A classical leader in the arts sector

Friday, 28 December 2012

As chief executive of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Dougie Scarfe has to guide the artistic direction of the organisation, as well as manage a large, complex business

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I like to get in early to finish going through emails from the previous evening or deal with things that have come in overnight. To be chief executive of an orchestra, as with all chief execs, you are running a business. But all businesses are different, and this one has an artistic slant to it; a high proportion of the company’s staff are musicians – highly skilled and trained to do a certain job. So the priority is managing and supporting your staff, as well as working on the strategic direction for the company.

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If the orchestra is in, I’ll always go to the start of a rehearsal to say hello to the conductor and talk to members of the orchestra. It’s important the orchestra sees I’m watching and listening and am therefore engaged in the artistic as well as administrative side. An arts organisation has to provide great art. We are the world-class provider of music in the South West of England so I need to ensure we’re doing that while also checking that all our funding agreements are in place.

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Moving a large orchestra around is logistically complex and requires careful planning. One of the interesting things is about how you might fit the same piece of music into three or four different venues, which all have their particular issues of space, sound, acoustics, lighting and so on. So part of the planning process is to think, “Can you take that piece there, is it too big, too small?”

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A lot of my time is spent on the road, driving to meetings. Our orchestra covers 12,000 square miles in the South West, and across that area we have a complex matrix of funders, venues, local authorities and other people who support us, and that needs to be constantly managed. It’s a crucial part of the job.

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If we have a concert on, we’ll almost certainly have guests – funders or other people we want to get to know. My role as chief executive is to be there and to either be the person they talk to, or to get the conductor or soloist to talk to them. I’ll always try to ensure guests get some contact with the artistic side of the company: they are mostly interested in the artists, and that is how it should be!