Jonathon Heyward Starts His Journey with the BSO
The BSO's new music director conducts upcoming concerts featuring Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.
Last spring, Jonathon Heyward made a bold and memorable debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
He led a diverse and compelling program that veered from a Beethoven staple to a new work by a contemporary female composer to the final symphony from Soviet-era Russian composer Shostakovich, Symphony No. 15, a profound and playful work that premiered just over 50 years ago but had not yet been performed by the BSO.
It was so promising and captivating, the organization decided they needed more Heyward for an extended period of time.
A few months later, the BSO announced that Heyward would lead the organization for five seasons starting in the fall of 2023.
With the appointment, Heyward will become the 108-year-old orchestra’s 13th music director — and also the youngest and first American of mixed heritage in the role.
He’s also a bit of an unknown, by dint of his age — he’s barely more than 30 years old.
His career trajectory, spanning less than a decade, has mainly transpired at reputable regional institutions far afield in Europe. A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Heyward moved away for college first to Boston, followed by postgraduate studies in London.
Apart from a stint in Los Angeles as a conducting fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 2017-18 season, Heyward has been fully based in Europe.
Fresh from debuting with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Lincoln Center, Heyward has returned to Baltimore to lead the full orchestra for the first time since last year’s appointment. Heyward will conduct the BSO in Rachmaninoff’s reflective, nostalgic Symphonic Dances, performed as part of a season-long celebration of the Russian-American Romanticism giant’s 150th birthday.
Rachmaninoff is paired with the heroic chords and spine-tingling ride of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, featuring soloist Behzod Abduraimov.
The two Russian Romantic works will be rounded out by Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral, a cathartic and moving one-movement work written at the turn of the millennium to commemorate the death of the composer’s younger brother.
Thursday, May 4, at 8 p.m. at the Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, Bethesda. Also Saturday, May 6, at 8 p.m., and Sunday, May 7, at 3 p.m. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St., Baltimore.
Two weeks later, Heyward will take to the BSO podium once again, this time for a wide-ranging program of musical adventure, from the ethereal The Imagined Forest by British composer Grace-Evangeline Mason to Tchaikovsky’s passionate final work, the Pathétique Symphony No. 6.
The bill also includes the Double Bass Concerto written and performed by another twentysomething artist, American virtuoso Xavier Foley, who is described in a press release as employing “every measure of his creativity and charisma to make the overlooked double bass a conduit for joy and justice.”
Friday, May 19, at 8 p.m., and Sunday, May 21, at 3 p.m. Meyerhoff. Also Saturday, May 20, at 8 p.m. Strathmore.
Tickets are $35 to $90 per program. Visit www.bsomusic.org.
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