years, he’s serious about it.

So when the orchestra has a fundraising auction, Martin’s services as a chef go on the block. For the top bidder, he spends a Saturday making dinner for eight. A six-course dinner for eight. His most recent one included salmon tartare, foie gras medallions over a green apple gelee, and butter-poached lobster. Four more soirees are planned.

Martin never auctioned himself off in Spokane, he says, and he only once did in Cleveland. The difference now: “We need the money more,” he says.

Beating back recession

For the orchestra’s menu, Martin and its music director, Christopher Warren-Green, did something Martin describes as crazy: Despite the recession, they cooked up a new concert series without the help of financial backing.

That’s the KnightSounds series. The idea is to break down those barriers between people and music.

The concerts are about an hour long. The conductor chats about the music. Multimedia ingredients add another entrée to the music. Concertgoers mingle over hors d’oeuvres before the concert. There’s usually an opportunity for post-concert socializing, too.

The craziness is paying off, Martin says. Last season’s four concerts nearly sold out, and newcomers made up a healthy part of the audience. This season, the orchestra has expanded the series to five programs. And it has gotten a boost from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which is sponsoring it to the tune of $125,000.

For the orchestra, Martin says, KnightSounds is a “template for the future.” He thinks the lessons about making concerts inviting can apply to other performances, too.

“We’re starting to see KnightSounds as not just a series,” Martin says, “but a state of mind.”