Warren Mack succeeds Gordon Sprenger as board chair of the Minnesota Orchestra, the state's largest arts organization.
Warren Mack, a partner at the Minneapolis law firm of Fredrikson & Byron, has been elected chairman of the board of directors of the Minnesota Orchestra.
Mack thanked the community at large for its support of the orchestra and said, "In return, the musicians, Osmo [artistic director Osmo Vanska], the staff and the board pledge to give you some of the most exciting music in America."
Mack succeeds Gordon Sprenger, who he credited with helping the orchestra's management and musicians reunite after a bitter 16-month lockout over labor disputes. Allen Lenzmeier, who was to have succeeded Sprenger, had to withdraw over health issues.
Mack has served on many for-profit and nonprofit boards, including Buffalo Wild Wings, North Memorial Health Care, Madeline Island Music Camp, and the Michael Steinberg & Jorja Fleezanis Fund for Music. He has experience on nearly all of the orchestra board's committees, most recently co-chairing, with Principal Trombone Douglas Wright, the Liaison Committee, a group of musicians, staff and board formed immediately following the labor dispute. An Orchestra subscriber for more than forty years, Mack is also a pilot and an amateur cellist.
Mack said that he and his wife, former Star Tribune architecture critic Linda Mack, "appreciate our world-class orchestra's sound delivered by Orchestra Hall's unbeatable acoustics. We bought our first season tickets in 1969 and sat in the top balcony of Northrop Auditorium, where we could hear some of the music some of the time and vaguely see Stanislaw Skrowaczewski's arms waving in the distance. Now we sit in the third row where we feel intimately connected with Osmo and the musicians. Every concert is a thrill."
