In its 2026-2027 concert season, the newly rebranded Vivo Performing Arts offers Massachusetts audiences over 80 classical music, jazz, and dance performances, while also presenting innovative and genre-defying acts and introducing new local initiatives in Roxbury and beyond. GBH Music General Manager Sam Brewer spoke with Vivo Performing Arts’ Gary Dunning about the upcoming season and his retirement this June after a long tenure as President and Executive Director. Select the audio player to listen, and to explore the full 2026-2027 season visit Vivo Performing Arts.
The programming pays special tribute to Beethoven, on the bicentennial of the composer’s death, with connections woven throughout the season. Performances include an all-Beethoven concert from pianist Igor Levit in his Symphony Hall recital debut (11/8) and a complete program of Beethoven sonatas by violinist Gil Shaham and pianist Akira Eguchi (1/14). The London Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Sir Antonio Pappano return to Boston for their first program since 2009 in a program featuring violinist Maxim Bengerov as soloist in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (3/11).
As part of a star-studded lineup of revered pianists this season, Mitsuko Uchida returns to Boston for her first solo recital since 1997 to play an ambitious program spanning Haydn to Kurtág (2/2). Víkingur Ólafsson marks Philip Glass’ 90th birthday by pairing the composer’s etudes with works by Rameau and Debussy (2/28). Pianist Seong-Jin Cho returns to Symphony Hall for a solo performance of works by Jörg Widmann, Prokofiev, and Mozart (3/7). Jeremy Denk pairs Beethoven's last two piano sonatas with works by Bach, Unsuk Chin, and Hélène de Montgeroult (12/11).
Vivo Performing Arts will also collaborate with the Boston Early Music Festival to present violinist Isabelle Faust and harpsichordist Kristian Bezuidenhout performing Baroque sonatas (3/5). The organization teams up with the Boston Lyric Opera to present soprano Erin Morley and tenor Lawrence Brownlee singing arias and duets from bel canto operas (4/16) and a season-capping recital featuring soprano Nadine Sierra and pianist Bryan Wagorn (6/2).
Audiences will continue to encounter the genre-defying acts that have found a welcome home in Somerville’s Crystal Ballroom in recent years, including performances with Sō Percussion performing alongside indie-folk storyteller Kate Stables and avant-pop innovator Helado Negro with (2/17) and a solo performance by violinist and vocalist Charles Yang from Time for Three (2/19).
Vivo’s long-running Debut Series includes a performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations by guitarists Thibaut Garcia and Antoine Morinière following their recent Warner Classics release (2/25). The series also introduces pianists Avery Gagliano (10/8) and Lukas Sternath (1/28) to audiences at Longy School of Music's Pickman Hall.
A new collaboration between Vivo Performing Arts and the Museum of Science brings a Jazz Festival (April 1-4) to the museum’s Public Science Common venue, which is expected to be unveiled in October 2026. Saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins (4/3) performs at the festival, and is also Vivo Performing Arts’ inaugural Roxbury Artist-in-Residence. Among the highlights of the many jazz performances through the regular season is Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis on a farewell tour to its eponymous music director and trumpeter (4/16). This season’s dance offerings include the return of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (April 30-May 2), and performances from Ballet BC (11/20 and 11/21) and Limón Dance Company (11/12 and 11/13). Vivo Performing Arts will also present 25 Neighborhood Arts programs across the city next season.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited for clarity)
Sam Brewer I'm here with Gary Dunning, the President and Executive Director of Vivo Performing Arts, which has just announced its 2026-2027 season. Tell us about the new name "Vivo."
Gary Dunning Vivo Performing Arts, we're excited about it. Celebrity Series of Boston is a great organization with a great history. This is our 88th season. In a sense, there wasn't anything wrong with the name, other than looking forward to who we wanted to continue to be, who we want to become as an organization, who we want to build an audience with. Celebrity Series was becoming somewhat problematic. I'll just give two quick examples. One is that people thought of us as a series that was part of another organization. We were the series at Symphony Hall or the series of Berklee Performance Center, and not our own 501c3 non-profit long-standing organization. "Celebrity" as a name, I think, has its own kind of obvious problem in that celebrity is a very different word than it was in 1938. We present, very proudly, artists who I would not call celebrities yet. That's the whole point. You know, we want you to discover them and follow them in their career and I think they will become celebrities in this particular field. And then third, we needed a vehicle that could help carry all of the activity we do from our Neighborhood Arts programs to the variety of genres, to the variety of venues, to the outdoor projects. That's why we went for something that is essentially an abstract name. "Vivo" has the Latin root "to live." So it just gave us both a broad sort of channel, or bucket as I call it, to put all of our activity into and then do what we do, which is present performances that people want to come to and want to come back to, and develop relationships with artists and audiences and all of that that we've been doing already.
Impact of Debut Series
Sam Brewer This is a time of transition for you, too. You're retiring from Vivo Performing Arts after 15 years.
Gary Dunning 15 years here, yep.
Sam Brewer The organization... It's grown, it's evolved, and I know that you've brought some really impactful initiatives over the years. Among these is the Debut Series that you began, I think, shortly after you started.
Gary Dunning In the second year, yeah.
Sam Brewer I'm looking through the Debut Series offerings this year. Thibaut Garcia and Antoine Moriniere are doing the Goldberg Variations, which of course we usually hear on piano and harpsichord, for which it was written. But here we have these two guitarists. What can we expect?
Gary Dunning: You're going to expect Bach, but I think it may sound a little bit different. This is a bit of an outlier, and I think for myself, I'm just very curious about it. I've heard it on tape and through recordings. And we've done that occasionally: Theo Ould last year with an accordion. So I think it's just kind of, open your eyes and your ears to a different take on something that most people find very familiar. The debut series was very much about wanting to represent a whole career range in any genre that we present. So I would say when I got here to Boston, just doing some basic research, about 80% to 90% of the bookings were essentially mid to late career stage artists, celebrities. If you had made it, then you eventually would have been invited to the Celebrity Series of Boston. And my feeling was that all of the genres have incredible young talent coming on. And we should try to represent that as best we can. And if it clicks, if it works, we then can follow that artist over decades. And very luckily, the first artist we presented was Daniil Trifonov, who obviously has gone on to a great career, including Symphony Hall performances. So it can work, and it did in this case.
Sam Brewer There's an advantage to using star power to build an audience, but I love that you've sort of flipped the script and you're really investing in artists for the benefit of the audiences. Talk a little bit more about Daniil Trifonov. It's such an amazing run he's had over your time.
Gary Dunning It's a combination of, we had booked him, had heard him, and heard of him as a real rising talent, and then very conveniently he went out and won a bunch of competitions after we booked him but before he arrived in town. But I would say while it worked particularly well with him, the whole idea for what we do at Vivo Performing Arts is, can we build an audience for an artist? Can we bring them back over time to watch them, in some cases, find their voice, find their view of things, and then watch them evolve over time? Another one I can mention would be the Danish String Quartet that really burst on the scene, and now they're maturing and very quickly have become sort of the go-to veteran string quartet that maybe the Emerson [String Quartet] used to have that position in most of our audience's eyes. So the different venues that we use—and in total, it's 20 different venues this year—that's honestly the key to our model that allows us to develop the variety of programming. The different seating capacities really lets us put the right artist in the right venue in front of the right audience and then develop those connections that we can build over time when we bring them back. Sometimes it's a break of a couple of years, sometimes a little bit longer. We have a couple coming this year that we haven't seen for a long time in recital.
Sam Brewer Among those that you haven't seen in a long time is Mitsuko Uchida, and there's just this wonderful thread of solo piano performances throughout the season: Igor Levit, Jeremy Denk, Seong-Jin Cho, Víkingur Ólafsson. I won't ask you to pick one out of that roundup, but tell me a little bit about Mitsuko. I understand her last solo performance here was in 1997. She has this really devoted following. I'm sure you've heard her many times. How would you characterize her playing?
Gary Dunning She comes across with this level of sort of seriousness because she is so intentional and so dedicated. And yet, I find that there is a lightness and a clarity and brightness in her playing that makes it light, at least to my ears, that I just admire so much. And then certainly, if you just followed her career over the decades, she has been so dedicated to her craft and to her work and to the music that, you know, she cares about the most. And so, the things that interfere with booking a recital are just endless, from schedules to, you know, the concerto repertory or... you know, for all of the instruments and artists that we present, that often you kind of go, "Oh my God, I can't believe it's really been 25, 28 years," but sometimes it just works out that way. And some artists don't tour North America that often. For some artists, it will take us five or ten years to actually get the stars to align. And happily, this year they did. Some of the others have been returning more often, which has its own advantage. You get to know them a little bit. Víkingur started on the Debut Series, again came on, did the "Goldberg" Variations at Jordan Hall, and then the duo piano recital with Yuja Wang, and now a solo recital. So we're beginning to see the different facets of his artistry, of his personality, and I think that's intriguing and interesting. The others have been on the series as well in different settings, so again: can we introduce an artist to the audience? Can we help that audience develop a relationship, really, truly with them, so they're interested in following them as they go on their own journey of their career and come back again and again? And that's, I think, when you have the kind of performances that bring together a little bit of nostalgia: "Oh, I knew Daniil when I was there at that concert." And excitement about where they are going now. Because all of them are clearly at the height of their powers, and for many, their powers are just growing. So that's the fun part.
Sam Brewer Are there any artists that just jump out as a surprise? You didn't know that it would land in that way, and they really have continued to grow?
Gary Dunning The one that has been somewhat unexpected, and I happened to like on a personal level, is Víkingur Ólafsson. A, because he's got such an interesting mind about how he puts programs together and how he thinks about it. But in talking to him, he said something I hadn't thought about. He said, "Gary, I come from Iceland. In most countries, you find a mentor, a teacher, or a leader who helps shape and guide your career. You know, a conductor who says, "Why don't you go to this festival and I'll put a good word in for you,” or something like that. He said, "You know, we don't have any of those in Iceland." He said, "So, I arrived late in my career." He was in his 30s before he really started to catch on. And again, I confess I didn't realize that or think about it from that perspective, how long he waited for this kind of breakthrough. I'm thrilled he got it, and I'm thrilled we're bringing him back.
Genre-Defying Acts
Sam Brewer Vivo has always embraced the fringes of the performing arts. You know, I've personally been to a Stave Sessions performance for the last three years. Even beyond that, you've got dancer Huang Yi in duet with an industrial robot. You've got a contemporary circus company, Gravity and Other Myths. But on the Stave sessions, which I know was started under your tenure, Sō Percussion jumps out at me. They've got an indie folk storyteller, I'm not sure what this job title is, but I love it: Avant Pop Innovator Helado Negro. Tell me more about this performance. But also, why is it important for Vivo Performing Arts to take on these experimental projects that will have a more limited audience, but are just so exciting?
Gary Dunning For me, the answer is very easy in that the more we can bring something that will challenge the audience a bit and help them expand their own horizons of experience, musical experience in this case, then I think it makes and leads to a more discerning audience. It's funny, people always ask me, "What if someone says something critical?" I'm not that concerned about whether someone liked a performance or not. I hope they do, of course, but I am more interested in whether they can articulate to me, if they want to, or to themselves, why they didn't like a performance, or what they did like about it. Because I think that develops, as I've said, a more discerning audience overall, which is great for artists. And I think we certainly have that here in Boston, and artists comment about it all the time.
But the Stave Sessions in particular was responding to not so much a need, because the audience wasn't saying, oh, I must find some of these offbeat sort of things. It was really responding to our kind of mantra of being artist-centric. Where are the artists taking us? What are they showing us? And I think certainly it's happening in conservatories around the country, but particularly here in Boston, where genres are kind of rubbing up against each other. You know, they used to be, I think, quite siloed in the different conservatories. You were one or the other; you couldn't talk about it. But now, conservatories are having video game scoring and film scoring. So there's a lot more influences, and I think these genres do literally rub up against each other because the students know each other and they're trying things. And I think Sō Percussion's a great example. Who would say "I have a percussion ensemble and here's an indie folk storyteller?" That is really obvious; we just have to do it. But I think that experimentation that the artists are doing... we're in a lucky position to be able to say, "This is great, let us give you an opportunity for you to share with the audience, something that they clearly haven't seen before." And yes, we have to do it in a small venue. There's not a big amount of appeal. Yes, it takes underwriting and some fundraising to make it work, but we're luckily in a position to do that. And I think over the years, we've gained the trust both with the artists that were serious about trying this and trust with the audiences who say, "I have no idea what this is, but I do trust Vivo Performing Arts to have a legacy of good taste. And therefore, I'm willing to take a gamble." Maybe I won't like it, but in most cases, they seem to have.
Sam Brewer At its highest level, it seems like the pillars for Vivo continue to be classical music, jazz, and dance. What is it about the three that makes them all make sense under one institutional umbrella?
Gary Dunning Again, genres are a word that is helpful and not helpful at the same time in terms of what does it really mean, because everyone has their own definition of it. But I think those primary genres of certainly jazz and dance and classical music have been central to the founding of Celebrity Series, even to the earliest years back in the late 1930s, and have continued through. I think what's happened is that those genres themselves have changed. Dance in 1938 is not what it is now. And so a lot of the companies that present, even Gravity & Other Myths, that I would even call sort of physical movement theater. Yes, it's circus-based, but it really is a choreographed movement of the most acrobatic style. They have taken the art form further. Therefore, we're going to follow that art form and continue to present it. Most audience members have a certain affinity. They study classical music, they want to go to classical music, or they love chamber music, or they love dance. But they do love to dabble, and they love to graze. We have established that reputation, that they can trust us to kind of go, "I am going to try something new." One of the things that I think is so important for people to understand is that our business is inherently about embracing risk. Certainly, presenting live concerts and selling tickets is a very risky financial proposition. It needs underwriting, it needs support, all of that. So our tolerance for risk is actually one of our core attributes and values. But I also love the idea of embracing risk. So if someone is coming to Symphony Hall to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for the very first time in their life, good for them; they're taking a risk. They have no idea whether they're going to be comfortable, whether they like it or not, or if someone's going to come and hear a new piece by a composer that's unknown, or going to hear an indie folk storytelling with a percussion ensemble. I want our audience to happily embrace risk-taking in the sense of being bold and trying something they haven't tried before. And as an organization, I think that's what we can offer to Boston is something in its aggregate that you couldn't get anywhere else. You would have to leave Boston to see these artists. And so that's how I think we contribute to the cultural fabric of the city.
London Symphony Orchestra
Sam Brewer There’s such a great annual tradition of presenting an out-of-town orchestra. But these are big swings. I mean, they must be expensive shows. You've got to build a big audience in Symphony Hall. The London Symphony is coming after 17 years with Antonio Pappano. What do you love about the London Symphony?
Gary Dunning I have heard them, but this is going back to my graduate student days, which is decades ago. So it's a new orchestra, but I was always fond of them. So that's the easy part. I'm fond of lots of orchestras, Berlin, and, you know, Vienna and others that we brought. I am a particular fan of Maestro Pappano. I've really enjoyed the performances that I've heard him conduct, and I've watched him, particularly when he was here conducting Martha Argerich, and that itself was a long journey to finally get her to appear on the stage. But to be dead honest, the booking of any major symphony orchestra, talk about aligning of the stars. It takes a lot of lucky breaks to fall in place as to: When are they going to tour in North America? What time of year? Orchestras are planning 2, 3, 4, 5 years in advance. You know, can we get the BSO to commit to renting us that date, that far in advance, when they may not have even finished their own planning for a particular season? Then you get to, what program is going to be there? Is that of interest? We need to think that it has a chance of selling. And then you finally get to the money. So if you can get the stars aligned, I'm going to do this one way or another. Now you don't start with the money at all. And some years orchestras are touring, and some years they're not. It is just—and I wish I could find a clear path to it, but it is... the last year when we had three was unexpected and came together very late. Yes, sometimes it has to do with the political landscape. Sometimes, some orchestras are not interested in touring in America, particularly right now. In some cases, it's the exchange rates because some of them are paying in euros. So the fees have got to be commensurate with that, depending on how the exchange rates are going. So I keep saying to my board and some of the stakeholders, I know it is less romantic than you want it to be. This is not that we think back in front of a roaring fireplace and pick those artists that we yearn about. It's a lot of tedious, hard work about logistics and money, time, and alignment. And when it works out, you're just happy.
Changes in Audience Patterns
Sam Brewer Over the past year and especially over the past couple of months, we've had great listenership on Classical Radio Boston. We think that part of it is because people are looking for an escape, right? Chaos, war, AI, politics, you name it. I'm curious if there are any parallels in the performing arts world. Do you see people coming out to live events sort of as a sense of escape or exploration away from all of this?
Gary Dunning Absolutely. Coming out of COVID we had similar sort of vibe of a landscape of fear, uncertainty. Talk about risk, you know potentially some real risks for people's health and such. But it was very clear early on that there was and remains to be a yearning for audiences to have shared—I'm going to call it ritual experiences. The shared collective experience of a live concert is simply more powerful than you listening to, you know, the very best speakers in the world hooked up to the finest sound system, the yearning to be together, because that moment when the concert is over, and people just leap to their feet because it is a shared experience. And it's a shared experience because the audience is feeding off the artist, the artist is feeding off the audience, before you even get to the bows and to the applause. I would say I've never seen the audience respond more enthusiastically than in the past five years. And I think that is absolutely people's sort of personal statement about, "I want this in my life. I want an experience for my family, for my children, for myself. I want to be here and have this happen and continue to have it happen." So that gives me strength and hope. It still is expensive, and it still takes a lot of work. I would say the general ground and soil are very fertile for us to continue to do what we do as long as we live up to both our artistic values and our customer service values.
Sam Brewer It's inspiring to hear that you're seeing a different side of audiences and a new enthusiasm just in the last five years. I am actually even more curious if you've seen changes in the audience’s taste or behavior in the past 15 years over your tenure here.
Gary Dunning Oh, I would say yes. And I would put it as the success that we've had at Vivo Performing Arts, I think, has to do with those changes, in that I won't say there's more curiosity, but it feels that way to me. And I'll give some data points, and I don't mean these critically, either to my predecessors or to the audiences, but I was looking up some data a few years ago. Jean-Pierre Rampal, a wonderful artist, wonderful flutist, appeared on the Celebrity Series twenty-three out of twenty-five years. That won't happen now. People are not interested in that. They are interested in the variety, particularly that the genres themselves are kind of, if you want to call them silos, they are expanding. There's more content, particularly if you've now added the younger career stage artists to the mix. There's just more to see, there's more to present. And I think we have responded to the curiosity and the desire to try something new. Again, risk, boldness, I'm trying something different, even if it's still classical, or it's dance, or jazz, but it's someone I haven't heard before.
Collaborations with Other Performing Arts Organizations
Sam Brewer Collaborations seem to be a real strength of Vivo. There are two Jordan Hall concerts that jump out to me. Nadine Sierra and Isabelle Faust, in partnership with Boston Lyric Opera and Boston Early Music Festival, respectively. What does a collaboration allow for that's maybe harder to go alone?
Gary Dunning Collaboration is at the beating heart of our enterprise, whether I like it or not. We don't have a choice. We don't own a venue, we don't control a venue. We have to be a good partner. We have been willing to listen to others and work with them. And that's just to do the sort of day-to-day work and to be able to keep on coming back and to gain respect and trust, most of all trust. That's important, because this business is all about relationships, from the company to the audience to the artist to the agent; it's all about relationships and trust.
And so often these collaborations take many different forms if you were to look at it from a pure business point of view. The model doesn't matter so much as the message that we are able, willing, and eager to work together. And then the collaborations are really the mechanism to make something happen that otherwise might not happen. Because either party alone would go, you know, I can't take the risk, or I know I'm going to lose money anyway, but I'm going to lose too much money. It's a great excuse to work together, but it's also a great mechanism for us to learn how to work together and help develop a broader audience for the artist.
Sam Brewer The new collaboration, the big one, at least it seems this year, is the Museum of Science Public Science Common, which I learned about through this information. It's so exciting. It's a dance and cabaret style venue. And I guess the idea is that arts and science collide there somehow. Tell me more about what you'll be doing there.
Gary Dunning Well, we'll be presenting some jazz performances, and the dancer, Huang Yi, we mentioned with KUKA, his industrial robot, who absolutely becomes alive. It's just a marvel. Vivo Performing Arts works in 20 different venues. We're constantly on the lookout for venues just to see what's on the horizon. Can we get in there? How do we use it? I'm sitting in Fraser Performance Studio, and we had performances here one time when the Tokyo String Quartet had a performance, so we're kind of voracious in our appetite for spaces.
When the Bloomberg Foundation put up the majority of the money to build the Common, we knew it was coming. I didn't quite know at first what the space would be for. Is it just a lecture hall about science and the world? Is it digital equipment? But it turns out, as it was being developed and in talking to Tim Ritchie, the CEO there, that they really wanted to use it as a multifaceted space to engage audiences and people. Yes, their mission is about science, but it is also about curiosity, the mind, and exploring new things. And of course, I'm walking in going, big space, nice-sized audience, acoustics sound like they're going to be good, lots of technical capability. I think we could do performances here. And then going back to the Museum of Science, going, what do you think about live performance, which they hadn't necessarily—well, maybe they thought of it, but maybe we were there and at the right time to sort of go, let us help you think about it a little more broadly. Because we work in so many different venues of different setups and different genres, we actually have a lot of experience with how theaters and spaces for performance work. And so I think we've been able to help them think about, well, what do you need in a space to make it sort of function well for an audience, for an artist? I have been in too many spaces where they have forgotten to put in dressing rooms for artists. I've been in spaces where they forgot to run electricity to the lighting grid. And so it's been a great collaboration just in terms of listening to each other. And yes, they wanted something with science, which is the Huang Yi, KUKA the robot, that I had seen a few years ago, was just too perfect to ignore. Some of the jazz performances are absolutely cerebral. Some of them even have some science connections to what was an inspiration, either sort of emotionally or very literally, with mapping constellations as if they were notes on the page.
Sam Brewer This is vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, right?
Gary Dunning Yes. I've heard a little bit of it. I don't know a lot about the mechanism or how she does it. But I'm both curious to get the details so I can listen to the music for that, and I'm also curious to not know that so I can just get a reaction to the music and then begin to understand it later. But I think that there is obviously, particularly in a city like Boston, there are so many connections between science, scientists, engineering, and music, along with the other arts and dance, that it'd be silly not to sort of say, we should be partners in this. How that manifests over time, you know, we'll figure that out. But the whole point was, let's have a really great first season. Let's get everyone interested. The museum is interested in getting an audience to go, gee, I didn't think of live performance in a museum of science. And then build it from there. I mean, so if anything, for me, that's the perfect sort of setting for what Vivo does, is just engage artists to engage an audience and kind of grip them in their journey and then ask them to come back and try something different or try something again or see what else they can discover about themselves and about the art.
Neighborhood Arts and Artist-in-Residence
Sam Brewer I think of Vivo as bringing these incredible artists from out of town, but I know that you do so much to lift up the talent that's right here in Boston. I'm curious if there are any ways you're doing that that's new this year.
Gary Dunning Well, certainly. In Roxbury, there is an initiative we've been working on for a couple of years. We started Neighborhood Arts about 13, 14 years ago, which was to frankly take advantage of Boston, which has such a rich, incredibly talented base of musicians and artists who live in the Boston area and want to work in the Boston area. In a sense, they've chosen, "I'm not going to do the international touring circuit where I'm on the road 200 days of the year." That's a really tough life, particularly tough if you're trying to raise a family. And so, you know, they've decided, no, I'm going to make a living in Boston with this. And so presenting them in performances, most of them being free, came out of an initial idea that, A, the arts are for everyone. I hope that's not too obvious a statement, but it does bear repeating all the time. And secondly, can we help introduce people to the joy, the simple joy of live performance, that shared experience that I talked about earlier. If our programs can do that, then I have faith that over time, maybe it's even generational, over time, that familiarity with I want live performance in my life, I want it in my community, I want it for my family will take root and the future of Vivo will have fertile ground to really thrive in. That was the genesis of it. The mechanics were great artists here in Boston, more so than in many other cities. You couldn't do this at this level in many other cities. So let's just take advantage of what we have here. So we're presenting the artists there. I will be very happy when the stakeholders, the business leaders and the religious leaders in Roxbury go, enough, Gary, we got enough. I'll stop then. But until then, let's figure out how much is enough.
Sam Brewer And that initiative this year is the inaugural Roxbury Artist in Residence, right?
Gary Dunning The inaugural, thank you. It's Immanuel Wilkins. Terrific. Out of Philadelphia, a great jazz saxophonist, performer, composer, arranger, but also engaged with civic life, engaged with community issues, and community activism. So we asked him to be an artist-in-residence and help him shape what that looks like. And one of the first things he did was say, "I really want to work with a Boston-based artist who knows the community better than I do." And so he's going to work with Jason Palmer, whom we've known for years and presented, who's a wonderful trumpeter, teacher, arranger. And they'll be working with Boston-based artists to both create work and create connections between artists and opportunities. We're Vivo, we provide performance opportunities for them, but also, how can we connect with the community in Roxbury and listen to them? What do you need, what would help build an audience and a culture of live performance, being essential to our daily, weekly life? I don't know all the answers to that. That's kind of why we're doing this. And you'll hear more about it, but Immanuel’s got some real interest in visual arts. How do we connect visual arts to the performing arts? Where do we do it? We're already doing concerts at the Roxbury Public Library, the branch in Roxbury. There are new studios: Jean Appolon Expressions has this new studio and dance center that just opened up. I mean, it's an exciting area with a nice bit of density. And I think that's what we're curious about. How can we leverage that density to lead to real, ongoing, constant activity?
Retirement and Next Chapter
Sam Brewer Every Vivo performance I've ever been to, you've been there. And I know you have a bit of a reputation for that. There are 80 performances this season. I imagine you won't be at all of them this year. What's going to fill up that time? Or is there a sense of relief?
Gary Dunning No, it's not a sense of relief in the sense I'm retiring in a couple of months. There is a sense and certainty that it's the right thing. I have no doubt. It's in my head, in my heart. It is time for me to turn over the reins to the next generation, a younger generation, because A) I think that's necessary, and B) it is hard work. I've been an Executive Director. I've been doing this for almost 50 years. I can tell that I'm not bringing the same energy that I think I should to it. I don't mean so much physical energy as to, am I pushing myself to explore new things? Am I being bold? Am I taking enough risks? And I had some doubts about that. And when you've done something for a long time, it's easy to go, oh, I recognize that. Oh, I recognize that. As opposed to thinking of new solutions, you kind of go to ones that you did before. I don't think that's always healthy. I think it'll be great for my organization and the people who I care about deeply, but they need some new blood and energy and new ideas that... I think I brought some in, and I think they've turned out well. I think Thor Steingraber, who's coming in to take over, has some great ideas. He'll do well. So I'm excited for myself and for the organization and for the effect that we'll have on the community, definitely. Now, the one thing I do worry about is that I won't be sitting in the good seats as much. That's going to be a bit of a challenge. But I'll definitely be going to concerts because that's what I do. This is... People say, "Oh, you go to so many concerts." Like, yeah, I happen to like concerts. I do.
Sam Brewer That's great. And there must be, I imagine, a sense of pride for handing off the reins of the organization in such a good place.
Gary Dunning Well, thank you. I'm proud, but also, I'm mostly proud of the people. I mean, we've put together a great team. They do the work. They do all the hard work. I get to take the credit for it. But that's the luck, but I just want to make sure that they know they and everyone knows they did it. And that's what I'm proud of.