Sandi Macdonald,Tar Heel of the Year finalist, wants the NC Symphony to play forever
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Colleagues often say it’s Sandi Macdonald’s vision that makes her a strong president and CEO of the N.C. Symphony, and at a mid-December Holiday Pops concert, she really tested it.
At the beginning of the performance in Meymandi Concert Hall, and between renditions of “Christmas Overture” and a sing-along of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Macdonald kept scooching forward in her balcony seat to peer over the rail.
From her seat, she already had a good view of the 66-piece orchestra, the guest soloists and a well-practiced if slightly fidgety elementary-school chorus performing for a nearly full house. But her high perch also let her look down into the audience, to watch people’s reactions to the music, to check whether they were having trouble finding their seats and whether ushers were quick to offer help.
Before the show, she had skipped parking in a designated symphony lot and driven instead into a nearby parking deck to see whether people bound for Meymandi Hall that busy night were encountering any problems.
She’s curious by nature, she says, but also believes it’s her job to make sure symphony customers enjoy a good experience, “and that begins long before the concert.” A thousand variables can make the difference between a ho-hum matinee and an electrifying evening, and in her eight years so far at the helm of the nation’s oldest state-supported symphony, Macdonald has tried to identify and control as many of them as possible.
She’s quick to note she has the able help of more than 250 full- and part-time Symphony employees — including the musicians — and would rather talk about them than about herself. Walking through Meymandi on concert night, she calls each employee by name, from the ushers in the lobby to the performers tuning their instruments backstage. At intermission, she personally greets the patrons, whose donations provide 30% of the symphony’s budget, in a third-floor reception area.
But as CEO, she has helped restore the symphony’s financial health as it coped with the aftermath of the Great Recession and has tripled its endowment. The financial stability has allowed musical programs to grow, ultimately providing more people, and thousands of children, access to the symphony’s music.
For those reasons, Macdonald was a finalist for The News & Observer’s Tar Heel of the Year. The recognition honors people who have made significant contributions to North Carolina and the region. The Tar Heel of the Year, Gregg Warren, executive director of DHIC, will be published Sunday.
Her instrument? The calculator
When Macdonald chats with ticketholders as they wait together coming in or going out of the performance space, most have no idea she is the chief executive of the $15.8 million symphony operation, and she doesn’t bring it up.
“Usually, when people ask me what I do, I say, ‘I work for the N.C. Symphony,’” Macdonald said. When they follow up with, “Oh? What instrument do you play?” Macdonald usually doesn’t mention the piano, violin or voice lessons of her youth, but says, “I play the calculator.”
It can be a difficult instrument. Just 31% of symphony funding comes from state appropriations and challenge grants; the rest is from ticket sales and performances, interest income on the symphony’s endowment, and those donor gifts. So fundraising is a large part of Macdonald’s job.
Don Davis, a retired power company executive and current chair of the Symphony Board of Trustees, says Macdonald has been a successful fundraiser by never forgetting that the orchestra was founded on and remains dedicated to serving the entire state.
“Fundraising is all about relationships and involvement,” said Davis, who served as the symphony’s interim president and CEO after the departure of David Chambless Worters in 2010. He was on the search committee that convinced Macdonald to leave her job as the Miami Residency Director for the Cleveland Orchestra and move to Raleigh.
“Donors are not really buying anything,” Davis said. “It’s not a typical transaction like buying a car. They’re giving you their money, and their expectations are really quite high. They’re not getting anything in return, but they want to do good things with their money.
“What Sandi does is engage the person in our efforts and show them what we’re doing,” so they see how their gift is put to work, Davis said.
Balancing symphony budget
That work has expanded under Macdonald’s leadership.
When she was hired, the symphony, like many other nonprofits, was reeling from the recession that began in 2007. Facing declining fundraising and falling ticket sales, the symphony had taken on $3 million in debt to help with expenses.
In 2010, musicians agreed to trim their performing contracts by six weeks, to cancel a scheduled pay raise and to take a week of furlough for a total 15% cut in compensation. The orchestra also canceled performances and a European tour that year.
Conductor Grant Llewellyn took a 10% pay cut, and then-CEO Wortens agreed to a 30% reduction, according to news reports at the time.
Under Macdonald’s tenure, according to its 2019 Report to the Community, the Symphony has balanced its budget in each of the past five fiscal years and in the 2018-19 fiscal year; increased gifts from individuals 5% over the previous year; increased season-ticket subscriptions 3%, defying national symphony trends; had record-breaking ticket sales for summer series shows and pop concerts; and had its best-selling season ever, with $4.4 million in sales and 20 sold-out performances.
With its improved finances, the Symphony was able to add a finishing touch this year to Meymandi Concert Hall, with the $1 million installation of acoustic panels above the orchestra, allowing the musicians to better hear one another.
Stabilizing and growing the Symphony’s finances, Macdonald says, has allowed it to support and build on the pioneering mission it undertook in its infancy: to deliver “good music to North Carolina’s schoolchildren.”
In addition to its regular performances, the N.C. Symphony now has at least 10 programs — the most of any symphony in North America — to engage students in music from preschool through college. Several of those have been launched during Macdonald’s time at the helm, including two three-year-long residency programs that paired symphony musicians with school students in Sampson and Cherokee counties.
The symphony says it reaches more than 250,000 children and adults each year, many of them fourth- and fifth-graders whose attendance at educational concerts around the state are their first exposure to classical music, which researchers say can boost concentration and creativity.
Jeremy Tucker was one of those “symphony kids” who says he vividly recalls going to hear the orchestra play in his hometown of Wilson when he was about 10 years old. Now the director of arts education for Durham County Public Schools, he first worked with Macdonald when he was a theater and arts consultant for the state Department of Public Instruction.
He says she understands the importance of guaranteeing that North Carolina schoolchildren get to hear their symphony, learn what the individual instruments sound like and how their effect is multiplied when they play in harmony.
“But you can’t just be a visionary,” he said. Like Macdonald, “You have to know how to get from Point A to Point B.”
Tucker also directs the Raleigh Boys’ Choir, whose members have performed with symphony musicians. He says that level of collaboration helps children learn the discipline of practice and teaches them “they can be part of something much larger than themselves.”
Meeting with the customers
To help make sure every symphony event offers the best possible customer experience, Macdonald attends as many as she can, including most of the orchestra’s appearances at its indoor home, Meymandi, and its summer venue, Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary.
“Sometimes I think of this as, ‘If I ran a store, I might have an office or a back room,” she said, like the symphony headquarters off Glenwood Avenue or backstage at Meymandi. “But I wouldn’t stay back there all the time. I would come out to be with the customers.”
After a concert, Macdonald holds informal debriefings with her staff to talk about what went well and what might need to be changed. In a file for next year’s Holiday Pops concert, for instance, is a note by Macdonald that says the children’s choir director should get a more proper introduction than she was allowed this year.
Other notes might have to do with the kinds of music included on a particular program. Do the choices appeal to the target audience? Is the focus too narrow? Too broad? Is it too predictable?
Macdonald says she believes that to remain viable, the symphony has to evolve its repertoire, adding different kinds of music to maintain the interest of audiences as well as performers.
In the past year, the symphony worked with the N.C. Museum of Science to stage concerts accompanied by screen projections of North Carolina water imagery. In September, musicians performed their first sensory-friendly concert, geared to audience members with autism and other sensory sensitivities.
As many times as she has heard its members play, Macdonald still can be as moved by the symphony performance as an awe-struck fourth-grader.
At the Holiday Pops concert, she said after the show, she wiped clean her memory of what she had seen in the matinee performance the day before. She looked up in wonder, like nearly everyone else in the audience, when snow began to fall from the ceiling. And when a red-suited Santa burst onto stage, cued by a Christmas tune, “My heart leapt,” she said, taken in by the moment and the music.
Tar Heel of the Year Finalist: Sandi Macdonald
Occupation: President and CEO of the North Carolina Symphony
Age: 61
Hometown: Toronto, Canada
Family: Husband, Henry Grzes
Education: Bachelor’s degree in business marketing, master of business administration. Studied music at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and arts management at the Banff School of Management and George Brown College.
Accomplishments: Began her career as income manager for the Canadian Opera Company and the National Ballet of Canada, then held marketing and communications positions in the opera and orchestra field in Toronto and Detroit, Michigan.
Prior to joining the North Carolina Symphony, Macdonald worked for The Cleveland Orchestra, as director of marking and public relations, then served as Miami Residency Director. Before that, Macdonald was senior director of strategic planning and audience development for the Seattle Symphony.
This story was originally published December 23, 2019 at 5:40 AM with the headline "Sandi Macdonald,Tar Heel of the Year finalist, wants the NC Symphony to play forever."
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