A bold baton for Sao Paulo.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: Music - State Symphony Orchestra

When John Neschling arrived in Sao Paulo in 1997 to take over the baton of the venerable State Symphony Orchestra, the situation, as he puts it starkly, "was in shambles. I had known the orchestra for thirty years, but its state when I took over was very bad. They didn't have a place to perform, didn't have a public, had basically nothing." Although the amount of work needed to be done to turn the orchestra into a first-class operation seemed overwhelming, it was the kind of challenge the well-traveled fifty-seven-year old conductor and artistic director had spent a lifetime preparing for. "If I had taken over an orchestra that was of more or less quality, I probably couldn't have done much. But since it was in shambles, I had an opportunity to start from scratch. My big challenge was to convince people to give me the means to do it and then deliver the goods. And that's the only reason they continue to give me money--because I deliver the goods."

The "goods" maestro Neschling has delivered for the past six years have put this once obscure regional symphony orchestra emphatically on the global culture map. Today, when the State Symphony Orchestra. of Sao Paulo (OSESP, as it is known by its Portuguese acronym) is mentioned, it's in increasingly glowing terms. Multi-city tours to the United States and Europe in the past three years, the design and construction of the world-class concert hall that's become the orchestra's permanent home, a series of recordings, and a grueling rehearsal and performance schedule that produces a concert a week throughout the year have made Neschling's orchestra the new gold standard for Latin American symphonies.

The conductor was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1947. His family tree gave a clue to his future career in music: He is the great nephew of two major figures ill twentieth-century classical music, composer Arnold Schonberg and conductor Arthur Bodanzky. He studied piano as a child and eventually became an accomplished jazz pianist before polishing his conducting skills in Vienna with Hans Swarowsky and with Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he won several student conducting competitions with major orchestra in Italy and England.

Cutting his European career short, Neschling returned to Brazil in 1973, where he took conducting positions with opera companies in Rio and Sao Paulo. He also gained fame as a film-score composer, writing works for such celebrated Brazilian movies as...