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Success IN the City: Alison Vulgamore
By Susan Soper, Executive Editor
In more than two dozen years heading up major orchestras (including the New York Philharmonic and the Washington, D.C., Symphony), Alison Vulgamore was always a change agent. It’s no different here, where for 13 years she’s been president and managing director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, instituting a wide variety of changes. As one of only three women to head a national major orchestra, she:
• Oversees an annual budget of $29 million – twice what it was when she arrived – with no debt.
• Has generated unprecedented funds and support for the ASO, including $110 million for the new Atlanta Symphony Center scheduled to open in 2008.
• Has combined her artistic and business skills in a creative leadership and management approach to melding administrative, artistic and volunteer goals.
• Has instigated innovative community outreach programs.
• Is one of 41 only community and cultural leaders chosen to participate in the Diversity Leadership Academy of Atlanta.
Vulgamore, 48, takes her position as a role model to women in the arts seriously and serves as the national volunteer chair for programming of the American Symphony Orchestra League.
She is a trustee of her alma mater, Oberlin College, where she studied voice, serves on numerous national and local boards – including the Midtown Alliance, the Atlanta Rotary Club and the International Women’s Forum of Georgia.
But there is a whimsical side to Vulgamore, too, whether playing with her “magnificent, urban black short-haired” cats Nat and Adelaide (named for Guys and Dolls characters) or creating annual marionette shows with her niece and nephew when she’s goes home to New Hamshire for the holidays.
Even though she doesn’t sing as much as she’d like, she has been known to break into song in her office or in a board meeting and says what she can’t live without is creativity – “whether in life experience or professional experience.”
That’s clearly evident in her Ansley Park house, vanilla on the outside but splashed with sherbet colors and a mix of art inside. Her grandmother’s blue-and-white enamelware is prominently displayed in a kitchen made for eclectic entertaining. And the house is filled with sentimental treasures – spiritual, artistic and nostalgic – with her piano prominently displayed in the living room.
But it’s in the backyard where she unwinds on weekends, pruning her old-fashioned roses, tending to the potted plants, pansies, and newly blooming delphiniums.
Vulgamore took time from her mega schedule to tell us more about herself:
What is your fitness or workout routine?
Swimming and walking – but not enough!
Best advice from your mother or father:
Live life and be yourself.
What’s your most cherished heirloom?
Anything I’ve been given. My father gave me a little treasure chest pin that opens with different jewels on the inside. He told me this was my resource, my connection....I save it for defining moments.
What is your least favorite thing about yourself?
I don’t get to sing enough.
What was your very first job?
I was a voice major at Oberlin and was hired to be executive director of the North Ohio Youth Orchestra.
What or who keeps you organized?
At work, my professional team. I also have a personal assistant who has taken the time to know the bohemian in me and the artist in me and keeps them alive when I’m entertaining – in the flowers, in the food. She allows me to do these things the way I would if I had the time to.
How would your co-workers describe you?
Demanding, fair and high energy.
If you got a big bonus, how would you reward yourself?
I would take a sabbatical, go to Europe and do some creating.
What books are you reading now?
Resonant Leadership – it’s about the role of compassion in leadership (Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and Connecting Others Through Mindfulness, Hope, and Compassion by Richard E. Boyatzis and Annie McKee).
Favorite cocktail and where?
Vodka martini (a potato vodka called Chopin) with olives – usually with Robert Spano.
The last CD you bought:
American Angels by Anonymous 4 (medieval and spiritual), Iris DeMent and Cecilia Bartoli’s Italian arias by Gluck.
Where do you take friends from out of town?
The ASO and Dunaway Gardens, a spiritual place in Newnan.
What’s your most treasured piece of art?
I have two right now. Santiago Calatrava painted for me a watercolor of a female figure full of aspiration that I treasure... and a Penley painting of Rostropovich. I worked for him for nine years.
Is there something that changed your life?
Living abroad – in Germany, in Beirut – taught me to be extremely comfortable with cultural exchanges.
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