The Hall Survived a Flood and a Foreclosure. Now the Nashville Symphony Says the Cash Is Running Short.
Schermerhorn Symphony Center has a way of making Nashville feel older and grander than it is. The limestone columns on Fourth Avenue, the tall windows, and the hall where the seats can be rolled away for a ballroom floor all suggest an institution that has been here forever. This week the orchestra that lives inside it said something institutions that feel permanent rarely say out loud: it does not have enough cash on hand to keep running the way it runs now.
In a statement released this week, President and CEO Mark Cantrell and board chair Teresa Sebastian described a significant financial challenge. They said the Symphony's executive committee is drafting a restructuring plan meant to steady the organization and put it on a more sustainable footing, and that details will be shared soon. No dollar figures came with the announcement, and no concerts were canceled in it.
The patron who held the roof up
Everyone following the Symphony's finances knows the name that hangs over this story. Martha Rivers Ingram, the philanthropist whose name is on the Martha Rivers Ingram Center for the Performing Arts at Vanderbilt and whose fingerprints are on nearly every major arts building in town, died in August at 90. She was the Symphony's leading benefactor for decades, and her loss has sharpened problems that were already there. (We looked back at how she built the room Nashville's arts scene still lives in.)
Her most dramatic rescue came in 2013. Bondholders were moving to foreclose on Schermerhorn, and Ingram stepped in through her company, Symplace Realty, to take on roughly $20 million in mortgage debt so the hall would stay with the orchestra. That loan was restructured again this May, pushing its maturity out to July 2035, with the building itself still pledged as collateral.
Fifteen years of hard weather
The current strain did not start this summer. The May 2010 flood swamped Schermerhorn's lower levels and did about $40 million in damage, including to the organ console and a basement full of instruments. The pandemic later cost the Symphony more than $10 million in lost revenue as the hall went dark. Staff layoffs followed in July 2024, when four vice presidents and six other employees were let go, and again in April 2025, when eight more positions were cut from a staff of 54.
There have been signs of renewal too. Leonard Slatkin was named music director in February with a term running through the 2028-29 season, and this summer the board hired Cantrell, who previously led the Colorado Symphony, to succeed longtime chief Alan Valentine. (Our earlier story covers Cantrell's appointment.) He took over at the moment the Symphony's safety net got thinner.
What happens now
Symphony leaders have not said what the restructuring will involve, whether that means a smaller season, changes to how the building is financed, new fundraising, or something else. What they have said is that the aim is to come out of this a healthier, more resilient organization, and that more will be shared in the near future. We will follow it.
For now, the season calendar is still posted, and the simplest vote of confidence any Nashvillian can cast is a ticket. The holiday run of Home Alone in Concert with the Nashville Symphony and the Family Series are both on our events calendar.
