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Yet the 54-year-old Noland, reared in Connecticut and educated at Yale, also brings a readily appreciative passion for things some people might consider arcane. A devoted student of Southern American history, he speaks of such scholars as C. Vann Woodward (his principal Yale mentor) and Stanley Engerman like a teenager gushing about his favorite rock stars. And when he recalls his years as a freelance newspaper foreign correspondent based in Paris -- well, you can't help but admire a young life well-lived.

Those days may be long past, but Noland remains committed to his appointed tasks of melding passion with pragmatism. Take, for instance, his ultimately unsuccessful effort to persuade state legislators to support supplemental funding for the orchestra, Actors Theatre, Kentucky Opera and the Louisville Ballet.

"Like so much else this year, it didn't work," Noland conceded during a recent interview in his Humana office. "We lobbied for it; I testified in Frankfort for it -- we did everything we could." But "it was a tough year at the beginning, and it only got tougher."

So goes contemporary political reality. "In a year when, especially education, has had to live with cutbacks, you cannot feel too bad about it," Noland said. Indeed, there was an upside: "I think we made a ton of progress getting us heard."

He threw in a near-quote from Winston Churchill: "Success is going from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm."

Not surprisingly, Noland strongly endorses ramped-up public funding of arts and culture, a prime imperative of the Partnership for Creative Economies, an adjunct of Greater Louisville Inc. The partnership argues -- as Noland does -- that the arts serve as a significant economic engine for Metro Louisville.

That's absolutely vital, Noland declares, particularly when Louisville is compared to such nearby cities as Nashville, Indianapolis and Cincinnati. The arts "are even more important in Louisville than our peer cities -- they have major-league sports; we don't. So I would argue that the arts -- partly by choice and partly by necessity -- are Louisville's franchise."

Invoking the mantra of "the 21st-century creative class," Noland emphasizes that these urban professionals crave the arts as an after-work refuge. "When they go home, they tend to go to the arts," he said. "They can't see the New York Yankees, but they can go to Actors Theatre."

Meanwhile, the orchestra has closed out its current fiscal year with reasonably stable finances. "We're within $50,000 of being balanced in a $7.5 million (operating) budget," said CEO Brad Broecker. Over the past year, the orchestra gave 113 performances -- the highest number in recent memory -- and continues to seek ways to boost that number.

Additionally, "we are doing things now to ensure the long-term sustainability of the orchestra," Noland said. He wants, for example, to expand the LO's Wow! series of special events "and somehow turn these individual successes into sustainable new audiences."

While acknowledging that "an orchestra fundamentally plays classical music," Noland believes that the Louisville Orchestra "must find a way to refresh the classical music experience for current patrons on the one hand, and new ones on the other."

He frames the question this way: "How do you take what is a static corpus of orchestral work, most of it composed between 75 and 200 years ago -- (and) make it relevant? How do you make it exciting?"

One answer is apparent to anyone who attends a concert in Whitney Hall: two big-screen video displays suspended on either side above the stage. Those displays "are consistent in ways younger people experience media," Noland said. "Screens are very much part of the life of a 25-year-old."

Another new tactic is the post-concert reception. "This used to be for a narrow group of patrons," Noland said. "Now it's for everyone." He added that music director "Jorge Mester is very much in sync with these changes" and in identifying works that may be repertoire standards, but which the LO, for whatever reason, has never yet played.

Though Mester is primed to begin his second full season with the orchestra (not counting his previous stint in the late 1960s and 1970s), the board continues to look beyond his tenure.

"There are two ways to go about a music director search," Noland said. "The first is, don't have a standing committee at all -- then the music director leaves" and the board has to scramble. "The other way is to have a standing committee, conscious that the music director can change at any moment."

Now, whenever a guest conductor rolls through Louisville, he or she is interviewed, a process "where we get their input about what they think of the orchestra," Noland said. "And we have the opportunity to tell them about the state of our orchestra."

Consistent with his ease as Humana's chief corporate communicator, Noland believes that "a board president should be a public face of the orchestra."

Indeed, "if I could take that theory and adapt (it), I think every single board member has an obligation to be a public face of the orchestra. I want to make sure that at work, at home, in their neighborhood, in church, at school, they are a Louisville Orchestra board member."

He allows himself a wry smile. "By the way, nobody has objected to that line of reasoning."

Reporter Andrew Adler can be reached at (502) 582-4668.