Richard Ortner

Born in Great Neck, NY, Richard Ortner has shared his lifelong passion for music and the performing arts with the most renowned senior professionals of our age, the best and brightest young artists and students, and the widest possible audiences.  

Piano studies starting at age five were reinforced by an excellent public school music program, in which Ortner accompanied choruses both in junior and senior high school. While active in the Long Island Federation of Temple Youth, he became their first choir director. After high school, he was accepted to The Cooper Union, where he studied architecture, but throughout these years he continued to pursue his interest in music by producing and hosting two classical music programs for WNYU (New York University) radio. He returned to studying music full time when he transferred to NYU, earning a B.A. in music in 1971. Ortner then began what he refers to as his “real musical education”—he spent three years as an usher at Carnegie Hall, while continuing his piano studies with Richard Faber of the Juilliard faculty.  

This marked the start of his activities as a concert producer. After persuading the management of Carnegie Hall to turn over the Recital Hall, free of charge, he organized the very first Carnegie Hall Ushers Recital, which the New York Times reviewed enthusiastically. Later, he organized the first concert of the Washington Square Chamber Music Society at NYU.

It was at Carnegie Hall that Ortner first met Leonard Bernstein and his manager Harry Kraut, both of whom encouraged Ortner that the next step in his burgeoning interest in orchestra management and learning “how music gets to people” must be a position at the Berkshire Music Center (now the Tanglewood Music Center), the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s renowned summer academy for advanced training in music at Tanglewood. From there, Bernstein said, he could get an incomparable overview of every facet of orchestra operations, from concert production and finance to facilities management and programming. 

In 1973, Ortner started working as a guide at Tanglewood, assisting with the information booth and  filling various backstage posts. One year later, in 1974, he was invited to become assistant administrator of the Music Center at Tanglewood, beginning a remarkable 23-year career with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). At that time, artistic direction at Tanglewood was accomplished by the unlikely ‘troika’ of Leonard Bernstein, Gunther Schuller and the young Seiji Ozawa, who had just been appointed music director of the BSO. Ortner became administrator of the Center in 1984 (with the appointment of pianist Leon Fleisher as Artistic Director), and along the way also served the orchestra as assistant manager of the BSO Chamber Players, coordinator of the Chamber Music Prelude Concerts and director of the BSO Credit Union, and was involved in numerous other special projects including the design and construction of Ozawa Hall.  

Ortner has served as a panelist at the National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music; a speaker at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and a frequent guest lecturer on music and education, including moderating the 2006 Harvard symposium on “Working with Bernstein.” He currently serves on the Board of Governors of the Boston Arts Academy (of which he was chair for two years), the Board of Overseers of the Handel & Haydn Society, the Board of Visitors of the Fenway Community Health Center and the Planning Task Force for the Boston’s New Center for Arts and Culture. 

Ortner was appointed president of The Boston Conservatory in July 1998.