A bold baton for Sao Paulo.

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 Kiss of the Spiderwoman and Pixote. Returning to Europe in 1983, he conducted major opera orchestras in Portugal, Switzerland, France, and Italy and had high-profile engagements in the U.S., including working with Placido Domingo and the Washington Opera.

But a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to guide the Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra to new prominence lured him back to Brazil in 1997. "I was given the mandate to turn the OSESP into an international quality orchestra, one of a kind which had never before existed in Brazil's history," Neschling recalls of how then state governor Mario Covas enlisted him to take over the orchestra and the promise of the state's cultural secretariat to underwrite the expensive undertaking.

"Theoretically, we have fifteen or sixteen symphony, orchestras just in the state of Sao Paulo," the conductor says. "Brazil has lots of symphonic orchestras; there may be three or four dozen so-called professional orchestras in the country. But in a way, that's misleading. It's a question of paying proper wages, having retirement, or playing good concerts and having a good hall, and this doesn't happen to everybody. At certain times, there had been fairly good orchestras in Rio and Sao Paulo, but they were never of real international quality. This is the first that's considered an orchestra of that class."

What Neschling inherited was an orchestra that had been founded in 1953 by Souza Lima. Conductor Eleazar de Carvalho led the OSESP from 1972 to his death in 1996. But by the time Neschling was called in to revive the orchestra, it had no home base and a dwindling core of professional musicians. His first order of business was to find a permanent home for the orchestra and then begin building the kind of well-funded organization virtually unknown in Latin America. "I have a long-term vision," he concedes. "I wanted to build a hall and create an orchestra with its own sound, and that doesn't happen in two or three years. I wanted to pay the musicians well, I wanted to create a distinctive repertoire and a public, and an endowment, subscriptions, and a school to train orchestra musicians. I have no intention to leave. It will take another ten years to achieve what I want to achieve. Most great orchestras have many decades, maybe over one hundred years of history. This orchestra is a baby."

His "baby" has a very special cradle in which to begin its life. The orchestra's home performance venue is Sala Sao Paulo, a fifteen-hundred-seat concert hall that was retrofit into the interior courtyard space of a 1920s train station in a neighborhood of Sao Paulo that had fallen into disrepair. The theater is an architectural and acoustic marvel, with great attention paid to maintaining the building's historic character while incorporating state-of-the-art acoustical properties and technology. And the support of Sao Paulo residents has been reassuring: The OSESP currently has about seven thousand annual ticket holders, and that number is growing at a 10 percent annual rate, defying a downward trend of support that's plaguing many symphony orchestras around the world.

"When the hall was opened in 1999 and we did our first concert in it, then I knew we would survive," he recalls of the orchestra's debut in Sale Sao Paulo. "We had a home." The new "home" has also led to a gradual transformation of the neighborhood from a district of rundown hotels and streets populated by drug users and prostitutes to a vibrant new cultural center in Sao Paulo. Nearby is the Pinacoteca do Estado, the state art museum that's housed in a landmark neoclassical building, and its adjoining park. Also close by is the ornate Estacao da Luz, a Victorian-style train station that's being restored to its turn-of-the-century splendor. "We are helping to recuperate this part of the city," Neschling states. "It takes decades. When we came here, there was nothing. Now there is a sacred art museum, a new music school across the street, and the Centro Cultural Bronco do Brasil. It will take a long time, but it will happen."

What's drafting classical music patrons back to this long-ignored orchestra and the shabby neighborhood where it has taken up residence is not just the presence of a truly professional orchestra but the results of Nesctling's deft management, his choice of repertoire, and his commitment to maintain an orchestra of the highest international standards. High on his must-do list is to spotlight the work of Brazilian composers.

"It's very dear to me that we rediscover, research, and present either new composer's or music of the nineteenth century, which has been lost because of the loss of memory," he adds. "This is a very important part of our mission--to rediscover and present Brazilian music. Also, I think of different aspects. I think of different pieces that the public loves and wants to hear, in order to sell tickets. A certain part of the repertoire is the known symphonic repertoire. Then, I think about unknown repertoire; people also want to hear things that they would not ordinarily hear at home on recordings or when they go to concerts. So, I have a few works dining the year that are completely unknown. Then I have a fairly large percentage of twentieth-century works that I particularly enjoy. Since we are a state-run orchestra, I don't have such a strong commitment to sales--I can be more daring in the programming. So, it's known, unknown, modern, and Brazilian. That's the mix from which I do the programming for the year."

His musicians come mostly from Brazil, but he wants to maintain a mix of non-Brazilians in the ranks of instrumentalists. "At the moment we have musicians from Peru, Argentina, the U.S., Serbia and Croatia," he comments. "There's no orchestra that's 100 percent anything. An orchestra is, by nature, an international group. We learn from other people. It's important to have other nationalities around. I'm not chauvinistic in this regard at all, on the contrary. But I do think the bulk of musicians should be Brazilians axed have studied more or less the same technique, so we can get a unified sound."

To date, that sound has enthralled audiences throughout the Americas and in Europe, where the orchestra toured to great critical and popular acclaim in 2003. "There was a certain surprise at the beginning," Neschling says of the reaction of European concert audiences, "because it was the first time. in history that a Latin American orchestra of such quality went to Europe and the States. But, after the first shock of seeing these good-looking South Americans playing well, the reaction was the same as for a big orchestra anywhere.

It depended on how well we performed." At the end of the day, Neschling isn't so concerned about whether or not his is considered the best symphony orchestra in the region. It's about raising the standard for excellence and challenging others to follow. "Are we the best symphony orchestra in Latin America?" he asks rhetorically. "It's not for me to say. It's for the critics to say, and they've been saying it. But it's not such a big thing to be the best orchestra in Latin America. I think Latin America deserves better orchestras."

Editor's Note: More information on the OSESP, its history, membership, and concert schedule can, be found at the orchestra's website: www.osesp.art.br.

Mark Holston is a musician and regular contributor to Americas.