|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra has named Tonya McBride Robles as its new president and CEO.
Robles begins her job on Aug. 17, succeeding Curtis Long, who has served as the RPO’s CEO since 2017.
Robles’ background includes more than two decades in leadership roles at important American orchestras and performing arts institutions, including the Nashville and Atlanta symphony orchestras and the New England Conservatory.
The announcement follows a three-and-a-half-month process involving a nationwide search, hiring an executive research group, forming a search committee of RPO board members and musicians, choosing and interviewing finalists, and making an offer to the leading candidate.
It sounds like a typical CEO search, but the RPO, founded more than a century ago, is not a typical organization. The orchestra produces150 concerts each year, and the CEO’s job is a delicate balancing act involving the organization’s financial, artistic, and community facets.
“I see my job as being a public spokesperson, a fundraiser, and a cheerleader for the orchestra,” says Robles. To that end, her duties will include:
■ close artistic partnerships with the RPO’s principal conductors, Andreas Delfs and Jeff Tyzik, and supporting the “Voices of Today” commissioning and recording program, which began two seasons ago and will continue in 2026-2027;
■ maintaining good, and creative, relations with local arts organizations and especially the orchestra’s neighbor, the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music; and
■ creating and maintaining relationships with current and potential donors, and completing the orchestra’s current $50 million-plus comprehensive campaign, which not only supports the endowment and education and community engagement programs, but also secures the orchestra’s long-term stability.
Robles credits a good part of her success in Nashville and Atlanta to connecting with their local arts communities, and she is similarly planning “to get know Rochester and its artists, meeting the members of this community where they are. Every community is unique, and listening to the community is critical.”
Her ability to listen gave her an extensive, and successful, track record of labor relations in Nashville and Atlanta, forecasting a smooth relationship with the RPO’s musicians and the American Federation of Musicians.
There’s more to Robles’ resume than those successful positions in Nashville, Atlanta, and Boston. She was trained as a singer at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, but she says that her turning point occurred during a summer internship with a Baltimore arts organization.
“That was a lightbulb moment,” Robles recalls. “I started out as a performer, but more and more I realized I had an ‘ops brain’ instead. I was interested in all the behind-the-scenes work and developed a real respect and understanding for that.” (She has not completely given up performing, and still enjoys choral singing.)
Robles has a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Maryland Global Campus and is a graduate of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s Joint Military Attaché School. She accompanied her husband, a U.S. naval officer, on assignments in Spain, Bahrain, Japan, and Ecuador—international experiences that Robles says have shaped her leadership philosophy.
Orchestras are, like everybody else, still adapting to a post-pandemic (and increasingly digital) world. During the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Robles was senior vice president and chief operating officer at the Baltimore Symphony.
“Overnight, we had to create a new normal,” she says, “but I found it liberating, an opportunity to innovate.” At that time, she remembers, “the Baltimore Symphony had zero digital content, no streaming at all, so we had to figure out how to create it quickly.”
With the help of a generous BSO donor, she hired a non-musical documentary crew to create 30 digital episodes featuring individual members of the orchestra navigating the pandemic at home, showing them in interviews, playing, and in the case of an orchestra oboist, even making reeds.
“You’d say this was an ambitious project—or a really bad idea,” Robles admits. The risk paid off: the videos were “a powerful tool. They humanized the musicians, and even led to some additional income for the orchestra.”
In Baltimore, she also invited pop musicians to collaborate with the BSO, and appointed rapper and activist Wordsmith as the orchestra’s first artistic partner.
No “new normals” are needed in Rochester, Robles thinks, just continuing and improving a good thing.
“The organization does so many things right,” she says. “The orchestra’s conductors and musicians are extraordinary, and it has a talented, smart board whose members realize the necessity for fiscal responsibility.”
Robles believes the orchestra is well-positioned for more growth.
“I think it’s an exciting time to be leading the RPO,” she says. “Thanks to Curt and the board, the orchestra is in very strong shape and ending a very successful capital campaign. There’s really nothing that needs fixing. I see my job as building on the RPO’s success for the past 100 years, continuing George Eastman’s original commitment to the Rochester community, but from a 21st-century perspective.”
David Raymond is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer.
The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing [email protected].