Former Banker Now Invests Himself in Music

Peter F. Nostrand is renting a music hall in Prague, hiring 61 musicians from the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra and flying in a conductor and orchestrator from North America later this month. He is paying them to record a symphony that he scribbled down at his Steinway piano at his riverside estate in Fairfax County.

By the time he leaves Prague in a few weeks, the symphony will be 45 minutes of music on a master CD that he hopes to sell to the public or filmmakers.

So why is this musician in the business pages?

Nostrand, 60, headed up Crestar Bank, was chairman of Greater Washington Board of Trade and led the local United Way campaign. By the time he retired two years ago, he had sold Crestar to SunTrust, an Atlanta-based banking institution whose vaults are famous for protecting Coca-Cola's secret syrup formula.

After decades of pounding out quarterly earnings, keeping a careful eye on loans and investments and measuring accountant statements, Nostrand is working on his first symphony. The self-taught pianist made enough at banking to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing his musical passion.

"Remember when George Herbert Walker Bush jumped out of the plane?" said Nostrand, who has a bouncy personality and white hair that curls up around his neck at a very un-banker-like length. "It's my one shot at jumping out of the airplane. I love music."

He also thinks there is a business there. Just in case, he has incorporated as Peter F. Nostrand LLC. The company owns title to his music.

"There is a side of me that says I should try and turn this into something," he said. "You've got to find someone willing to pay for it. I would like to sell it to the film industry. If something comes of it, that's great."

Nostrand has been in touch with actor Stephen Collins -- the father on the TV series "7th Heaven," and a fellow member of the band The Flower & Vegetable Show during their days at Amherst College in the 1960s -- to help him make contacts in Hollywood. He hopes his symphony CD or Web site will be discovered and the music played at a concert, in a film or on radio, or downloaded off the Internet.

"He has got to find an electronic venue that will allow him to expose this music," said Paul Christianson, a veteran orchestrator from Southern Maryland whom Nostrand has hired to help turn his compositions into real music. Orchestators help adapt music, often written with a piano score, to orchestras or films.

"It could be in a documentary film. It could be in a summer concert: 'Here is the banker conducting his music with XYZ Orchestra.' Or it could be used in some education format," Christianson said. "Then people will come to you and say, 'Hey, I want to make some money off you.' "

But is it any good?