In Friday’s (2/1) Denver Post, Ray Mark Rinaldi reports, “Colorado Symphony chief executive Gene Sobczak is leaving the orchestra after just one year on the job. Replacing him as head of day-to-day operations is Jerome Kern. Kern co-chairs the CSO’s board of trustees along with his wife, Mary Rossick Kern. Sobczak, who gave up his job as head of the Arvada Center to take the orchestra position, said Thursday that he plans to set up a consultancy working with cultural nonprofits. The CSO will be among his clients. ‘I had made the commitment to myself to stay on for a year and to determine then where my work was best-placed,’ he said Thursday. His departure is voluntary, he said, and establishing his own firm ‘was already in my thinking prior to the CSO appointment.’ In the world of nonprofit cultural organizations, it is rare to have the same person serve as chair and executive director. … The Kerns assumed their current board positions in October 2011, during a serious CSO financial crisis, and in the wake of the resignation of most board members. Sobczak was hired two months later. During the trio’s tenure, the CSO went from having a $1.3 million budget deficit to operating with a balanced ledger.”
Posted February 1, 2013
