ANDRIS NELSONS ON SEXUAL HARASSMENT

looking back on his 2017 comments in 2025

Andris Nelsons’ comments about sexual harassment made the comments of a recent post here. Nelsons has been the Music Director of the Boston Symphony since 2014. Nelsons made comments in an interview with Boston Pubic Radio, and then those comments made the Boston Globe.

You can listen to the original interview on Boston Public Radio at 46:50 here. There’s a lot of boring, canned music director speak there. I swear these dudes are all speaking with AI. It’s cool how they got an AI conductor to speak with a Latvian accent! But if you cut to 46:50, you can hear him being asked about sexual harassment in the classical music world. It’s a super relevant question now, and it was back in November 2017, as well, when the Boston Symphony’s former music director, James Levine, would be outed in the international press just four months later as a sexual abuser.

Nelsons simply says “no” when asked if sexual harassment is an issue in our field, and then goes on to say things are often “artificially exaggerated” and “made too important.” This isn’t AI speaking now, this is just regular clueless Big Fancy Men of classical music speaking. I think they get these words from their All Is Well in Man World database. The interviewer goes on to praise the Boston Symphony for having blind auditions (I wonder how truly blind they are, or were, in 2017), and for having so many women in the orchestra. The orchestra had at that time two women playing principal positions, the same number it has today. Of course, one of those women in 2017 was paid far less than her peer and filed a lawsuit about it in 2018. She has since left the orchestra for another career.