Nashville Symphony Names J. Mark Cantrell Its Next President and CEO, Closing the 28-Year Valentine Era
For the first time in nearly three decades, the Nashville Symphony is about to be led by someone other than Alan Valentine. The Grammy-winning orchestra has named J. Mark Cantrell as its next president and chief executive officer, handing the keys to one of Music City's cultural anchors to a leader who spent the first half of his career inside the orchestra rather than in front of a spreadsheet.
Cantrell takes over August 1, the close of a search that reached well beyond Tennessee. He arrives at a milestone moment: the coming season marks the Symphony's 80th anniversary, a run that stretches back to 1946 and has made the ensemble one of the most-recorded orchestras in the country.
From the trombone section to the corner office
What sets Cantrell apart is where he started. Before he ever ran an orchestra, he played in one — for two decades as a bass trombonist in Boston, performing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Pops, the Boston Ballet and the Boston Lyric Opera. It is a résumé that means he has felt the same pre-concert nerves and long rehearsal weeks as the musicians he will now answer to, a rare kind of credibility in a job that is usually filled from the business side.
He made the leap to management and never looked back, going on to lead both the Colorado Symphony and The Florida Orchestra. In those roles he built a reputation as a turnaround specialist — steadying finances, growing audiences and deepening donor and community support at organizations that, like most American orchestras, live and die by the health of their balance sheets. Along the way he helped secure a major public bond for concert-hall renovations, the kind of civic-scale project that keeps a symphony's home viable for a generation.
Following a long and consequential tenure
Cantrell inherits an institution that Valentine spent 28 years shaping — and, at one point, quite literally rebuilding. When the historic May 2010 flood sent the Cumberland River into downtown, it poured into the basement levels of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, ruining instruments, mechanical systems and one of the hall's signature organs. The Symphony reopened months later, and that recovery became part of the organization's identity: a downtown orchestra that refused to go quiet.
The Schermerhorn itself, which opened in 2006, remains one of Nashville's architectural jewels, a neoclassical hall a few blocks from the honky-tonks that give the city its other, louder reputation. That contrast — world-class classical music sharing a zip code with Lower Broadway — is a big part of what makes the Symphony's role in Nashville distinctive.
What comes next
Cantrell will work alongside music director Leonard Slatkin, one of the most decorated conductors in American music, as the Symphony builds out its anniversary season. The immediate challenges are the ones facing orchestras everywhere: bringing younger and first-time audiences through the doors, keeping subscription and donor bases strong, and making the case that live classical music still matters in a streaming-first world.
For a city that sells itself to the world on music, the Symphony has always been a quieter but essential part of that story. Its next chapter now belongs to a leader who knows exactly what it feels like to sit on that stage — and who will spend the next several years trying to keep the seats in front of it full.
