Time for Her Solo
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Card didn’t beat out 109 other candidates for the job on charm alone. Raised in California, she became a serious violin student after a third-grade teacher opened a cabinet and spoke the magic words: “What instrument do you want to play?” A Stanford graduate, she earned an MBA at the University of Southern California and joined the operations staff of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she rose to orchestra manager. From 1986 to 1992 she served as executive director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra–where she hired Kauffman as general manager. In ’92 she became executive director of the Seattle Symphony, and in 11 years there she orchestrated an impressive turnaround, reversing a budget deficit, raising $160 million for a new concert hall, and more than doubling subscription sales, annual donations, and the number of concerts.
It won’t be that easy to goose attendance here (running about 82 percent in Symphony Center). Card’s goal is to build an “even broader community sense of pride and joy in the orchestra.” She doesn’t want it to be “perceived as something only other people do.” She’ll be looking at the way concerts are marketed and at a price structure that has been diced into confusion over the last couple of years. (Jane Quinn, vice president for marketing and communications for the last three years, resigned earlier this month; the job is open.) She’ll have to negotiate the gray areas between her responsibilities and those of music director Daniel Barenboim and figure out what to do about Symphony Center’s sound; a consulting firm will report on its study of the auditorium acoustics in the fall. She says her early meetings with the musicians were “great,” and Chicago Federation of Musicians steward Stephen Lester says they, in turn, are “thrilled” about the arrival of Card and her “more collaborative management style.” Still, the prospect of union contract negotiations is enough to make her “think about being a gardener.”
