Barnaby Kerekes

Toronto, August 31, 2026

Dear Ms. McGregor, Ms. Peloso, and the Search Committee,

An orchestra in a hard year does not need a new strategy first. It needs the people inside it to believe the next promise will be kept. That is what I would start on the day I arrived, and it is what I have been doing for twenty-three years. Vancouver is also where my musical life began. I took my Bachelor of Music at UBC with Douglas Sparkes, the VSO’s Bass Trombonist, was mentored by Gordon Cherry, its Principal Trombonist, and played with the Orchestra by invitation in 2005. I ushered and then ran front of house at the Chan Centre. I know what this orchestra means to that city because I was one of the people it meant something to.

For twenty-three years I have run the ABC Academy of Music in Toronto. I built it from an $8,000 first year to roughly $250,000 a year: 4 teachers to 20, under 50 students to 200, one address to 11 locations across the region. It has never missed a year and never carried debt, and it stayed profitable through the 2008 recession and the pandemic. Retention runs 70–80% year over year. I sourced, negotiated and integrated an acquisition in 2019. Let me be straightforward about what that record is and is not. It is not a budget the size of the VSO’s. It is twenty-three years of holding an organisation together across eleven sites and twenty staff, through two economic shocks, with every dollar earned rather than granted, and without a single interrupted year. That is durability and judgement under pressure, and it is what I would bring to a much larger balance sheet.

I have sat on both sides of the table. I have been an orchestral musician — the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, the Vancouver Philharmonic, the Brampton Symphony — and a musicians’ union member. I worked in the unionized environment of the Chan Centre and served a term there in interim management. For two decades I have been an employer of musicians, which means earning back, every year, the trust of people whose work is their identity. The posting is candid about a contentious bargaining cycle and divisions that have not healed, with another round ahead. I would go into it early, in person, and with nothing held back. No surprises is the rule, and it only counts if it holds on the ordinary days.

The School of Music is where I differ most from the rest of your pool. Nearly 3,000 students is not a side business; it is the largest audience-development engine the VSO already owns. Building that kind of school from nothing — enrolment, retention economics, curriculum licensing, credentialed programs, turning a student household into a concert household — is the thing I have actually done. The alignment the posting asks for between the School and the orchestra is where I would want to start.

This is a transition at a hard moment for funders, for civic partners, and for audiences everywhere. My reading is that instability makes a new direction more possible, not less — but only if the people who have to fund it and play it are brought along at every step instead of handed a finished plan. So my first hundred days would be sequenced, not vague. Weeks one to four: every section of the orchestra, every department, the union, the School’s faculty, and all three boards, in person. Weeks five to eight: the major donors individually, alongside whoever holds each relationship today, so no one experiences the change as a loss — and in the same window the municipal, provincial, federal and Indigenous relationships, including the Indigenous Council and the host Nations, where the commitment is to keep showing up rather than to announce something. Weeks nine to thirteen: back to all three boards with what I heard, what I would keep, and the two or three things I would change first, with the numbers attached. I am confident about the era that follows; I would not have written to you otherwise. But that confidence is earned by making the first hundred days unglamorous and thorough, and by everyone recognising their own words in what comes next.

I also founded and lead a software platform that runs music-education businesses end to end — scheduling, enrolment, billing, and client communication — and I have spent the last eighteen months putting emergent AI tools to work across operations, planning and marketing. That has made me genuinely fluent with operating data rather than merely comfortable with the word. My rule is simple: measure honestly, test cheaply, scale what works, and let technology carry the routine so that more of everyone’s time goes to music and to people.

A Music Director search that may fall to this role, a European tour, a School with real room to grow, and a city whose musical life is larger than any one hall — those are the reasons I want this job, and I would be glad to make the case in person whenever it suits the committee.

Barnaby Kerekes