Winds of change
BSO principal flutist Elizabeth Rowe landed the dream job of a lifetime at 29. At 49, she’s walking away.
“What will I do?” That’s what flutist Elizabeth Rowe used to ask herself when she imagined life after the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Maybe she’d take up gardening. Maybe she’d teach more. She imagined herself in her 60s or 70s. Everything else, she says now, was “a big question mark.”
For most of her career, Rowe hadn’t had a clear sense of what life outside the orchestra world might be like, because she had never needed one. She clinched the principal flute chair with the BSO in 2004 at age 29, less than a decade after her graduation from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music and subsequent ascension through a handful of American symphony orchestras. Barring unforeseen catastrophe, the Walter Piston chair was hers to sit in for as long as she wanted it.
In August, after Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 ends the summer at Tanglewood, Rowe, 49, will take her final bow with the orchestra, which will probably also be her final bow as a professional flutist. Then, she’ll devote her days to her newly chosen career: leadership coaching.
Her client base is made up of self-described “high achievers.” What that means, she said in a recent interview in a hotel lobby near Symphony Hall, is “people who are interested in becoming the best version of themselves.” She knows what it’s like to work to master something. “And what it’s like to maintain and sustain a level of excellence, and how to relate to the idea of excellence or accomplishment,” she added.
“There’s a very low bar to entry to be a coach,” said Carolyn Freyer-Jones, who has been Rowe’s own coach for around two years. “It’s not regulated. But there’s a really high bar to be successful.”
In Freyer-Jones’s opinion, Rowe will clear that bar.
“To be a great musician, you have to know how to listen. Professional coaching is about hearing people,” said Freyer-Jones, who runs a Los Angeles-based business development program for coaches in addition to coaching on her own.
Given the flutist’s profile and tenured position with the BSO, she knows her decision to leave the music world now is an unorthodox move. Among her colleagues, there’s “understandably some wondering” about what her new career entails and why she’s leaving, she said.
She wasn’t pushed out, she said. “I love my work as a musician. I love playing with the Boston Symphony,” said Rowe, who lives in Boston with her husband, BSO violinist Glen Cherry. “For most people in a stable situation like that, it requires either some seismic event, or a really deep level of dissatisfaction with your work. I love my work, so that wasn’t it.”
When did she begin exploring the idea? “I really started wondering if there might be a fork in the road around 2018,” she said.
This was the year that Rowe made headlines when she sued the BSO under the Massachusetts Equal Pay Law, which is intended to ensure equal pay for “comparable work” between employees of different genders.
The suit, which was filed in Suffolk County Superior Court one day after the law went into effect, claimed Rowe’s work was comparable to that of principal oboe John Ferrillo, but that she was being paid less. BSO tax filings for the year ending Aug. 31, 2016 listed Ferrillo’s base compensation as roughly $280,000. Rowe was paid $70,000 less as of 2017, her attorney said at the time.
“I consider Elizabeth to be my peer and equal, at least as worthy of the compensation that I receive as I am,” Ferrillo told the Globe shortly after Rowe filed the suit. She settled the case in early 2019.
Rowe declined to comment as to whether the lawsuit and its aftermath specifically influenced her decision to leave the orchestra.
Her track toward leadership coaching began with her own flute students at Tanglewood and at New England Conservatory, where she maintained a small studio until a few years ago. Though she taught them “how to shape a phrase in Mozart or whatever,” she said, she noticed that many called on her to ask her questions about their lives and careers.
During the pandemic, she started a Facebook group for young professional musicians, with the intent that it be somewhere they didn’t “have to be perfect at performing and presenting this polished thing all the time,” she said. When she began offering informal pro bono coaching through the group, the pull only grew stronger.
Last July, she announced she would leave the orchestra following the 2024 Tanglewood season. Principal flute auditions were conducted earlier this year, and Rowe and Ferrillo indicated a replacement has been hired. The BSO confirmed in an email to the Globe that a new principal flute has been hired to start after Rowe steps down, noting an announcement will be made later this spring.
The BSO’s principal players tend to be lifers. Except for principal piccolo Cynthia Meyers, who joined the orchestra in 2006, all current principal woodwinds in the orchestra were already in their seats when Rowe arrived in 2004.
It didn’t take long before everyone knew they had “hit solid gold” in hiring Rowe, Ferrillo said in a recent phone interview. “From the very first note, she and I were able to play ‘floboe,’” he said, referring to an effect where the flute and the oboe blend so well that they sound like a single instrument. Their concepts of “sound, pitch, and how you connect things to make a phrase, were immediately simpatico. She made me a better player,” he said.
Rowe has been hailed as one of the finest flutists in the country, if not the world. She has been a featured soloist on several BSO programs, and appeared on multiple recordings. But it isn’t the concertos or the “big flute solos” that she’ll miss the most. Her favorite thing has been “the collaborative stuff,” she said. “The beautiful Beethoven moments, with my wind colleagues.”
“I’ll tell you, I’m going to miss her terribly,” said Ferrillo. He reminisced about a time when he complained about an articulation in a tricky passage of Tchaikovsky, to which Rowe responded by smiling and saying, “Oh, John. You, of all players.”
“And I said, ‘You are evil!’” Ferrillo said and guffawed. “She knows the right boundaries. How much you can recommend.”
As Rowe’s final performances approach, she’s feeling many things at once, she said. The beauty of the music. The pressure of the job. Sadness at having played her last “Mother Goose.” Relief. Excitement.
After August, the world at large may not hear her play again. She’s not certain yet, but she suspects that much of the satisfaction and joy she finds in playing music comes from performing at a high level and collaborating, she said.
Without that, “my strong instinct is that my playing days will be done, and I will become a fan, and I will sit in the audience and soak it up and love that,” she said. “I’m working to be OK with the complexity of it all.”