MSO5: 2025

MARCH — MAY 2025

ENCORE

Volume 43 No. 5

14 March 28 - 30 — Pops

Twist & Shout: The Music of The Beatles

19 April 4 & 5 — Classics

Copland’s Appalachian Spring

25 April 11 - 13 — Classics Brahms Requiem

31 April 26 - 27 — Classics

Dinur Conducts Tchaikovsky

41 May 3 — Special Ben Folds with the MSO

45 May 9 - 10 — Classics Pines of Rome

5 Orchestra Roster

7 Music Director

8 Music Director Laureate

9 Principal Pops Conductor

10 Assistant Conductor

11 Milwaukee Symphony Chorus

58 MSO Endowment/ Musical Legacy Society

59 Annual Fund

62 Gala Paddle Raisers/Gala Sponsors/ Corporate & Foundation

63 Matching Gifts/Golden Note Partners/ Marquee Circle/Tributes

66 MSO Board of Directors

67 MSO Administration

This program is produced and published by ENCORE PLAYBILLS. To advertise in any of the following programs:

• Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra

• Florentine Opera

• Milwaukee Ballet

• Marcus Performing Arts Center Broadway Series

• Skylight Music Theatre

• Milwaukee Repertory Theater

• Sharon Lynne Wilson Center

Please contact: Scott Howland at 414-469-7779 scott.encore@att.net

MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 212 West Wisconsin Avenue Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53203 414-291-6010 | mso.org

Connect with us! MSOrchestra MilwSymphOrch @MilwSymphOrch

The MSO and the Bradley Symphony Center have partnered with KultureCity to improve our ability to assist and accommodate guests with sensory needs. For information on available resources, visit mso.org.

FINE ARTS QUARTET

Monday, May 5 | 7 PM St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Arriaga, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn

Friday, May 9 | 7:30 PM UW-Milwaukee Recital Hall

Beethoven and Mendelssohn

Sunday, May 11 | 3 PM UW-Milwaukee Helene Zelazo Center

Mozart, Schumann and Dvo ř ák

MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, led by Music Director Ken-David Masur, is among the finest orchestras in the nation and the largest cultural institution in Wisconsin. Since its inception in 1959, the MSO has found innovative ways to give music a home in the region, develop music appreciation and talent among area youth, and raise the national reputation of Milwaukee.

The MSO’s full-time professional musicians perform over 135 classics, pops, family, education, and community concerts each season in venues throughout the state. A pioneer among American orchestras, the MSO has performed world and American premieres of works by John Adams, Roberto Sierra, Philip Glass, Geoffrey Gordon, Marc Neikrug, Camille Pépin, Matthias Pintscher, and Dobrinka Tabakova, as well as garnered national recognition as the first American orchestra to offer live recordings on iTunes.

In January of 2021, the MSO completed a years-long project to restore and renovate a former movie palace in the heart of downtown Milwaukee. The Bradley Symphony Center officially opened to audiences in October 2021. This project has sparked a renewal on West Wisconsin Avenue and continues to be a catalyst in the community.

The MSO’s standard of excellence extends beyond the concert hall and into the community, reaching more than 30,000 children and their families through its Arts in Community Education (ACE) program, Youth and Teen concerts, Family Series, and Meet the Music pre-concert talks. Celebrating its 35th year, the nationally recognized ACE program integrates arts education across all subjects and disciplines, providing opportunities for students when budget cuts may eliminate arts programming. The program provides lesson plans and supporting materials, classroom visits from MSO musician ensembles and artists from local organizations, and an MSO concert tailored to each grade level. This season, more than 5,900 students and 500 teachers and faculty are expected to participate in ACE both in person and in a virtual format.

Photo by Jonathan Kirn

2024.25 SEASON

KEN-DAVID MASUR

Music Director

Polly and Bill Van Dyke

Music Director Chair

EDO DE WAART

Music Director Laureate

BYRON STRIPLING

Principal Pops Conductor

Stein Family Foundation Principal Pops

Conductor Chair

RYAN TANI

Assistant Conductor

CHERYL FRAZES HILL

Chorus Director

Margaret Hawkins Chorus Director Chair

TIMOTHY J. BENSON

Assistant Chorus Director

FIRST VIOLINS

Jinwoo Lee, Concertmaster, Charles and Marie Caestecker Concertmaster Chair

Ilana Setapen, First Associate Concertmaster, Thora M. Vervoren First Associate Concertmaster Chair

Jeanyi Kim, Associate Concertmaster

Alexander Ayers

Autumn Chodorowski

Yuka Kadota

Sheena Lan**

Elliot Lee**

Dylana Leung

Kyung Ah Oh

Lijia Phang

Yuanhui Fiona Zheng

SECOND VIOLINS

Jennifer Startt, Principal, Andrea and Woodrow Leung Second Violin Chair

Ji-Yeon Lee, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)

John Bian, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)*

Hyewon Kim, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair)

Glenn Asch

Lisa Johnson Fuller

Clay Hancock

Paul Hauer

Janis Sakai**

Mary Terranova

VIOLAS

Robert Levine, Principal, Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family Principal Viola Chair

Samantha Rodriguez, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair), Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri Viola Chair

Alejandro Duque, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair)

Elizabeth Breslin

Georgi Dimitrov

Nathan Hackett

Erin H. Pipal

CELLOS

Susan Babini, Principal, Dorothea C. Mayer Cello Chair

Shinae Ra, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)

Scott Tisdel, Associate Principal Emeritus

Madeleine Kabat

Peter Szczepanek

Peter J. Thomas

Adrien Zitoun

BASSES

Principal, Donald B. Abert Bass Chair

Andrew Raciti, Acting Principal

Nash Tomey, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair)

Brittany Conrad

Omar Haffar**

Paris Myers

HARP

Julia Coronelli, Principal, Walter Schroeder Harp Chair

FLUTES

Sonora Slocum, Principal, Margaret and Roy Butter Flute Chair

Heather Zinninger, Assistant Principal

Jennifer Bouton Schaub

PICCOLO

Jennifer Bouton Schaub

OBOES

Katherine Young Steele, Principal, Milwaukee Symphony League Oboe Chair

Kevin Pearl, Assistant Principal

Margaret Butler

ENGLISH HORN

Margaret Butler, Philip and Beatrice Blank English Horn Chair in memoriam to John Martin

CLARINETS

Todd Levy, Principal, Franklyn Esenberg Clarinet Chair

Jay Shankar, Assistant Principal, Donald and Ruth P. Taylor Assistant Principal Clarinet Chair

Besnik Abrashi

E-FLAT CLARINET

Jay Shankar

BASS CLARINET

Besnik Abrashi

BASSOONS

Catherine Van Handel, Principal, Muriel C. and John D. Silbar Family Bassoon Chair

Rudi Heinrich, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)

Beth W. Giacobassi

CONTRABASSOON

Beth W. Giacobassi

HORNS

Matthew Annin, Principal, Krause Family French Horn Chair

Krystof Pipal, Associate Principal

Dietrich Hemann, Andy Nunemaker French Horn Chair

Darcy Hamlin

Scott Sanders

TRUMPETS

Matthew Ernst, Principal, Walter L. Robb Family Trumpet Chair

David Cohen, Associate Principal, Martin J. Krebs Associate Principal Trumpet Chair

Tim McCarthy, Fred Fuller Trumpet Chair

TROMBONES

Megumi Kanda, Principal, Marjorie Tiefenthaler

Trombone Chair

Kirk Ferguson, Assistant Principal

BASS TROMBONE

John Thevenet, Richard M. Kimball Bass Trombone Chair

TUBA

Robyn Black, Principal, John and Judith Simonitsch Tuba Chair

TIMPANI

Dean Borghesani, Principal

Chris Riggs, Assistant Principal

PERCUSSION

Robert Klieger, Principal

Chris Riggs

PIANO

Melitta S. Pick Endowed Piano Chair

PERSONNEL

Antonio Padilla Denis, Director of Orchestra Personnel

Paris Myers, Hiring Coordinator

LIBRARIANS

Paul Beck, Principal Librarian, James E. Van Ess Principal Librarian Chair

Matthew Geise, Assistant Librarian & Media Archivist

PRODUCTION

Tristan Wallace, Production Manager/ Live Audio

Lisa Sottile, Production Stage Manager

* Leave of Absence 2024.25 Season

** Acting member of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra 2024.25 Season

on the shores of Lake Michigan on the East Side of Milwaukee, Ovation Communities offers independent and assisted living apartments as well as

KEN-DAVID MASUR, MUSIC DIRECTOR

Hailed as “fearless, bold, and a life-force” (San Diego Union-Tribune) and “a brilliant and commanding conductor with unmistakable charisma” (Leipziger Volkszeitung), Ken-David Masur is celebrating his sixth season as music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony’s Civic Orchestra.

Masur’s tenure in Milwaukee has been notable for innovative thematic programming, including a festival celebrating the music of the 1930s, when the Bradley Symphony Center was built; the Water Festival, which highlighted local community partners whose work centers on water conservation and education; and last season’s city-wide Bach Festival, celebrating the abiding appeal of J.S. Bach’s music in an ever-changing world. He has also instituted a multi-season artistic partnership program, and he has led highly acclaimed performances of major choral works, including a semistaged production of Peer Gynt. This season, which celebrates the eternal interplay between words and music, he continues an artistic partnership with bass-baritone Dashon Burton and conducts Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. In Chicago, Masur leads the Civic Orchestra, the premiere training orchestra of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in a variety of programs, including an annual Bach Marathon.

In the summer of 2024, Masur made his debut at the Oregon Bach Festival and returned to the Tanglewood Festival, where he conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra, both in a John Williams film night and in a program honoring the BSO’s longtime music director Seiji Ozawa. This season also features return appearances with the Louisville Orchestra, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, and the Omaha Symphony, and in September, Masur made his subscription debut with the New York Philharmonic. The following month, he made his subscription debut with the Chicago Symphony in a program featuring soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Masur has conducted distinguished orchestras around the world, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, National, and San Francisco symphonies, l’Orchestre National de France, Minnesota Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic, Norway’s Kristiansand Symphony, and Tokyo’s Yomiuri Nippon Symphony. He has also made regular appearances at Ravinia, Tanglewood, the Hollywood Bowl, Grant Park, and international festivals including Verbier. Previously, Masur was associate conductor of the Boston Symphony, principal guest conductor of the Munich Symphony, associate conductor of the San Diego Symphony, and resident conductor of the San Antonio Symphony.

Music education and working with the next generation of young artists are of major importance to Masur. In addition to his work with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, he has conducted orchestras and led masterclasses at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts, New England Conservatory, Manhattan School of Music, Boston University, Boston Conservatory, Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan Chamber Orchestra, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, and The Juilliard School, where he led the Juilliard Orchestra last season.

Masur is passionate about contemporary music and has conducted and commissioned dozens of new works, many of which have premiered at the Chelsea Music Festival, an annual summer festival in New York City founded and directed by Masur and his wife, pianist Melinda Lee Masur. The festival, which celebrated its 15th Anniversary in 2024, has been praised by The New York Times as a “gem of a series” and by Time Out New York as an “impressive addition to New York’s cultural ecosystem.”

Masur and his family are proud to call Milwaukee their home and enjoy exploring all the riches of the Third Coast.

Photo by Adam DeTour

EDO DE WAART, MUSIC DIRECTOR LAUREATE

Throughout his long and illustrious career, renowned Dutch conductor Edo de Waart has held a multitude of posts with orchestras around the world, including music directorships with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Antwerp Symphony, New Zealand Symphony, and Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and a chief conductorship with the De Nederlandse Opera and Santa Fe Opera.

Edo de Waart served as principal guest conductor of the San Diego Symphony, conductor laureate of both the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra and Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, and music director laureate of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

As an opera conductor, de Waart has enjoyed success in a large and varied repertoire in many of the world’s greatest opera houses. He has conducted at Bayreuth, Salzburg Festival, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Grand Théâtre de Genève, Opéra Bastille, Santa Fe Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera. With the aim of bringing opera to broader audiences where concert halls prevent full staging, he has, as music director in Milwaukee, Antwerp, and Hong Kong, often conducted semi-staged and opera in concert performances.

A renowned orchestral trainer, he has been involved with projects working with talented young players at the Juilliard and Colburn schools and the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara.

Edo de Waart’s extensive catalogue encompasses releases for Philips, Virgin, EMI, Telarc, and RCA. Recent recordings include Henderickx’s Symphony No. 1 and Oboe Concerto, Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, and Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, all with the Royal Flemish Philharmonic.

Beginning his career as an assistant conductor to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic, de Waart then returned to Holland, where he was appointed assistant conductor to Bernard Haitink at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Edo de Waart has received a number of awards for his musical achievements, including becoming a Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion and an Honorary Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

Photo by Jesse Willems

BYRON STRIPLING, PRINCIPAL POPS CONDUCTOR

With a contagious smile and captivating charm, conductor, trumpet virtuoso, singer, and actor Byron Stripling ignites audiences across the globe. In 2024, Stripling was named Stein Family Foundation Principal Pops Conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Stripling is also principal pops conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and he currently serves as artistic director and conductor of the highly acclaimed Columbus Jazz Orchestra. Stripling’s baton has led countless orchestras throughout the United States and Canada, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood and the orchestras of San Diego, St. Louis, Virginia, Toronto, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Fort Worth, Rochester, Buffalo, Florida, Portland, and Sarasota, to name a few.

As a soloist with the Boston Pops, Stripling has performed frequently under the baton of Keith Lockhart, including as the featured soloist on the PBS television special Evening at Pops with conductors John Williams and Mr. Lockhart.

Since his Carnegie Hall debut with Skitch Henderson and the New York Pops, Stripling has become a pops orchestra favorite throughout the country, soloing with over 100 orchestras around the world. He has been a featured soloist at the Hollywood Bowl and performs at festivals around the world.

An accomplished actor and singer, Stripling was chosen, following a worldwide search, to star in the lead role of the Broadway-bound musical Satchmo. Many will remember his featured cameo performance in the television movie The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and his critically acclaimed virtuoso trumpet and riotous comedic performance in the 42nd Street production of From Second Avenue to Broadway.

Television viewers have enjoyed his work as soloist on the worldwide telecast of The Grammy Awards. Millions have heard his trumpet and voice on television commercials, TV theme songs including 20/20 and CNN, and soundtracks of favorite movies. In addition to multiple recordings with his quintet and work with artists from Tony Bennett to Whitney Houston, his prolific recording career includes hundreds of albums with the greatest pop, Broadway, soul, and jazz artists of all time.

Stripling earned his stripes as lead trumpeter and soloist with the Count Basie Orchestra under the direction of Thad Jones and Frank Foster. He has also played and recorded extensively with the bands of Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Herman, Dave Brubeck, Lionel Hampton, Clark Terry, Louis Bellson, and Buck Clayton in addition to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, The Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, and The GRP All Star Big Band.

Stripling is devoted to giving back and supports several philanthropic organizations, including the United Way and The Community Shelter Board. He also enjoys sharing the power of music through seminars and master classes at colleges, universities, conservatories, and high schools.

Stripling was educated at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and the Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan. One of his greatest joys is to return, periodically, to Eastman and Interlochen as a special guest lecturer.

A resident of Ohio, Stripling lives in the country with his wife Alexis, a former dancer, writer, and poet and their beautiful daughters.

Photo by John Abbott

RYAN TANI, ASSISTANT CONDUCTOR

Ryan Tani is in his second season as assistant conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. In 2021, he completed his two-year tenure as the Orchestral Conducting Fellow for the Yale Philharmonia under Music Director Peter Oundjian, where he was the recipient of the Dean’s Prize for artistic excellence in his graduating class. Committed to meaningful community music-making in the state of Montana, Tani has directed the Bozeman Chamber Orchestra, Bozeman Symphonic Choir, Second String Orchestra, and MSU Symphony Orchestras. He frequently serves as cover conductor for the St. Louis, Colorado, and Bozeman symphonies and recently served on the faculty at the Montana State University School of Music.

Tani recently concluded his tenure as music director of the Occasional Symphony in Baltimore. A fierce advocate of new music, Tani curated over 20 commissions from Baltimore-based composers during his fouryear directorship of OS. As resident conductor of the New Music New Haven series, he has collaborated, under the guidance of Aaron Jay Kernis, with Yale University composition students and faculty.

Tani is also a graduate of the Peabody Institute, where he studied conducting with Marin Alsop and Markand Thakar, and of the University of Southern California, where he studied voice with Gary Glaze. In 2015, he was declared the winner of the ACDA Undergraduate Student Conducting Competition at their national conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. In addition to his studies at Yale and Peabody, Tani has also studied conducting with Larry Rachleff, Donald Schleicher, Gerard Schwarz, Grant Cooper, and José-Luis Novo. Tani currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he can be found in the park with his dog, playing board games with friends and family, in the library with a good book, or in the practice room with his violin.

MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY CHORUS

The Milwaukee Symphony Chorus, founded in 1976, is known and respected as one of the finest choruses in the country. Under the direction of Dr. Cheryl Frazes Hill, the 2024-25 season with the MSO includes works by Poulenc, Brahms, Wagner, Verdi, and Mozart, as well as Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and the Hometown Holiday Pops performances.

The 150-member chorus has been praised by reviewers for “technical agility,” “remarkable ensemble cohesion,” and “tremendous clarity.” In addition to performances with the MSO, the chorus has appeared on public television and recorded performances for radio stations throughout the country. The chorus has performed a cappella concerts to sold-out audiences and has made guest appearances with other performing arts groups, including Present Music, Milwaukee Ballet, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The chorus has also made appearances at suburban Chicago’s famed Ravinia Festival.

The Margaret Hawkins Chorus Director Chair was funded by a chorus-led campaign during the ensemble’s 30th anniversary season in 2006, in honor of the founding chorus director, Margaret Hawkins.

Comprised of teachers, lawyers, students, doctors, musicians, homemakers, and more, each of its members brings not only musical quality, but a sheer love of music to their task. “We have the best seats in the house,” one member said, a sentiment echoed throughout the membership. Please visit mso.org/chorus for more information on becoming a part of the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus.

Photo by Jonathan Kirn

CHORUS MEMBERS & STAFF

Jahnavi Acharya

Anna Aiuppa

Mia Akers

Laura Albright-Wengler

Anthony Andronczyk

James Anello

u Thomas R. Bagwell

Evan Bagwell

Barbara Barth Czarkowski

Marshall Beckman

Yacob Bennett

Emily Bergeron

JoAnn Berk

Edward Blumenthal

Jillian Boes

u Scott Bolens

Madison Bolt

Neil R. Brooks

Michelle Budny

Noah Buhle

Ellen N. Burmeister

Gabrielle Campbell

Katie Cantwell

Elise Cismesia

Ian Clark

Sarah M. Cook

Amanda Coplan

Sarah Culhane

Phoebe Dawsey

Colin Destache

Rebeca Dishaw

Megan Kathleen Dixson

Rachel Dutler

James Edgar

Joe Ehlinger

Katelyn Farebrother

Michael Faust

Catherine Fettig

Marty Foral

STAFF

Robert Friebus

u Karen Frink

Maria Fuller

James T. Gallup

Jonathan Gaston-Falk

Willie Gesch

Samantha Gibson

Jessica Golinski

Mark R. Hagner

Mary Hamlin

Beth Harenda

u Karen Heins

Mary Catherine Helgren

Kurt Hellermann

Melissa Kay Herbst

Nathan Hickox-Young

Eric Hickson

Michelle Hiebert

Laura Hochmuth

Amy Hudson

Matthew Hunt

Stan Husi

u Tina Itson

• Christine Jameson

Paula J. Jeske

John Jorgensen

Caitleen Kahn

• Heidi Kastern

Christin Kieckhafer

Robert Knier

Jill Kortebein

Kaleigh KozakLichtman

Kyle J. Kramer

u Joseph M. Krechel

Julia M. Kreitzer

Savannah Grace

Kroeger

• Harry Krueger

Nathan Krueger

Cheryl Frazes Hill, chorus director

Timothy J. Benson, assistant director

Terree Shofner-Emrich, primary pianist

Melissa Cardamone, Jeong-In Kim, rehearsal pianists

Darwin J. Sanders, language/diction coach

Christina Williams, chorus manager

Benjamin Kuhlmann

Rick Landin

Alexandra Lerch-Gaggl

Nicholas Lin

Robert Lochhead

Kristine Lorbeske

Grace Majewski

Douglas R. Marx

Joy Mast

Justin J. Maurer

Betsy McCool

Shannon McMullen

Hilary Merline

Kathleen O. Miller

Megan Miller

Bailey Moorhead

Jennifer Mueller

Lucia Muniagurria

Matthew Neu

Kristin Nikkel

Jason Niles

Alice Nuteson

Robert Paddock

Katherine Petersen

Elizabeth Phillips

R. Scott Pierce

u Jessica E. Pihart

Olivia Pogodzinski

Bianca Pratte

Kaitlin Quigley

Mary E. Rafel

Jason Reuschlein

Rehanna Rexroat

James Reynolds

Marc Charles Ricard

Amanda Robison

Veronica Samiec

u Bridget Sampson

James Sampson

Joshua S. Samson

Darwin J. Sanders

Alana Sawall

John T. Schilling

Sarah Schmeiser

Rand C. Schmidt

Randy Schmidt u Allison Schnier

Andrew T. Schramm

Matthew Seider

Bennett Shebesta u Hannah Sheppard

David Siegworth

Bruce Soto u Joel P. Spiess

u Todd Stacey u Donald E. Stettler

Scott Stieg

Donna Stresing

Laura Sufferling

Ashley Ellen Suresh

Joseph Thiel

Dean-Yar Tigrani

Clare Urbanski

Matthew Van Hecke

Tess Weinkauf

Emma Mingesz Weiss

Michael Werni

Erin Weyers

Charles T. White

Christina Williams

Emilie Williams

Sally Salkowski Witte

Kevin R. Woller

Rachel Yap

James Yarbrough

Jamie Mae Yu

Michele Zampino

Katarzyna Zawislak

Stephanie Zimmer

u Section Leader

• Librarian

DR. CHERYL FRAZES HILL, CHORUS DIRECTOR

Dr. Cheryl Frazes Hill is now in her eighth season as director of the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus. In addition to her role in Milwaukee, she is the associate conductor of the Chicago Symphony Chorus. Frazes Hill is professor emerita at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts, where she served for 20 years as director of choral activities and head of music education. During the 2024-25 season, Frazes Hill will prepare the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus for classical performances of Poulenc’s Gloria, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, and Brahms’s German Requiem, concluding with Great Moments in Grand Opera.

In her role as the Chicago Symphony Chorus associate conductor, she has prepared the chorus for Maestros Alsop, Boulez, Barenboim, Conlon, Levine, Mehta, Salonen, Tilson Thomas, and many others. Recordings of Frazes Hill’s chorus preparations on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra label include Beethoven, A Tribute to Daniel Barenboim, and Chicago Symphony Chorus: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Under her direction, the Roosevelt University choruses have been featured in prestigious and diverse events, including appearances at national and regional music conferences and performances with professional orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Sinfonietta, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and the Illinois Philharmonic. The Roosevelt Conservatory Chorus received enthusiastic reviews for their American premiere of Jacob ter Veldhuis’s Mountaintop. Other recent performances have included the internationally acclaimed production of Defiant Requiem and three appearances with The Rolling Stones during a recent United States concert tour.

Frazes Hill received her master’s and doctoral degrees in conducting from Northwestern University and bachelor’s degrees in voice and music education from the University of Illinois. An accomplished vocalist, she is a featured soloist in the Grammy-nominated recording CBS Masterworks release Mozart: Music for Basset Horns. An award-winning conductor and educator, Frazes Hill recently received the ACDA Harold Decker Conducting Award, the Mary Hoffman Music Educators Award, and in past years, the Commendation of Excellence in Teaching from the Golden Apple Foundation, the Illinois Governor’s Award, Roosevelt University’s Presidential Award for Social Justice, the Northwestern University Alumni Merit Award, and the Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Chicago, among others.

Frazes Hill’s recently released book, Margaret Hillis: Unsung Pioneer, a biography of the famed female conductor, received a commendation from the 2023 Midwest Book Awards. Frazes Hill is nationally published on topics of her research in choral conducting and music education. A frequent guest conductor, clinician, and guest speaker, Frazes Hill regularly collaborates with Maestro Marin Alsop at the Ravinia Festival’s Breaking Barriers series, providing workshops for Taki Alsop women conducting fellows. Upcoming appearances this season include a presentation at the American Choral Directors National Conference and a three-day residency at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.

TWIST & SHOUT: THE MUSIC OF THE BEATLES – A SYMPHONIC EXPERIENCE

a Schirmer Theatrical/Greenberg Artists co-production Arrangements by Jeff Tyzik

Friday, March 28, 2025 at 7:30 pm

Saturday, March 29, 2025 at 7:30 pm

Sunday, March 30, 2025 at 2:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Byron Stripling, conductor

Daniel Berryman, vocals

Tim Lappin, bass

Paul Loren, vocals and keyboard

Emilio Navaira, drums

Oscar Rodriguez, guitar

Colin Smith, vocals and guitar

SHE LOVES YOU, originally released as a single in 1963 and on Meet the Beatles! (1964)

PLEASE PLEASE ME, originally released as a single in 1963 and on Please Please Me (1963)

DRIVE MY CAR, originally released on Rubber Soul (1965)

AND I LOVE HER, originally released as a single and on A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

NORWEGIAN WOOD (THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN), originally released on Rubber Soul (1965)

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW A SECRET, originally released on Please Please Me (1964)

EIGHT DAYS A WEEK, originally released on Beatles for Sale (1964)

MICHELLE, originally released on Rubber Soul (1965)

ELEANOR RIGBY, originally released as a single and on Revolver (1966)

IF I FELL, originally released as a single and on A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

I FEEL FINE, originally released as a single and on Beatles for Sale (1964)

YOU REALLY GOT A HOLD ON ME, released by The Beatles on With the Beatles (1963) written by Smokey Robinson, originally released by The Miracles (1962)

ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC, released by The Beatles on Beatles for Sale (1964) written by Chuck Berry, originally written and recorded by Chuck Berry (1957)

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE, originally released as a single in 1967

TWIST & SHOUT, released by The Beatles on Please Please Me (1963) written by Bert Russell and Phil Medley, originally released by The Top Notes (1961)

INTERMISSION

DAY TRIPPER, originally released as a single in 1965 and on Yesterday and Today (1966)

WE CAN WORK IT OUT, originally released as a single in 1965 and on Yesterday and Today (1966)

GOT TO GET YOU INTO MY LIFE, originally released on Revolver (1966)

YESTERDAY, originally released on Help! (1965)

NOWHERE MAN, originally released on Rubber Soul (1965)

CAN’T BUY ME LOVE, originally released as a single and on A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, originally released on A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

HERE, THERE & EVERYWHERE, originally released on Revolver (1966)

LOVE ME DO, originally released as a single in 1962 and on Please Please Me (1963)

YOU CAN’T DO THAT, originally released as a single and on A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

YELLOW SUBMARINE, originally released as a single and on Revolver (1966)

HEY JUDE, originally released as a single in 1968

I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND, originally released as a single in 1963

ALL ARRANGEMENTS ARE LICENSED BY SCHIRMER THEATRICAL, LLC

All music under license from Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and MPL. All photos under license from The Beatles Book Photo Library. The show is not endorsed by or connected to Apple Corps or The Beatles.

Creative Team

Robert Thompson, Creative Producer

Jeff Tyzik, Producer & Arranger

Jami Greenberg, Producer & Booking Agent

Betsey Perlmutter, Producer

Alex Kosick, Associate Producer

A portion of the proceeds from productions of Twist & Shout: The Music of The Beatles –A Symphonic Experience will be donated to the Penny Lane Development Trust (PLDT), a charitable community centre located in Liverpool, UK, offering an engaging environment to tourists and locals alike. In addition to hosting exercise classes and youth projects in theatre and music, the Trust features a number of Beatles-inspired installations including a “Penny Lane Wonderwall,” a “Sign Wall,” “Octopus Garden,” and “Penny Lane Gate.”

The length of this concert is approximately 2 hours. All programs are subject to change.

Guest Artist Biographies

PAUL LOREN

Leading a new generation of soulful crooners, Paul Loren is a singer, songwriter, producer, and consummate entertainer. A native New Yorker, Loren was raised on the rich legacy of soul, classic pop, and the Great American Songbook, and in those musical idioms, he feels most at home. Taking elements from early R&B, jazz, and Brill Building pop, he crafts his music with an ear towards timelessness.

Loren’s appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon showcased his talents for millions of viewers. In addition, Loren recently landed his first television sync on NBC’s Mysteries of Laura, performed on the nationally syndicated radio show The Weekend with Ed Kalegi, has partnered with The Ryan Seacrest Foundation, showcased at the headquarters of the worldrenowned Leo Burnett agency in Chicago, and had the unique honor of performing at the legendary STAX Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. While in Memphis, Loren had the rare opportunity to record in the world-renowned Sun Studio in the same room as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and many other pioneers of rock and roll music. Loren was also a finalist in the “Unsigned Only” singer-songwriter competition for 2018.

COLIN SMITH

With a career spanning over 20 years, Irish-born Colin Smith has led a musical life as varied as it is impressive. With his former band MrNorth, while on RCA, they toured extensively with the likes of The Who, Van Halen, Sheryl Crow, and Journey, among many others. As a solo artist, songs from his two records have been licensed to both movies and television alike. Smith has been seen in live collaborations with Alicia Keys and has worked multiple times on Saturday Night Live as the featured vocal talent. Smith has most recently been seen touring with Christina Aguilera, joining her on the Grammy Award-winning “Say Something” for audiences across the globe, as well as performing background vocals for the show. Smith splits his time between New York City and Los Angeles.

DANIEL BERRYMAN

Daniel Berryman was most recently seen with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra celebrating 100 years of the MUNY under the direction of Ben Whitely. Credits include Call Me Madame, Sweeney Todd, The Golden Apple, The Fantasticks, Les Misérables, The Sound of Music, Hello, Dolly!, The Most Happy Fella, and Rent. Daniel received a BFA in musical theater from the University of Michigan.

Guest Artist Biographies

OSCAR RODRIGUEZ

Oscar Albis Rodriguez is a producer, engineer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter. He grew up in Rhode Island, graduated with a jazz guitar degree from NYU, and made Brooklyn his home base in 2000. Since then, he’s played across North America with his bands De La Hoya and Nakatomi Plaza, freelanced with innumerable NYC singer-songwriters and bands, performed in Broadway musicals (most notably Hedwig and the Angry Inch), and toured the world with the Grammy Award-winning duo A Great Big World.

Rodriguez started producing and engineering at Russell Street Recording in 2013 and soon after began collaborating with Zach Jones. Since then, the two have played in each other’s bands (Albis and Zach Jones & The Tricky Bits) and have co-produced records for artists such as Jenny Owen Youngs, Elizabeth Wyld, Hannah Winkler, Talay, Jesse Dylan & The Scaredy Cats, and A Great Big World. On his own, Rodriguez’s production credits include Jukebox The Ghost, Jon The Guilt, and Rikki Will. He’s also written and produced hundreds of songs for the YouTube Audio Library, the Facebook Sound Collection, Marmoset Music, and Premium Beat, and is a co-founder of the music and media collective Track Tribe.

EMILIO NAVAIRA

Emilio Navaira IV was born in San Antonio, Texas, and grew up on stage. He started playing with his father — Tejano icon Emilio Navaira — at an early age and, along with his brother Diego, was soon fronting his own projects across the U.S. Their band, The Last Bandoleros, has toured the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. They’ve shared the bill with artists like The Mavericks, Cheap Trick, Los Lobos, Miley Cyrus, Guns N’ Roses, Shaggy, and Sting.

TIM LAPPIN

Tim Lappin has been touring the world playing with the likes of Chet Faker, John Splithoff, Adam Green, and many more over his career. His original indie rock project, Casual Male, just released their first full length record, Casual Male, now available everywhere.

COPLAND’S APPALACHIAN SPRING

Friday, April 4, 2025 at 11:15 am

Saturday, April 5, 2025 at 7:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ryan Tani, conductor

Ji Su Jung, marimba

AARON COPLAND

Suite from Appalachian Spring (1945)

KEVIN PUTS

Marimba Concerto

I. “terrific sun on the brink”

II. “into the quick of losses”

III. “logarithms, exponents, the damnedest of metaphors” Ji Su Jung, marimba

INTERMISSION

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Opus 60

I. Adagio – Allegro vivace

II. Adagio

III. Allegro vivace

IV. Allegro ma non troppo

The 2024.25 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION

The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. All programs are subject to change.

Guest Artist Biographies

JI SU JUNG

The first percussionist to ever receive the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, Ji Su Jung has a distinctive musical voice that is instantly recognizable for its depth and lyricism. She has performed concertos with such leading orchestras and conductors as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with Marin Alsop, the Houston Symphony with Daniel Hege, the Aspen Festival Orchestra with Michael Stern, the Colorado Symphony and the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra with Peter Oundjian, and the Colorado Springs Philharmonic with JoAnn Falletta. This season, she performs concerto engagements with the U.S. Air Force Band and Indianapolis and Milwaukee symphonies, as well as in collaborative and solo recitals in Boston, Philadelphia, Palm Beach, Newport, Rhode Island, and Rapid City, South Dakota. Highlights of last season include performances with the Sarasota Orchestra and Wyoming Symphony, as well as at the Korean Embassy in Washington, D.C. Jung’s recording of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts’s marimba concerto, performed with the Baltimore Symphony and Marin Alsop, was released on the Naxos label in February 2023. Pizzicato said of the recording that “Jung elicits wide spectrums from the work with superior technical execution.” Jung has performed solo recitals in such venues as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She frequently performs with The Percussion Collective, an all-star collection of young percussionists, of which she is a core member.

Recognized internationally as a pedagogue, Jung serves on the faculties of the Curtis Institute of Music and the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University. Jung holds a bachelor’s degree from the Peabody Institute and a master’s degree and an artist diploma from the Yale School of Music. Jung is a musical ambassador for Adams Percussion, Pearl/Adams, and Vic Firth percussion companies.

Ji Su Jung is represented by Curtis Artist Management at the Curtis Institute of Music.

Program notes by David Jensen

AARON COPLAND

Born 14 November 1900; New York City, New York Died 2 December 1990; North Tarrytown, New York

Suite from Appalachian Spring (1945)

Composed: June 1943 – 1944; suite compiled in May 1945

First performance: 30 October 1944 (ballet); Louis Horst, conductor; Martha Graham Dance Company; 4 October 1945 (suite); Artur Rodziński, conductor; New York Philharmonic

Last MSO performance: 19 June 2016; Jeffrey Kahane, conductor

Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 trombones; timpani; percussion (bass drum, claves, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tabor, triangle, wood block, xylophone); harp; piano; strings

Approximate duration: 24 minutes

Deeply affected by the political circumstances of his time, Copland spent the late 1930s and early 1940s frankly addressing the social concerns of his generation. In response to the Great Depression and the clouds of war looming on the world’s horizon, he produced a series of works for the stage distinguished by their simple, accessible musical aesthetics and direct narratives with the aim of reaching the general public, including his opera The Second Hurricane and the ballets El Salón México and Billy the Kid Accused by his contemporaries of indulging popular tastes, Copland replied that “The composer who is frightened of losing his artistic integrity through contact with a mass audience is no longer aware of the meaning of the word art.”

During the last years of World War II, he began collaborating with the American dancer Martha Graham, who had been commissioning new scores for her all-female ensemble during the 1930s. Her scenarios had centered primarily around American cultural history, but her first request was for an adaption of the Medea mythology, which Copland declined. Eric Hawkins, the first male dancer to join the Martha Graham Dance Company, approached Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge the following year to negotiate better funding. Doubling his fee and offering him a joint premiere with the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, Copland agreed to the project, and by summer, Graham was mailing him new scripts from New York for consideration.

Copland, then frequenting the West Coast and scoring Hollywood productions, composed the music from a continent away as the two finessed the particulars of the plot. A proposal entitled “House of Victory” was twice revised for a total of three working scripts, which eventually yielded character archetypes common to the American imagination: a pioneer woman, a young couple, and a revivalist preacher and his disciples. Taking place over the course of a wedding day in an antebellum American settlement, the lovers’ reverie is interrupted by a presentiment of war. Gathering in prayer, the community finds solace in a revival meeting, the confidence of the townspeople is restored, and the newlyweds come to rest in their new home.

The rustic, pared-down music features what composer Virgil Thomson described as “plain, cleancolored, deeply imaginative” orchestration; a stipulation of the original commission had limited Copland to a chamber orchestra of 13 musicians. The Shaker melody “Simple Gifts” permeates the score, which, supported by Copland’s spacious, glowing harmonies, invokes the atmosphere of a simpler, preindustrial America. Copland revised and rearranged the ballet several times, but the orchestral suite he prepared in May 1945, heard on this weekend’s program, enjoys the most enduring popularity. Appalachian Spring earned Copland the Pulitzer Prize the same week as the ballet’s New York premiere, which took place just days after the Allied Nations declared victory over Germany in Europe.

KEVIN PUTS

Born 3 January 1972; St. Louis, Missouri

Marimba Concerto

Composed: 1997

First performance: September 1997; Jamie Laredo, conductor; Makoto Nakura, marimba; Vermont Symphony Orchestra

Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere

Instrumentation: flute; piccolo; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; bassoon; contrabassoon; 2 horns; trumpet; percussion (xylophone); strings

Approximate duration: 21 minutes

Kevin Puts has, without question, secured his place in the firmament of American composers. A graduate of Yale University and the Eastman School of Music, his music has been premiered by the preeminent musical institutions of North America, including the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has served as composer in residence for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, received commissions from the Aspen Music Festival, the Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, and San Francisco symphonies, and held professorships at both the University of Texas at Austin and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. A prizewinner, his 2011 opera Silent Night, a dramatization of the 1914 “Christmas truce” between enemy forces during World War I, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, while his 2023 triple concerto for two violins, bass, and orchestra, Contact, received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

The first of his concertante works, the marimba concerto was composed while Puts was still a graduate student at the Eastman School of Music, the product of a joint commission from the Vermont Symphony Orchestra (who premiered the piece and subsequently toured it around Vermont) and the Kobe Ensemble of Japan. The concerto was written with marimba virtuoso Makoto Nakura in mind collaborations between the two had already resulted in several pieces of solo and chamber music during Puts’s student years, and Nakura would serve as soloist at the premiere in September 1997. Puts has observed that the music is characteristic of his “most direct and unguarded voice as a composer” and noted that the concerto, scored in the key of E-flat major, is inspired by and modeled upon several of Mozart’s piano concerti in the same key. The titles for each of the three sections are extracted from the poetry of his aunt, the American author Fleda Brown.

The lush, sweeping opening melody, according to Puts, was “probably inspired by my hearing a pianist warming up on the stage of the Eastman Theater as I passed through it on the way to a class.” The simple harmonic progression introduced at the beginning serves as the foundation for all of the soloist’s elaborations throughout the first movement, which draws to a close as an intimate, shimmering cadenza dissolves into a simplified restatement of the opening theme played by solo strings. Choral, four-voice textures supplied by the strings predominate in the solemn, introspective inner section as the soloist continually weaves glistening embroidery. The final movement, “an athletic moto perpetuo,” begins with distinctly articulated figures in the marimba and winds before gradually reintegrating the opening theme of the concerto, making for a cyclic design as the musical material coalesces in a particularly fresh and vibrant show of dexterity.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Born 17 December 1770; Bonn, Germany

Died 26 March 1827; Vienna, Austria

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Opus 60

Composed: Summer – Autumn 1806

First performance: March 1807; Ludwig van Beethoven, conductor; Palais Lobkowitz, Vienna

Last MSO performance: 20 November 2016; Edo de Waart, conductor

Instrumentation: flute; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; timpani; strings

Approximate duration: 34 minutes

Nestled between the revolutionary “Eroica” and the brazenly emotive fifth symphony, Beethoven’s fourth has suffered unfairly from its proximity to two of the most intensely inventive monoliths in the whole of Western music. A footnote in the literature of musicologists and historians, the fourth welds together what has come to be described as Beethoven’s “symphonic ideal” the newly expanded musical structures, the assimilation of musical materials across multiple movements, the psychological profiles implied by the imposing stature of the music with a relentless optimism that pervades every page of the score.

Emerging from a protracted struggle to complete his only opera, Fidelio, Beethoven spent the summer of 1806 in Silesia at the country estate of his patron, Prince Lichnowsky. It was to be an extraordinarily productive period in his life, a swift succession of works flowing from his pen one after another (and often simultaneously). A note included in the margins of his sketches from that summer offers an illuminating perspective on his state of mind: “Just as you plunge yourself here into the whirlpool of society, so in spite of all social obstacles it is possible for you to write operas. Your deafness shall be a secret no more, even where art is involved!”

Lichnowsky introduced Beethoven to Count Franz von Oppersdorff, who, impressed by his private orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s second symphony, offered him a handsome sum to compose a new work for him, although the premiere would ultimately be given at the home of Prince Lobkowitz in Vienna the following spring (along with the overture to Coriolan and the fourth piano concerto, both products of that inspired season), another wealthy patron to whom Beethoven would eventually dedicate the fifth and sixth symphonies. As far as Lichnowsky is concerned, his patronage of that notoriously temperamental artist collapsed that same year when Beethoven, refusing to play for French soldiers visiting the nobleman, nearly smashed a chair over his head.

Belying the symphony’s spirited character, a tonally unsteady introduction wanders through distantly related key centers before erupting, triumphantly, in an unabashedly vivacious sonataallegro first movement. Hector Berlioz, in his essay on Beethoven’s symphonies, remarked that the ensuing adagio, in rondo form, was written by the archangel Michael, “so pure are the forms, so angelic the expression of the melody and so irresistibly tender… ” The following scherzo breaks with the traditionally threefold minuet-and-trio design, with two iterations of the trio surrounded by three of the scherzo, the last of which is condensed. The finale, impelled by the perpetual motion of semiquaver figures in the strings, is capped by a rhythmic augmentation of the main theme played at half tempo, punctuated by several Haydnesque pauses, before rounding off with an electrifying fortissimo gesture.

LIVE BEYOND THE ordinary

For those looking for their retirement adventure, Cedar Community is a destination location—nestled in the scenic Kettle Moraine, just minutes from West Bend’s vibrant downtown.

. Savor a meal at our full-service restaurant and cafés.

. Relax in the indoor pool and whirlpool.

. Create in our artisan spaces for pottery, stained glass, and woodworking.

. Stay active with fitness classes, scenic walking trails, and gardening.

. Be adventurous—boating, kayaking, and fishing on Big Cedar Lake.

BRAHMS REQUIEM

Friday, April 11, 2025 at 7:30 pm

Saturday, April 12, 2025 at 7:30 pm

Sunday, April 13, 2025 at 2:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ken-David Masur, conductor

Sonya Headlam, soprano

Dashon Burton, bass-baritone

Milwaukee Symphony Chorus

Cheryl Frazes Hill, director

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Ein deutsches Requiem [A German Requiem], Opus 45

I. Selig sind, die da Leid tragen [Blessed are they that mourn]

II. Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras [For all flesh is as grass]

III. Herr, lehre doch mich [Lord, teach me]

IV. Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen [How amiable are Thy tabernacles]

V. Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit [Ye now therefore have sorrow]

VI. Denn wir haben hie [For here have we no enduring city]

VII. Selig sind die Toten [Blessed are the dead]

Sonya Headlam, soprano

Dashon Burton, bass-baritone

Milwaukee Symphony Chorus

The 2024.25 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION

The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes. All programs are subject to change.

Guest Artist Biographies

DASHON BURTON

Hailed as an artist “alight with the spirit of the music” (Boston Globe), threetime Grammy-winning bass-baritone Dashon Burton has built a vibrant career, performing regularly throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Burton’s 2024-25 season begins with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, led by Gustavo Dudamel. Highlights of the season include returns to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for his second season as artistic partner, featuring Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Bach’s Ich habe genug, and Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, conducted by Ken-David Masur. He makes his Boston Symphony subscription debut with Michael Tilson Thomas’s Walt Whitman Songs, conducted by Teddy Abrams, and his Toronto Symphony debut in Mozart’s Requiem under Jukka-Pekka Saraste. Additional performances include the Brahms-Glanert Serious Songs and Mozart’s Requiem with the St. Louis Symphony under Stéphane Denève, Mozart’s Requiem with the Minnesota Orchestra and Thomas Søndergård, and Handel’s Messiah with the National Symphony, led by Masaaki Suzuki.

During the 2023-24 season, Burton collaborated frequently with Michael Tilson Thomas, including performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the San Francisco Symphony and Copland’s Old American Songs with the New World Symphony. He also sang Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the Washington Bach Consort, Handel’s Messiah with both the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the title role in Sweeney Todd at Vanderbilt University. With the Cleveland Orchestra, he appeared in a semi-staged production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. As the Milwaukee Symphony’s artistic partner, Burton joined Ken-David Masur for three subscription weeks.

A multiple award-winning artist, Burton earned his second Grammy Award in 2021 for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for his role in Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Prison with The Experiential Orchestra (Chandos). He won his first Grammy in 2013 as an original member of the groundbreaking ensemble Roomful of Teeth for their debut album of new commissions. In 2024, he earned his third Grammy for their latest recording, Rough Magic, featuring works by Caroline Shaw, William Brittelle, Peter Shin, and Eve Beglarian.

Burton’s discography also includes Songs of Struggle & Redemption: We Shall Overcome (Acis), the Grammy-nominated recording of Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road (Naxos), Holocaust, 1944 by Lori Laitman (Acis), and Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. His album of spirituals received critical acclaim, with The New York Times calling it “profoundly moving…a beautiful and lovable disc.”

Burton holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin College and Conservatory and a Master of Music degree from Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music. He is currently an assistant professor of voice at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

Dashon Burton appears by arrangement with Colbert Artists Management, Inc., 180 Elm Street, Ste I #221, Pittsfield, MA 01201-6552.

Guest Artist Biographies

SONYA HEADLAM

With a voice described as “golden” (Seen and Heard International), soprano Sonya Headlam enjoys a versatile career in ensemble and solo singing, and in repertoire spanning art song, opera, chamber music, concert works, and oratorio. She has performed with leading ensembles across the United States, including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, Apollo’s Fire, and New Jersey Symphony.

Celebrated for her heartfelt interpretations of Handel’s Messiah, Headlam devotes much of her career to performing works from the Western classical canon. She also explores music beyond the traditional repertoire, performing lesserknown works of the past alongside innovative contemporary compositions. This commitment is exemplified by her recent collaboration with the Raritan Players on a recording of songs by Ignatius Sancho and Reflections, a new composition by Trevor Weston based on Sancho’s words. Both recordings are anticipated to be released in 2025.

Additional recent highlights include Mozart’s Requiem with Downtown Voices and a program with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra featuring music by Mozart and Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, under conductor Jeannette Sorrell, alongside New York Philharmonic principal clarinetist Anthony McGill. Headlam also premiered the role of the Caretaker in Luna Pearl Woolf’s Number Our Days: A Photographic Oratorio, at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City and performed Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians with the Bang on a Can All-Stars at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In addition to these recent projects, past collaborations include performances of works by composers such as Ellen Reid, Tyshawn Sorey, and Julia Wolfe, reflecting her commitment to a diverse repertoire spanning both contemporary and traditional works.

A former full-time member of the Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Headlam credits this formative experience with having a lasting influence on her artistry. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Rutgers University, where she was honored with the Michael Fardink Memorial Award.

Program notes by David Jensen

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Born 7 May 1833; Hamburg, Germany

Died 3 April 1897; Vienna, Austria

Ein deutsches Requiem [A German Requiem], Opus 45

Composed: 1857 – May 1868

First performance: 10 April 1868 (partial premiere); Johannes Brahms, conductor; Julius Stockhausen, baritone; Bremen Cathedral; 18 February 1869 (complete premiere); Carl Reinecke, conductor; Emilie Bellingrath-Wagner, soprano; Franz Krückl, baritone; Gewandhaus Orchestra

Last MSO performance: 30 March 2019; Eun Sun Kim, conductor; Tara Erraught, soprano; Stephen Powell, baritone

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; 2 harps; organ; strings

Approximate duration: 68 minutes

Brahms’s life was not a particularly happy one. The son of a seamstress and a semi-professional musician, his upbringing was troubled by his family’s economic instability. As a child, his talents were sensational — his friendship with the violinist Joseph Joachim, who immediately recognized his miraculous instinct for composition, brought him into contact with the Schumanns in 1853. But plagued by a tendency toward perfectionism and self-doubt, the extravagant accolades Robert printed in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that October burdened Brahms, writing to Schumann a few weeks later that his praise would “arouse such extraordinary expectations of my achievements by the public that I don’t know how I can begin to fulfill them even somewhat.”

Robert’s suicide attempt and hospitalization in a private sanatorium, followed by his untimely death two years later in 1856, left Brahms bereft. He returned to Düsseldorf to help manage the family’s affairs, and the attention he subsequently lavished upon Clara bred in him a lifelong ardor that would never find its consummation. There is evidence that Brahms had begun sketching a “cantata of mourning” in the year following Robert’s death, but it was his own mother’s passing in the winter of 1865 that provided him with the emotional impetus to begin planning in earnest a large-scale choral work devoted to articulating his attitude toward death. The centuries-old tradition of setting the requiem mass had, by that point, established a standardized Latin text as the de facto model for the genre, but Brahms culled the language for his interpretation from Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible, pointing unequivocally to his categorically humanistic (in contrast to a strictly Catholic) perspective. Brahms even explained to Carl Reinthaler, director of music at Bremen Cathedral (where a partial premiere of the Requiem took place in April 1868), that it could just as well have been called Ein menschliches Requiem (“A Human Requiem”). Preoccupied with consoling the living as opposed to simply honoring the dead, the very beginning — its shadowy hues marked by the absence of violins — unfolds with a line from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

Four of the seven movements are written for purely choral forces, with the third and sixth calling for a solo baritone and the fifth for a soprano, and the influence of the choral music of

the preceding three centuries is evidenced by the brilliant fugues which conclude the second, third, and sixth. The second (a funeral march) and sixth (the apostle Paul’s reflection on the resurrection) constitute the lengthiest and most dramatic segments, and the music reaches its emotional summit in the fourth, which is rightfully cherished as some of the most breathtaking writing in the vocal repertoire. Architecturally, the German Requiem is fashioned as an arch structure, and as the seventh movement reprises the music of the first (harps play at the close of both), a passage from the Book of Revelation (“Blessed are the dead”) draws the requiem to a close with the very same word with which it began.

MAY 16, 2025 AT 7:30PM

MAY 18, 2025 AT 2:30PM

UIHLEIN HALL, MARCUS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

DINUR CONDUCTS TCHAIKOVSKY

Saturday, April 26, 2025 at 7:30 pm

Sunday, April 27, 2025 at 2:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Yaniv Dinur, conductor

Alexander Korsantia, piano

SAMUEL BARBER

Overture to The School for Scandal, Opus 5

SERGEI PROKOFIEV

Concerto No. 3 in C major for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 26

I. Andante – Allegro

II. Andantino: Tema con variazioni

III. Allegro ma non troppo

Alexander Korsantia, piano

INTERMISSION

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Opus 36

I. Andante sostenuto – Moderato con anima

II. Andantino in modo di canzona

III. Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato – Allegro

IV. Finale: Allegro con fuoco

The MSO Steinway was made possible through a generous gift from MICHAEL AND JEANNE SCHMITZ

The 2024.25 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION.

The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 50 minutes. All programs are subject to change.

Guest Artist Biographies

YANIV DINUR

Yaniv Dinur is the winner of the 2019 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Fellow Award and music director of the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra. He is lauded for his insightful interpretations and unique ability to connect with concertgoers of all ages and backgrounds, from season subscribers to symphony newcomers.

The 2024-25 season marks the beginning of Dinur’s eighth season as music director of the New Bedford Symphony. Under his leadership, the ensemble has been nationally recognized for its bold, engaging programming and artistic quality, prompting the League of American Orchestras to invite the orchestra to perform at the 2021 League Conference. In 2023, Dinur concluded a successful tenure as resident conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, during which he conducted hundreds of concerts. Recognizing his leadership and impact, the Milwaukee Business Journal selected him as a 40 Under 40 honoree, an award for young professionals making a difference in the community.

Dinur made his conducting debut at the age of 19 with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. Since then, he has conducted orchestras around the world, including the Israel Philharmonic, Jerusalem Symphony, Houston Symphony, Louisiana Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, New World Symphony, Portugal Symphony Orchestra, State Orchestra of St. Petersburg, Torino Philharmonic, and the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Recent and upcoming guest conducting highlights include debuts with the Rochester Philharmonic, Orquesta Filarmonía de Madrid, New Hampshire Music Festival, Edmonton Symphony, and Present Music in Milwaukee. Dinur has collaborated with world-renowned soloists such as Pinchas Zukerman, Yefim Bronfman, Itzhak Perlman, Karen Gomyo, Vadim Gluzman, and Augustin Hadelich.

A passionate chamber musician, Dinur is the founder and artistic director of the Winterlude chamber music series at the Villa Terrace Museum in Milwaukee, as well as the Milwaukee Summer Chamber Music Festival, where he performs with musicians from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

Born in Jerusalem, Dinur began studying the piano at the age of six with his aunt, Olga Shachar, and later with Alexander Tamir, Tatiana Alexanderov, Mark Dukelsky, and Edna Golandsky. He studied conducing in Israel with Evgeny Zirlin and Mendi Rodan and holds a Doctorate in Orchestral Conducting from the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, where he was a student of Kenneth Kiesler.

Guest Artist Biographies

ALEXANDER KORSANTIA

Alexander Korsantia is one of the leading pianists of our time. A “major artist” (Miami Herald) and a “quiet maverick” (Daily Telegraph), he has been praised for a “piano technique where difficulties simply do not exist” (Calgary Sun).

In upcoming seasons, Korsantia performs all over the world, including with the Illinois Symphony, Israel Symphony, and the Baltic Philharmonic orchestras. In recent seasons, Korsantia performed with the Stuttgart Philharmonic, Boston Philharmonic, Xiamen Philharmonic, and Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. With A Far Cry chamber orchestra, he played Galina Ustvolskaya’s piano concerto in Boston and Tbilisi. He also continues to serve on jury panels of major piano competitions, such as he has in the past for the Arthur Rubinstein, Cleveland International, Hilton Head, and Nina Simone competitions.

Ever since winning the First Prize and Gold Medal at the Arthur Rubinstein Piano Master Competition and the First Prize at the Sydney International Piano Competition, Korsantia’s career has taken him to many of the world’s major concert halls, collaborating with renowned conductors such as Christoph Eschenbach, Gianandrea Noseda, and Paavo Järvi, with orchestras such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Mariinsky Orchestra, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI in Turin, Cincinnati Symphony, and Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Korsantia is a frequent guest in many of the world’s leading concert series, including in Warsaw, Boston, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Vancouver, Calgary, San Francisco, Lodz, St. Petersburg, and Blaibach, including major international festivals in Tanglewood and Verbier. A passionate chamber musician, he has collaborated with other leading soloists such as Vadim Repin, Miriam Fried, Kim Kashkashian, Sergei Nakariakov, and the Stradivari Quartet.

Born in Tbilisi, Korsantia began his musical education first with his mother, one of Georgia’s most respected piano teachers. Later he became a pupil of Tengiz Amirejibi, Georgia’s foremost piano instructor. In 1992, he joined the famed piano studio of Alexander Toradze at Indiana University South Bend. He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including the Georgian Order of Honor, National State Prize and Shota Rustaveli Prize, and the Golden Wing Award. Korsantia resides in Boston, where he is a professor of piano at the New England Conservatory.

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Program notes by David Jensen

SAMUEL BARBER

Born 9 March 1910; West Chester, Pennsylvania

Died 23 January 1981; New York City, New York

Overture to The School for Scandal, Opus 5

Composed: 1931

First performance: 30 August 1933; Alexander Smallens, conductor; Philadelphia Orchestra

Last MSO performance: 7 February 2015; Andrew Litton, conductor

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; bass clarinet; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, suspended cymbals, triangle); harp; celesta; strings

Approximate duration: 8 minutes

Samuel Barber was determined to build a life for himself as an artist from the very beginning. He had his first piano lesson at age six and penned his first composition a year later, but his parents, raising him in the culturally conservative suburbs of Philadelphia, were committed to the idea of his being a typically gregarious, football-playing American boy — so much so that he was moved to draft a decidedly unambiguous note for them when he was only eight or nine years old: “Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. … To begin with I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure.”

A child prodigy, he was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 14 as a member of its first class in 1924, where his talents blossomed. He studied piano with George Boyle and Isabelle Vengerova, voice with Emilio de Gogorza (he even considered, for a time, a career as a professional baritone), and conducting with the legendary Fritz Reiner, but it became evident during the course of his eight-year tenure that he was cultivating an inimitable personality as a composer. Writing under the aegis of Italian composer Rosario Scalero, Barber’s proclivity for broad, lyrical melodies, shrewd handling of dissonance, and careful application of instrumental color came to define his artistic voice.

He was awarded the Joseph H. Bearns Prize in Music from Columbia University in 1928 for a violin sonata (now lost to posterity), and the prize money allowed him to visit Italy for the first time. He returned frequently in subsequent years, and it was there in the summer of 1931, under Scalero’s tutelage, that the Overture to The School for Scandal took shape.

A lifelong litterateur, Barber’s music was not actually intended to precede a performance of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play of the same name, but rather reflect its quick-witted, acerbic character in musical terms. Classical in its form and affect, Barber’s luminous orchestral timbres evoke the chattering, gossiping drawing-room dramas of Sheridan’s comedy of manners, culminating in a dazzling fugato crowned by an outburst of orchestral laughter. The overture was the first of Barber’s works to be performed by a major orchestra and the second to earn him the Bearns prize. Having again used his winnings to visit Italy with Gian Carlo Menotti — a fellow student at Curtis and his romantic partner of more than 40 years — he was, ironically, unable to attend the world premiere that launched his career.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV

Born 27 April 1891; Sontsovka, Russia (now Ukraine)

Died 5 March 1953; Moscow, Russia

Concerto No. 3 in C major for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 26

Composed: 1911 – October 1921

First performance: 16 December 1921; Frederick Stock, conductor; Sergei Prokofiev, piano; Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Last MSO performance: 18 January 2020; Ken-David Masur, conductor; Sergei Babayan, piano

Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; timpani; percussion (bass drum, castanets, cymbals, tambourine); strings

Approximate duration: 27 minutes

In the summer of 1902, Sergei Taneyev, director of the Moscow Conservatory, arranged for Reinhold Glière to visit the provincial village of Sontsovka to tutor a young boy that had already, by the age of 11, composed two operas. His first lessons in composition provided the child with a vital grounding in the principles of tonal harmony, classical form, and orchestration, but the wunderkind was already eagerly experimenting, writing dozens of so-called “little ditties” for the piano that toyed with unconventional meters, curious dissonances, and peculiar metric impulses — all hallmarks of a mature style that would one day set Sergei Prokofiev apart as an aggressively avant-garde artist.

Arriving at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in September 1904, he was soon regarded as an arrogant, rebellious enfant terrible. To his disappointment, he found his coursework tedious and restrictive, and he graduated from the conservatory’s composition class with only average marks. Uncertain of his future as a composer, he dedicated himself to his development as a pianist, and lessons with Anna Yesipova tamed his tough, mechanical approach and cultivated his lyrical sensibilities. Within a few years, he was earning acclaim as a cutting-edge modernist in Saint Petersburg’s musical circles, supporting himself with performances and publications of his own music.

But he was coming of age at a tumultuous moment in Russian history. Following the February Revolution of 1917, he fled his homeland, where his star had been steadily rising, and arrived in America, dismayed by his competition on the international stage — finding himself compared, as a composer, with Igor Stravinsky, and as a pianist with Sergei Rachmaninoff. He poured his creative energies into a new opera, The Love for Three Oranges, but the effort it required cost him dearly. Finding himself in financial crisis when its premiere fell through, he retreated to Paris. Realizing he would need to compose something that illustrated his talents as both performer and composer, he spent the summer of 1921 on the coast of Brittany, assembling a new concerto from musical fragments dating back to his student years.

Unlike his first two piano concerti, the third was the fruit of an unusually lengthy genesis. The two main themes of the first movement (the first a plaintive tune sounded by a solo clarinet; the second a sarcastic, wheedling oboe accompanied by castanets) were sketched by 1916. The gavotte that forms the basis for five distinct variations — ranging from the lyrical to the downright sinister — in the middle movement dates from 1913, and part of the ensuing “argument” between soloist and orchestra in the third movement derived from an abandoned string quartet of 1918. The resulting fusion remains Prokofiev’s most popular concerto, a steely, highly rhythmic, assertive display of technical cunning and effortless harmonic manipulation.

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

Born 7 May 1840; Votkinsk, Russia

Died 6 November 1893; Saint Petersburg, Russia

Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Opus 36

Composed: May 1877 – 7 January 1878

First performance: 22 February 1878; Nikolai Rubinstein, conductor; Russian Musical Society

Last MSO performance: 21 September 2019; Ken-David Masur, conductor

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, triangle); strings

Approximate duration: 44 minutes

In the spring of 1877, Tchaikovsky had begun receiving letters from Antonina Miliukova (supposedly a former pupil of his at the Moscow Conservatory), who, shortly after declaring her love for him, threatened suicide if he refused to see her. Even after meeting her family (whom he found impossibly grating) and assuring them that he could not love her, he married her that summer, hoping that the union would serve as a convenient subterfuge to the truth of his sexuality. It would prove to be the most disastrous miscalculation of his life. The marriage failed almost immediately and precipitated in Tchaikovsky a psychological crisis — following a botched suicide attempt, he arrived in Saint Petersburg that October, teetering on the edge of insanity, and at a doctor’s recommendation, his brother Anatoly helped him to separate from his wife completely.

His work on the fourth symphony that year, a deeply personal document of his suffering, allowed for a torrential outpouring of emotion, and newfound patronage from the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck provided much-needed financial stability and vital psychological support. She had begun subsidizing Tchaikovsky’s efforts earlier that year in exchange for his correspondence, and their letters provide a remarkable record not only of the deleterious effect the short-lived affair had had on Tchaikovsky, but the generative process and narrative content of the fourth symphony. Admitting a link between the programmatic heart of Beethoven’s fifth — humanity’s struggle against the inexorable tide of fate — he described the opening fanfare in explicit terms:

This is Fate, that inevitable force which checks our aspirations towards happiness ere they reach the goal, which watches jealously lest our peace and bliss should be complete and cloudless — a force which, like the sword of Damocles, hangs perpetually over our heads and is always embittering the soul. This force is inescapable and invincible. There is no other course but to submit and inwardly lament.

The first movement, a colossal sonata form, accounts for almost half of the symphony’s total length. The ghostly, waltz-like theme that emerges constantly hesitates, but “Fate” interrupts, first before the development and again before the coda: “so all life is but a continual alternation between grim truth and fleeting dreams of happiness.” The plaintive tune introduced by the oboe in the second movement, which “expresses another phase of suffering … A long procession of old memories,” rises to a fever pitch of emotional urgency before receding into melancholy.

In the scherzo that follows, the strings play pizzicato throughout its entirety as “capricious arabesques, intangible forms” give way to “the picture of a tipsy peasant and a street song,” reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s finest balletic music. The final movement, painting the scene of a “rustic holiday,” incorporates Russian folk song — cut short once again by “Fate,” completing the cycle initiated at the outset — and arrives at a sublime pinnacle of exuberant bombast: “And will you still say that all the world is immersed in sorrow? Happiness does exist, simple and unspoilt. Be glad in others’ gladness. This makes life possible.”

LIVE AT THE IVY

WITH THE

ZACKARY DURLAM

TIMOTHY KLABUNDE

TWO GREAT CELEBRATIONS. ONE ENERGIZING EVENING. ALL BENEFITING YOUNG MUSICIANS.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 7

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5:30 PM

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7 PM

THE MUSIC!

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• UWM DIRECTOR OF CHORAL ACTIVITIES

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• RECENTLY RETIRED AS A 44-YEAR MEMBER OF THE MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

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BEN FOLDS WITH THE MSO

Saturday, May 3, 2025 at 7:30 pm ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ryan Tani, conductor

Ben Folds, piano and vocalist

PROGRAM TO BE ANNOUNCED FROM THE STAGE

The MSO Steinway was made possible through a generous gift from MICHAEL AND JEANNE SCHMITZ. The length of this concert is approximately 2 hours. All programs are subject to change.

Guest Artist Biographies

BEN FOLDS

Ben Folds is widely regarded as one of the major music influencers of our generation.

The Emmy-nominated singer-songwriter-composer has created an enormous body of genre-bending music that includes pop albums with Ben Folds Five, multiple solo albums, and numerous collaborative records. His latest pop solo album was released in 2023 to rave reviews and soldout performances. He released his first Christmas album in 2024 and recorded a live album last fall, slated for release in 2025, with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in D.C., where he served for eight years as the first artistic advisor to the NSO.

He currently tours as a pop artist, while also performing with some of the world’s greatest symphony orchestras.

A New York Times best selling author and former podcast host, Folds is also working on new compositions for film, television, and theater. He also frequently guest stars in films and television.

In 2022, Folds launched a charitable music education initiative in his native state of North Carolina entitled “Keys For Kids,” which provides funds and keyboards to existing nonprofits that offer free or affordable piano lessons to school-age children from economically disadvantaged households. He continually advocates for improving public policies for the arts and arts education on the national level as a member of Americans for the Arts and the Arts Action Fund.

PINES OF ROME

Friday, May 9, 2025 at 11:15 am

Saturday, May 10, 2025 at 7:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ken-David Masur, conductor

GIOACHINO ROSSINI

Overture to Guillaume Tell [William Tell]

RICHARD STRAUSS

Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche

[Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks], Opus 28, TrV 171

INTERMISSION

TANIA LEÓN

Ácana

OTTORINO RESPIGHI

Pini di Roma [Pines of Rome], P 141

I. The Pines of the Villa Borghese

II. The Pines Near a Catacomb

III. The Pines of the Janiculum

IV. The Pines of the Appian Way

The 2024.25 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION.

The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Program notes by David Jensen

GIOACHINO ROSSINI

Born 29 February 1792; Pesaro, Italy

Died 13 November 1868; Paris, France

Overture to Guillaume Tell [William Tell]

Composed: 1824 – 1829

First performance: 3 August 1829; François Antoine Habeneck, conductor; Paris Opéra

Last MSO performance: 12 March 1965; Harry John Brown, conductor

Instrumentation: flute; piccolo; 2 oboes (2nd doubling on English horn); 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, triangle); strings

Approximate duration: 12 minutes

One of the most delightful parables of Gioachino Rossini’s prodigious musical abilities comes from the winter of 1813: swaddled in blankets in a cheap Venetian inn, composing a duet for his farcical opera Il signor Bruschino, his manuscript paper fell to the floor. Rather than go to the trouble of getting out of bed to pick it up, he simply began writing a new one from scratch. At just twenty years old, it was already his ninth opera, and within the year, his burgeoning fame would soon flower into unparalleled international renown.

By the time Rossini was penning the last of his 39 operas, he had accumulated more wealth, found greater fame, and exerted more influence than any other composer in the first half of the century. He had relocated to Paris and favorably negotiated a lifetime annuity from the French government, ensuring an early retirement from his frenetic enterprises in the theater. Guillaume Tell, the acme of his creative energies and the capstone of his career, was to be the lengthiest, most opulent of his operas to date, lasting roughly four hours. Given its unwieldy proportions, large swaths of music already lay on the cutting room floor shortly after the premiere. An anecdote places Rossini in the streets with the director of the Paris Opéra: “Tonight we are performing the second act of your Tell.” “Indeed!” the composer replied. “All of it?”

Taking Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 play Wilhelm Tell as its basis, the opera tells the story of the titular Swiss marksman as he leads his countrymen in revolt against the tyrannical Habsburg dynasty. Fluently assimilating the spectacular elements of French opera, the illustrious ensemble numbers, ballets, and heroic feats of patriotism (which were particularly appealing to the romantic nationalism sweeping Europe on the brink of the 1830 revolutions) prompted his contemporary, Gaetano Donizetti, to declare that the first and third acts were composed by a genius, but the second was written by God himself.

Divided into four sections, the overture begins with the breaking dawn as a brooding cello solo in E minor blossoms into a quintet of cellos, supported by double basses, which spin a lush string chorale in the parallel major. The roll of a timpani presages the approaching storm: a flurry of activity in the upper strings builds tension, which erupts as the brass and bass drum thunder above descending chromatic lines in the woodwinds. The storm subsides, giving way to a bucolic ranz des vaches (a simple melody, traditionally played by Alpine herdsman, meant to herd cattle) played in turns by the English horn and flute. The overture culminates with the infamous “March of the Swiss Soldiers,” a rousing galop that foreshadows the thrilling final act of the opera in which the Swiss emerge victorious over their Austrian oppressors.

RICHARD STRAUSS

Born 11 June 1864; Munich, Germany

Died 8 September 1949; Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany

Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche

[Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks], Opus 28, TrV 171

Composed: 1894 – 6 May 1895

First performance: 5 November 1895; Franz Wüllner, conductor; Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne

Last MSO performance: 24 September 2016; Edo de Waart, conductor

Instrumentation: 3 flutes; piccolo; 3 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; E-flat clarinet; bass clarinet; 3 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum; cymbals; ratchet; snare drum; triangle); strings

Approximate duration: 15 minutes

Heir to the enormously rich musical heritage of the German Romantics, Richard Strauss is credited with having radically altered the landscape of Western concert music. A born prodigy, his natural gift for composition was nurtured from an early age by his father Franz, the principal horn for the Munich Court Orchestra. Franz, who bore a congenital dislike of modern music — Richard was forbidden to study Wagner’s music, only obtaining a score of Tristan und Isolde at the age of 16 — saturated his son in the music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. By the time Strauss graduated from the Ludwigsgymnasium in Munich in 1882, he had already written more than 140 pieces firmly rooted in the tonal language of the Viennese masters.

But despite his father’s misgivings, his exposure to Wagner’s harmonically progressive operas, which were challenging conventions of tonality, form, and orchestration, left an indelible impression, and his conducting apprenticeship with Hans von Bülow at the Meiningen Court Orchestra in the early 1880s established his reputation as a preeminent talent. Meiningen would prove to be critical to his development: he met Johannes Brahms, the personification of late Romanticism, and the violinist Alexander Ritter, who exposed him to the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and encouraged him to renounce his musically conservative inclinations and compose the “music of the future” espoused by Wagner and Liszt. The eventual result of this artistic incubation was a series of career-defining tone poems which would become foundational literature of the orchestral canon.

Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks dates from his years as chief conductor of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich — where he was conducting Wagner’s operas — and exploits the expressive power of the expansive Wagnerian orchestra to fantastic effect. The eponymous hero, Till Eulenspiegel (whose surname is translated as “owl mirror”), made his earliest known appearance in publications from the beginning of the sixteenth century, belonging to German folklore as a jocular figure whose antics across the Holy Roman Empire subverted authority and exposed hypocrisy and corruption.

Beginning in a dreamy, fairy-tale setting, a boisterous solo horn interjects, providing the jovial central statement of the poem’s rondo form. Following an orchestral repetition of the theme, a clarinet introduces a second motto, suggestive of laughter, and the music accompanies Till as he blusters through a marketplace, taunts the local clergy, chases young women, and denigrates the stuffy academics. A rollicking climax is suddenly cut short by an ominous drumroll: seized by the authorities, Till (again played by the clarinet) tries to reason with his executioner to no avail. His fate ineluctable, a pizzicato from the strings snaps his neck at the gallows. But all is not lost: after a brief silence, the opening material returns, implying that his legend lives on, and with a final surge of instrumental color, Till himself has the last laugh.

TANIA LEÓN

Born 14 May 1943; Havana, Cuba

Ácana

Composed: 2008

First performance: 29 February 2008; Purchase College Orchestra

Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere

Instrumentation: 2 flutes (both doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; 2 clarinets (2nd doubling on bass clarinet); 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; trombone; percussion (bamboo wind chimes, bass drum, bongo drums, castanets, claves, congas, djembe, dumbak, frame drum, guiro, high hat, log drum, maracas, 2 marimbas, sizzle cymbal, suspended cymbals, tam tam, temple blocks, wind chimes); piano; strings

Approximate duration: 13 minutes

With a vibrant, diverse, and global career as a composer, conductor, and pedagogue that spans decades, Tania León has earned recognition as one of the most vital voices in contemporary music. Born in Havana, it was her fascination with the family radio that prompted her grandmother to enroll her in her first music lessons. She received her first bachelor’s degree from a Havana conservatory in 1963, but her international career began in the spring of 1967 when she boarded a flight to Miami, one of hundreds of thousands of refugees embarking upon the “Freedom Flights” afforded by a rare stint of cooperation between the Cuban and United States governments.

She made her way to New York, helping to found the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969. It was while composing for the newly formed company that she discovered her propensity for writing; she changed her major at New York University from piano to composition, earning a master’s degree under Ursula Mamlok. She would go on to establish the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series, serve as New Music Advisor to Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic, and launch the Composers Now festival. Lessons with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa would lead to conducting appearances with the Beethoven Orchester, the Gewandhausorchester, and the New York Philharmonic. In 2020, the New York Philharmonic premiered Stride, which would earn León the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and she was feted with a Kennedy Center Honor in 2022.

Ácana was inspired by a poem of the same name by Cuban Poet Laureate Nicolás Guillen. The title is the Spanish common name of the species Pouteria multiflora, a tree native to Cuba and renowned for its enormous size (mature specimens are known to reach up to 90 feet tall and three feet in diameter). The plant’s timber, prized for its strength, durability, and deep red hue, is used to build everything from houses to ships, and the poem entwines the tree in every aspect of Cuban life, drawing metaphorical connections to the homes people live in and the tables on which their bodies will one day come to rest.

Two solo trumpets sound an intertwining fanfare over the soft rattle of maracas as hazy string textures and chittering percussive elements are meticulously interwoven — one can practically see the scattered sunlight through the canopy and hear the murmur of forest life. Flutes and clarinets dance over drum beats as dazzling figures from the piano and marimbas forge kaleidoscopic textures. Molto espressivo strings extend a lyrical character to the central section, and a crescendo in the winds leads to interjections from the drums and strings, which lend an angular, energetic quality to the following episode, marked ritmico (“rhythmic”). Solo trumpets herald the work’s conclusion with the hushed return of the opening motif.

OTTORINO RESPIGHI

Born 9 July 1879; Bologna, Italy

Died 18 April 1936; Rome, Italy

Pini di Roma [Pines of Rome], P 141

Composed: 1924

First performance: 14 December 1924; Bernardino Molinari, conductor; Orchestra dell’Augusteo (modern-day Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia)

Last MSO performance: 18 November 2018; Jader Bignamini, conductor

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (3rd doubles on piccolo); 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; bass clarinet; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; 2 soprano buccine (played by 2 rotary trumpets); 2 tenor buccine (played by 2 tenor Wagner tubas); 2 bass buccine (played by 2 tenor trombones); timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, ratchet, snare drum, tam tam, tambourine, triangle); harp; celesta; organ; piano; strings

Approximate duration: 23 minutes

Born into a middle-class family in Bologna, there was no reason to suspect, in his childhood, that Ottorino Respighi would ever achieve worldly acclaim. His father devotedly gave him his first piano and violin lessons, but to his disappointment, his son initially showed little interest. Even his formal training ground to a halt a few years later, having given up on the spot after receiving a slap on the hand from his teacher’s ruler. With some convincing, he took to a more forgiving mentor, eventually enrolling at the Liceo Musicale di Bologna, where he studied violin and viola, counterpoint, and composition, graduating in 1899.

He got his professional start as a “jobbing” musician, first in the orchestra at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, then at the Russian Imperial Theatre in Saint Petersburg, where he served as the opera orchestra’s principal violist. It was there that he encountered Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the great Russian composer and pedagogue renowned as a leading authority on the art of orchestration. Respighi’s lessons with Rimsky-Korsakov would prove to be invaluable: returning to Bologna and completing an advanced course of study in composition at the Liceo, his composition teacher, Giuseppe Martucci, declared that “Respighi is not a pupil, Respighi is a master.”

After years of toiling as a working violinist, he relocated to Rome in 1913 to teach composition. His break finally came in 1918 when Arturo Toscanini programmed his Fountains of Rome on a series of concerts in Milan, paving the way to international fame. Pines of Rome would become the second entry in his so-called “Roman” trilogy, cementing his status as a connoisseur of orchestral color: drawing on a life-long fascination with ancient music, it gives the composer’s impressions of life in the Italian capital, and the four scenes, played without pause, take “nature as a point of departure, to recall memories and visions. The century-old trees which dominate so characteristically the Roman landscape become testimony for the principal events in Roman life.” The first movement, set in the opulent gardens of the Villa Borghese, positively glitters with its spritely tunes in the winds, portraying children at play among the trees, and is quickly contrasted by the thick string textures of the second, which conjure the depths of the Roman catacombs and underscore Respighi’s interest in Gregorian chant. A subdued nocturne depicts an evening on the Janiculum Hill accompanied by a nightingale’s song, played by a solo clarinet marked come in sogno (“as if in a dream”) — Respighi even calls for a specific phonograph recording of the bird to be played at the end of the movement, which is realized with a digital sample in modern performances. The work reaches a blazing peak as Roman soldiers march into the ancient city, attended by gleaming brass fanfares and the steady beat of the timpani.

Music of John Williams AUGUST 14

Dennis Kim and Joan DerHovsepian AUGUST 16

Dame Evelyn Glennie AUGUST 19

Maestro Rune Bergmann, Conductor

The Argosy Foundation has generously extended their support for the Just Duet Matching Challenge for the 15th year in a row. From now until August 31, every new or increased donation will be matched dollar for dollar up to $300,000!

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Douglas M. Hagerman

Mrs. Alyce Coyne Katayma

Andrea and Woodrow Leung Principal Second Violin Chair and Fred Fuller

Dorothea C. Mayer Principal Cello Chair

Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra League Principal Oboe Chair

Northwestern Mutual Foundation

Melitta S. Pick Endowed Piano Chair

Dr. Carol Pohl

Walter L. Robb Family Principal Trumpet Chair

Robert T. Rolfs Foundation

Gertrude Elser and John Edward Schroeder Guest Artist Fund

Walter Schroeder Foundation Principal Harp Chair

Muriel C. and John D. Silbar Family Principal Bassoon Chair

Marjorie Tiefenthaler

Principal Trombone Chair

Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family

Principal Viola Chair

BENEFACTORS

Commitments of $100,000 and above

Four Anonymous Donors

Patty and Jay Baker Fund for Guest Artists

Mr. and Mrs. Frederick J.O. Blachly

Philip Blank English Horn Chair in memoriam to John Martin and his favorite cousin, Beatrice Blank

Judith and Stanton Bluestone

Estate of Lloyd Broehm

Louise Cattoi, in memory of David and Angela Cattoi

Lynn Chappy Salon Series

Terry J. Dorr

Elizabeth Elser Doolittle Charitable Trust

Franklyn Esenberg

Principal Clarinet Chair

David L. Harrison Endowment for Music Education

Estate of Sally Hennen

Karen Hung and Robert Coletti

Richard M. Kimball

Bass Trombone Chair

William Randolph Hearst Foundation

Judy and Gary Jorgensen

Judith A. Keyes MSOL Docent Fund

Charles A. Krause

Donald and JoAnne Krause Music Education Endowment Fund

Martin J. Krebs

Co-Principal Trumpet Chair

Laskin Family Foundation

Charles and Barbara Lund

Mr. Peter L. Mahler

Marcus Corporation Foundation Guest Artist Fund

Annette Marra

Susan and Brent Martin

Christian and Kate Mitchell

William and Marian Nasgovitz

Andy Nunemaker French Horn Chair

John and Elizabeth Ogden

Lois and Richard Pauls

Gordana and Milan Racic

The Erika Richman MSO-MYSO

Reading Workshop Fund

Pat and Allen Rieselbach

Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri Assistant Principal Viola Chair

Sara and Jay Schwister

Allison M. & Dale R. Smith

Percussion Fund

Estate of Walter S. Smolenski, Jr.

Bert L. & Patricia S. Steigleder

Charitable Trust

Donald B. and Ruth P. Taylor

Assistant Principal Clarinet Chair

Haruki Toyama

Mrs. William D. Vogel

Barbara and Ted Wiley

Jack Winter Guest Artist Fund

Fern L. Young Endowment Fund for Guest Artists

MUSICAL LEGACY SOCIETY

The Musical Legacy Society recognizes and appreciates the individuals who have made a planned gift to the MSO. The MSO invites you to join these generous donors who have remembered the Orchestra in their estate plans.

Nine Anonymous Donors

George R. Affeldt

Dana and Gail Atkins

Robert Balderson

Bruce and Margaret Barr

Adam Bauman

Priscilla and Anthony Beadell

Mr. F. L. Bidinger

Dr. Philip and Beatrice Blank

Mr. Richard Blomquist

Judith and Stanton Bluestone

Patrice L. (Patti) Bringe

Jean S. Britt

Laurette Broehm

Neil Brooks

Anthony and Vicki Cecalupo

Lynn Chappy

Ellen and Joe Checota

Donald and Judy Christl

Mary E. and James M. Connelly

Jo Ann Corrao

Lois Ellen Debbink

Mary Ann Delzer

Robert C. and Lois K. Dittus

Julie Doneis

Terry J. Dorr

Donn Dresselhuys

Beth and Ted Durant

Rosemarie Eierman

Franklyn Esenberg

John and Sue Esser

JoAnn Falletta

Donald L. Feinsilver, M.D.

Susie and Robert Fono

Ruth and John Fredericks

Brett Goodman

Roberta Gordon

Marta P. and Doyne M. Haas

Douglas M. Hagerman

Ms. Jean I. Hamann

Ms. Sybille Hamilton

Kristin A. Hansen

David L. Harrison

Judy Harrison

Cheryl H. and Roy L. Hauswirth

Cliff Heise

Sidney and Suzanne Herszenson

Dr. and Mrs. Samuel Hoke

Glenda Holm

Jean and Charles Holmburg

Karen Hung and Robert Coletti

Myra Huth

William and Janet Isbister

Lee and Barbara Jacobi

Leon and Betsy Janssen

Marilyn W. John

Faith L. Johnson

Jayne J. Jordan

Judy and Gary Jorgensen

Musical Legacy Society/Annual Fund

Debra Jupka

James A. and Robin S. Kasch

Howard Kaspin

James H. Keyes

Judith A. Keyes

Richard and Sarah Kimball

Mary Krall

JoAnne and Donald Krause

Martin J. and Alice Krebs

Ronald and Vicki Krizek

Cynthia Krueger-Prost

Steven E. Landfried

Mr. Bruce R. Laning

Victor Larson

Tom and Lise Lawson

Andrea and Woodrow Leung

Mr. Robert D. Lidicker

Mr. and Mrs. John B. Liebenstein

Drs. John and Theresa Liu

Mr. Peter L. Mahler

Dr. John and Kristie Malone

Steven and Mary Rose Marinkovich

Ms. Kathleen Marquardt

Susan and Brent Martin

JoAnne Matchette

Rita T. and James C. McDonald

Patricia and James McGavock

Nancy McGiveran

Nancy McKinley-Ehlinger

Mark and Donna Metzendorf

Mrs. Christel U. Mildenberg

Christian and Kate Mitchell

Joan Moeller

Ms. Melodi Muehlbauer

Robert Mulcahy

Kathleen M. Murphy

William and Marian Nasgovitz

Andy Nunemaker

Diana and Gerald Ogren

Lynn and Lawrence Olsen

Mr. and Mrs. Philip W. Orth

Lygere Panagopoulos

Jamshed and Deborah Patel

Gerald T. and Carol K. Petersen

Mr. and Mrs. Ronald R. Poe

Dr. Carol Pohl

Julie Quinlan Brame and Jason Brame

Ms. Harvian Raasch-Hooten

Christine Radiske and Herbert Quigley

Steve and Susan Ragatz

Catherine A. Regner

Pat and David Rierson

Pat and Allen Rieselbach

Dr. Thomas and Mary Roberts

Roger B. Ruggeri and Andrea K. Wagoner

Nina Sarenac

Mary B. Schley in recognition of David L. Schley

Dr. Robert and Patty Schmidt

Michael J. and Jeanne E. Schmitz

James and Kathleen Scholler

Charitable Fund

James Schultz and Donna Menzer

Mason Sherwood and Mark Franke

John and Judith Simonitsch

Margles Singleton

Lois Bernard and William Small

Dale and Allison Smith

Susan G. Stein

John Stewig and Richard Bradley

Dr. Robert A. and Kathleen Sullo

Terry Burko and David Taggart

Lois Tetzlaff

E. Charlotte Theis

James E. Van Ess

Thora Vervoren

Dr. Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner

Veronica Wallace-Kraemer

Michael Walton

Brian A. Warnecke

Earl Wasserman

Alice Weiss

Carol and James Wiensch

Rolland and Sharon Wilson

Floyd Woldt

Sandra and Ross Workman

For more information on becoming a Musical Legacy Society member, please contact the Advancement Office at 414-226-7891.

ANNUAL FUND

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra truly values the music lovers in the concert hall, and we thank our contributors to the Annual Fund for investing their time and support in this treasure. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions to the Annual Fund as of February 20, 2025.

CONDUCTOR CIRCLE

$100,000 and above

Clair and Mary Baum

Ellen and Joe Checota

David Herro and Jay Franke

Mr. and Mrs. George C. Kaiser

Donald and JoAnne Krause

Marty Krebs

Sheldon and Marianne Lubar Charitable Fund of the Lubar

Family Foundation

Drs. Alan and Carol Pohl

Michael Schmitz

Julia and David Uihlein

$50,000 and above

Laura and Mike Arnow

Mr. and Mrs. Donald S. Wilson

$25,000 and above

One Anonymous Donor

Bobbi and Jim Caraway

Anthony and Vicki Cecalupo

Mr. and Mrs. Franklyn Esenberg

Mrs. Susan G. Gebhardt

Doug Hagerman

Judith A. Keyes

Robert and Gail Korb

Dr. Brent and Susan Martin

Thomas Sherman

Drs. George and Christine Sosnovsky

Charitable Trust

Drs. Robert Taylor and Janice McFarland Taylor

Thora Vervoren

James and Sue Wiechmann

$15,000 and above

One Anonymous Donor

Marilyn and John Breidster

Elaine Burke

Mary and James Connelly

Dr. Deborah and Jeff Costakos

Mrs. Alyce Coyne Katayama

George E. Forish, Jr.

Roberta Gordon and Allen Young

Kim and Nancy Graff

Drs. Carla and Robert Hay

Jewish Community Foundation

Eileen and Howard Dubner Donor Advised Fund

Judy and Gary Jorgensen

Charles and Barbara Lund

Maureen McCabe

Christian and Kate Mitchell

Lois and Richard Pauls

Pat Rieselbach

Brian M. Schwellinger

Sara and Jay Schwister

Allison M. and Dale R. Smith

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas R. Tiffany

Haruki Toyama

Alice Weiss

$10,000 and above

Three Anonymous Donors

Dr. Rita Bakalars

Richard and JoAnn Beightol

Ara and Valerie Cherchian

Jennifer Dirks

Jack Douthitt and Michelle Zimmer

Bruce T. Faure M.D.

Mary Lou M. Findley

The Paul & Connie Flagg Family Charitable Fund

Elizabeth and William Genne

Judith J. Goetz

Stephanie and Steve Hancock

Katherine Hauser

Mr. and Mrs. Eric E. Hobbs

Dr. and Mrs. Samuel Hoke

Barbara Karol

Christine Krueger

Geraldine Lash

Mr. Peter L. Mahler

Dr. Ann H. and Mr. Michael J. McDonald

Mark and Donna Metzendorf

Dr. Mary Ellen Mitchanis

Bob and Barbara Monnat

Patrick and Mary Murphy

Andy Nunemaker

Brian and Maura Packham

Julie Peay

Ellen Rohwer Pappas and Timothy Pappas

Leslie and Aaron Plamann

Richard V. Poirier

Christine Radiske and Herbert Quigley

Lynn and Craig Schmutzer

Nancy and Greg Smith

Pamela Stampen

Mrs. George Walcott

Tracy S. Wang, MD

Evonne Winston

Diana J. Wood

Herbert Zien and Elizabeth Levins

PRINCIPAL CIRCLE

$5,000 and above

Five Anonymous Donors

Anthony and Kathie Asmuth

Fred and Kay Austermann

Thomas Bagwell and Michelle Hiebert

Robert Balderson

Natalie Beckwith

Lois Bernard

Richard and Kay Bibler

Dr. Sherry H. Blumberg

Nancy Vrabec and Alastair Boake

William and Barbara Boles

Suzy and John Brennan

Mary and Terry Briscoe

Roger Byhardt

Chris and Katie Callen

Ms. Trish Calvy

Donald and Judy Christl

Sandra and Russell Dagon

Karen Dobbs and Chris DeNardis

Mrs. William T. Dicus

Joanne Doehler

Jacquelyn and Dalibor Drummer

Beth and Ted Durant

Dr. Eric Durant and Scott Swickard

Dr. and Mrs. Harry A. Easom

Elizabeth and Herodotos Ellinas

Dr. Donald Feinsilver and JoAnn Corrao

Beth and Jim Fritz

Alison Graf and Richard Schreiner

Jean and Thomas Harbeck

Family Foundation

James and Crystal Hegge

Ms. Mary E. Henke

Mark and Judy Hibbard

Peg and Mark Humphrey

Lee and Barbara Jacobi

Leon Janssen

Jayne J. Jordan

Lynn and Tom Kassouf

Benedict and Lee Kordus

Mary E. Lacy

Alysandra and Dave Lal

Mr. and Mrs. James LaBelle

Peter and Kathleen Lillegren

Gerald and Elaine Mainman

John and Linda Mellowes

Judith Fitzgerald Miller

Rusti and Steve Moffic

William J. Murgas

Mark Niehaus

Barbara and Layton Olsen

Elaine Pagedas

Sharon L. Petrie

Dr. and Mrs. Richard A. Pierce-Ruhland

Jim and Fran Proulx

Jerome Randall and Mary Hauser

Dr. Donna Recht and Dr. Robert Newby

Steve and Fran Richman

Pat and David Rierson

Roger Ritzow

Dr. Thomas and Mary Roberts

Gayle G. Rosemann and Paul E. McElwee

Patricia and Ronald Santilli

Mr. Thomas P. Schweda

Lynne Shaner

Joan Spector

Carlton Stansbury

Mr. and Mrs. Roland E. Strampe

Bob and Betty Streng

Jim Strey

Mrs. James Urdan

Mr. and Mrs. Francis Wasielewski

Nora and Jude Werra

Janet Wilgus

Jessica R. Wirth

Mr. Wilfred Wollner

ORCHESTRA CIRCLE

$2,000 and above

Seven Anonymous Donors

Donald and Jantina Adriano

Drs. Helmut and Sandra Ammon

Dr. Joan Arvedson

Richard and Sara Aster

Mark and Laura Barnard

Bruce and Maggie Barr

Priscilla and Anthony Beadell

Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Beckman

Jacqlynn Behnke

Roger J. Bialcik

Marlene and Bert Bilsky

Scott Bolens and Elizabeth Forman

Virginia Bolger

Dr. and Mrs. Squat Botley

Walter and Virginia Boyer

Cheri and Tom Briscoe

Marcia P. Brooks and Edward J. Hammond

Teri Carpenter

Leigh Barker-Cheesebro

Mr. and Mrs. Stephen L. Chernof

Lynda and Tom Curl

Larry and Eileen Dean

Paul Dekker

Ms. Nancy A. Desjardins

Chris Dillie

Art and Rhonda Downey

Barbara and Harry L. Drake

Sigrid Dynek and Barry Axelrood

Donald Elliott

Signe and Gerald Emmerich, Jr.

Shirley Erwin

Joseph and Joan Fall

Kristin Fewel

Mr. and Mrs. A. William Finke

Anne and Dean Fitzgerald

Jo Ann and Dale Frederickson

Allan and Mary Ellen Froehlich

Timothy Gerend

Jane K. Gertler

Barbara Gill

Pearl Mary Goetsch

Karleen Haberichter

Ginny Hall

Dale and Sara Harmelink

Millicent Hawley

Judith and David Hecker

Robert Hey

Charles and Jean Holmburg

Howard and Susan Hopwood

Robert S. Jakubiak

Pauline and Thomas Jeffers

Marilyn W. John

Ms. Lynda Johnson

Candice and David Johnstone

Maja Jurisic and Don Fraker

Matthew and Kathryn Kamm

Dr. Bruce and Anna Kaufman

Dr. Jack and Myrna Kaufman

Dr. and Mrs. Kim

Mr. Rick Kirby

Mr. and Mrs. F. Michael Kluiber

Maritza and Mario Laguna

Mr. and Mrs. Ian Lambert

Drs. Kaye and Prakash Laud

Micaela Levine and Thomas St. John

Mr. and Mrs. Mark Levy

Tom Lindow

Frank Loo and Sally Long

Kathleen Lovelace

Sara and Nathan Manning

Dr. and Mrs. Debesh Mazumdar

Guy and Mary Jo McDonald

Mr. and Mrs. Dean Mehlberg

Genie and David Meissner

Mrs. Debra L. Metz

Mr. and Mrs. George Meyer

Gregory and Susan Milleville

Mark and Carol Mitchell

Melodi Muehlbauer

Richard and Isabel Muirhead

Ms. Mary Ann Mueller

Raymond and Janice Perry

Gerald T. and Carol K. Petersen

David J. Peterson

Kathryn Koenen Potos

John and Susan Pustejovsky

Philip Reifenberg

Drs. Walter and Lisa Rich

Dr. Marcia J.S. Richards

Susan Riedel

Dr. and Mrs. David Y. Rosenzweig

Dottie Rotter

Mr. Thomas Schneider

Ralph and Cheryl Schregardus

Rev. Doug and Marilyn Schoen

Mr. and Mrs. Mark W. Schwallie

Dr. and Mrs. Kevin R. Siebenlist

Paul and Frances Seifert

Margles Singleton

Mrs. George R. Slater

Dr. and Mrs. C. John Snyder

Leonard Sobczak

Loretto and Dick Steinmetz

Jeff and Jody Steren

Richard and Linda Stevens

Annual Fund

Ian and Ellen Szczygielski

David Taggart and Terry Burko

John and Anne Thomas

Joan Thompson

Mr. Stephen Thompson

Mr. Ed Tonn

Joy Towell

Mike and Peg Uihlein

Linda and Lynn Unkefer

James Van Ess

Mark Van Hecke

Ann and Joseph Wenzler

Prati and Norm Wojtal

Lee and Carol Wolcott

Mr. Kevin R. Woller

Jim and Sandy Wrangell

Marshall Zarem

William and Denise Zeidler

$1,000 and above

Five Anonymous Donors

Mr. and Mrs. James B. Anello

Ruth Agrusa

Sue and Louie Andrew

Betty Arndt

Mr. Paul A. Baerwald

Paul Barkhaus

Steve and Mary Barney

James and Nora Barry

Rodney C. Bartlow and Judith K. Stephenson

Mr. James M. Baumgartner

Jack Beatty

Christine Beck

Dianne and David Benner

Richard Bergman

Elliot and Karen Berman

Mrs. Kristine Best

Mr. Lawrence Bialcik

Karen and Geoffrey Bilda

Ms. Elizabeth Billings

Marjorie Bjornstad

Greg Black

Robert Borch and Linda Wickstrom

Art and Jacinda Bouton

Lois and Robert Brazner

Dan and Peg Bresnahan

James Brown and Ann Brophy

Michael and Marianna Bruch

Dr. and Mrs. James D. Buck

Mike and Ericka Burzynski

Karen and Harry Carlson

Ms. Carol A. Carpenter

Mr. and Mrs. Richard J. Cecil

John Chain

B. Lauren and Margaret Charous

Edith Christian

Margaret Cieslak-Etlicher

Margaret Crosby

Garrett and Anne de Vroome Kamerling

Mrs. Linda DeBruin

Ms. Kristine Demski

Mary Paula Dix

Thomas C. Dill

Donald, Kathleen, and Amy Domagalski

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Dougherty

Gloria and Peter Drenzek

Mary Ann Dude

Thomas Durkin and Joan Robotham

Jill and George Fahr

Helen Forster

Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Freitag

Drs. Mark and Virginia Dennis

Martha Giacobassi

Matelan and Carole Glaske

Ralph and Cherie Gorenstein

Stephen and Bernadine Graff

Mr. and Mrs. James Gramentine

Greater Milwaukee Foundation

Dresselhuys Family Fund

Leesley B. and Joan J. Hardy

Jay Kay Foundation Fund

Mr. and Mrs. James Grigg

Sharon and Michael Grinker

Douglas and Margaret Ann Haag

Leila and Joe Hanson

Jacqueline Heling

Jean and John Henderson

Dr. Sidney and Suzanna Herszenson

Ms. Judy Hessel

Jenny and Bob Hillis

Mr. and Mrs. Bernard C. Hlavac

Jeanne and Conrad Holling

Richard and Jeanne Hryniewicki

Terry Huebner

Barbara Hunteman

Mr. and Mrs. James Hunter III

Suzanne and Michael Hupy

Deane and Vicky Jaeger

Kathryn and Alan Janicek

Amy S. Jensen

Faith L. Johnson

Karen and Dean Johnson

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kahn

Mr. Stephen Kaniewski

Rose and Dale Kaser

Patrick and Jane Keily

Brain and Mary Lou Kennedy

Ms. Carole Kincaid

Robert and Dorothy King

Ms. Jane Kivlin

Joseph W. Kmoch

Jonathan and Willette Knopp

Michael Koss/Koss Foundation

Milton and Carol Kuyers

Larry and Mary LeBlanc

Mr. and Mrs. David Leevan

John and Janice Liebenstein

Mr. and Mrs. David Lindberg

Matt and Patty Linn

Ann Loder

Bruce and Elizabeth Loder

Richard and Roberta London

Neill and Fran Luebke

Wayne and Kristine Lueders

Stephen and Jane Lukowicz

Ms. Joan Maas

Ann MacIver

Stephen and Judy Maersch

Dr. John and Kristie Malone

Mr. Peter Mamerow

Jeanne and David Mantsch

Steven and Mary Rose Marinkovich

Dr. and Mrs. Francisco Martinez

Dr. Daniel and Constance McCarty

Mr. Brian and Lesli McLinden

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas L. McLinn

Drs. Daryl Melzer and Rita Hanson

Ray and Elaine Meyer

Ms. Jean L. Mileham

Steven Miller

Dr. David Miyama

Christine Mortensen

William and Laverne Mueller

David and Gail Nelson

Jean A. Novy

Laurie Ocepek

Dr. and Mrs. James T. Paloucek

William and Cynthia Prost

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Quadracci

Catherine Quirk

Dr. Francis J. Randall

Dr. Ken C. Redlin

Lysbeth and James Reiskytl

Karen and Paul Rice

Dan and Anna Robbins

Mrs. David Y. Rosenzweig

Roger Ruggeri and Andrea Wagoner

Drs. Larry and Polly Ryan

Keri Sarajian and Rick Stratton

Wilbert and Genevieve Schauer

Foundation

Lawrence and Katherine Schnuck

Elaine and Martin Schreiber

Stephen and Lois Schreiter

Phil Schumacher and Pauline Beck

Bob and Sally Schwarz

Dr. and Mrs. Neville Sender

Ronald and Judith Shapiro

Scott Silet and Kate Lewis

John and Judith Simonitsch

Mr. Reeves E. Smith

Ken and Dee Stein

Bonnie L. Steindorf

Sally Swetnam

Ms. Lola Tegeder

Rebecca and Robert Tenges

Tim and Bonnie Tesch

Kent and Marna Tess-Mattner

Dean and Katherine Thome

Mr. and Mrs. James S. Tidey

Drs. Steven and Denise Trinkl

Katherine Troy

Constance U’Ren

Gary and Cynthia Vasques

Michael Walton

Ruth A. Way

Ms. Beth L. Weckmueller

Henry J. Wellner and James Cook

Mr. and Mrs. Jerome T. Welz

Ann and Joe Wenzler

Barbara Wesener

David Wesley

Lynn and Richard Wesolek

Ms. Stephanie Wesselowski

Robert and Barbara Whealon

A. James White

Robert and Lana Wiese

Linda and Dan Wilhelms

Annual Fund/Gala Paddle Raisers/Gala Sponsors/Corporate & Foundation

Terry and Carol Wilkins

Jay and Madonna Williams

Rolland and Sharon Wilson

Ron and Alice Winkler

Daryl and Bonnie Wunrow

Joan and Robert Ziegler

Mrs. Sharon S. Ziegler

Marilyn and Doug Zwissler

GALA PADDLE RAISERS

André Allaire

Mary Allmon

Alice Ambrowiak

Laura and Mike Arnow

Alexander Ayers

Tom and Susan Beranek

Erica and Eric Berg

John and Caroline Bolger

Virginia Bolger

Meg Boyd

Bob Bronzo

Randy Bryant and Cecelia Gore

Norman Buebendorf

Robert Burris and Marlene King

Daniel and Allison Byrne

Derrick Callister

Steven and Gillian Chamberlin

Joseph Checota and Ellen McNamara Checota

Amy and Frederick Croen

Lafayette Crump

Jillian Culver

Michael Cyrus

Benjamin Dern

George and Sandra Dionisopoulos

Jennifer Dirks

Matt Domski

Elizabeth and Robert Draper

Martha and Aaron Ebent

Linda Edelstein

Marquita Edwards

Joshua Erickson

Danielle Finn

Thayer Fisher

Moira Fitzgerald and Peter Kammer

Michael and Pamela Glorioso

Daniel and Samantha Grambow

John and Peggy Griffith

Gruber Law Offices LLC

Laura Gutierrez

Calvin Harris

Zoë Hastert

Paul Hauer

Kathryn Hausman and Matthew Millson

Barrie and Rob Henken

Renee Herzing

Karen Hung and Robert Coletti

Rachel Idso

Joan Johnson

Candice Johnstone

Judy and Gary Jorgensen

Alyce Katayama

Pat and Christine Keyes

Matt Kiefer

Marilyn King

Vivian King

Michael Krco

Konrad Kuchenbach

Tom Lindow

Xia Liu

Christopher and Krista Ludwig

Peter Mahler

Melissa and Dylan Mann

Susan and Brent Martin

Christian and Kate Mitchell

Teresa Mogensen

Theodore and Kelsey Molinari

Robert and Barbara Monnat

Bruce and Joyce Myers

Mitchell Nelles and Ellie Gettinger

Brian and Maura Packham

Nicholas and Alison Pardi

Richard and Lois Pauls

Tai and Andrew Pauls

Irina Petrakova Otto

Michael and Jayne Pink

Leslie and Aaron Plamann

Kathryn Podmokly

Deanna Singh and Justin Ponder

Anne and Thomas Reed

Kathryn Reinardy

Patricia Rieselbach

Michael Rossetto

Niko Ruud

Jakob Schjoerring-Thyssen

Michael Schmitz

Evamarie Schoenborn

Richard Schreiner and Alison Graf

Margot Schwartz

Gretchen Seamons

SixSibs Capital

Dale and Allison Smith

Pamela Stampen

Eric Stolzmann

Beth Straka

Bruce Tilley

Linda and Gile Tojek

Haruki Toyama and Brenda Bulinski

Susan Varela

Sarah Wagner

Marie Weiss

Michael and Cathy White

Jeff Yabuki and Gail Groenwoldt Yabuki

Andy Zilinskas

GALA SPONSORS

Laura and Mike Arnow

ATC

Baird Funds

BMO Bank

Brewers Community Foundation, Inc.

Ernst & Young, LLP

Godfrey & Kahn, S.C.

Interstate Parking

Johnson Controls, Inc.

Johnson Financial Group

Marietta Investment Partners

Susan and Brent Martin

Bob and Barb Monnat

Northern Trust

Northwestern Mutual

Old National Bank

PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP

Quarles & Brady, LLC

Rockwell Automation

SixSibs Capital

Dale and Allison Smith

We Energies Foundation

Westbury Bank

Herb Zien and Liz Levins

CORPORATE & FOUNDATION

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra truly values the generosity of musicloving patrons in the concert hall and throughout the community. We especially thank our Corporate and Foundation contributors for investing their time and support in this treasure. We gratefully acknowledge contributions from:

$1,000,000 and above

United Performing Arts Fund

$250,000 and above

Argosy Foundation

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

Laskin Family Foundation

$100,000 and above

Greater Milwaukee Foundation

Dr. John H. and Sara Sue Esser Fund

Herzfeld Foundation

Rockwell Automation

We Energies Foundation

$50,000 and above

Bader Philanthropies, Inc.

Chase Family Foundation

Greater Milwaukee Foundation

Norman and Lucy Cohn Family Fund

Helen and Jeanette Oberndorfer Fund

Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Fund

Melitta S. and Joan M. Pick Charitable Trust

$25,000 and above

Anonymous

Greater Milwaukee Foundation

Gertrude Elser and John Edward Schroeder Fund

Johnson Controls

Milwaukee County Arts Fund (CAMPAC)

National Endowment for the Arts

R.D. and Linda Peters Foundation

Schoenleber Foundation, Inc.

Wisconsin Arts Board

$15,000 and above

A.O. Smith Foundation, Inc.

Bert L. & Patricia S. Steigleder

Charitable Trust

Greater Milwaukee Foundation

David C. Scott Foundation

Krause Family Foundation

U.S. Bank

Matching Gifts/Golden Note Partners/Marquee Circle/Tributes

Wisconsin Department of Tourism

$10,000 and above

Ayco Charitable Foundation

Brico Fund

Ellsworth Corporation

General Mills Foundation

Gladys E. Gores Charitable Foundation

Greater Milwaukee Foundation

Donald and Barbara Abert Fund

William A. and Mary M. Bonfield, Jr. Fund

Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation

Komatsu Mining Corp Foundation

Northwestern Mutual

Ralph Evinrude Foundation, Inc.

William and Janice Godfrey Family Foundation

Wispact Foundation

$5,000 and above

Charles D. Ortgiesen Foundation

Frieda and William Hunt Memorial

Gene and Ruth Posner Foundation, Inc.

Greater Milwaukee Foundation

Margaret E. Sheehan Memorial Fund

Herb Kohl Philanthropies

Julian Family Foundation

Koeppen-Gerlach Foundation, Inc.

Milwaukee Arts Board

Richard G. Jacobus Family Foundation

Stackner Family Foundation, Inc.

$2,500 and above

Camille A. Lonstorf Trust

Dean Family Foundation

Dorothy Inbusch Foundation, Inc.

Enterprise Holdings

Greater Milwaukee Foundation

Del Chambers Fund

Eleanor N. Wilson Fund

ELM II Fund

Henry C., Eva M., Robert H. and Jack J. Gillo Charitable Fund

Margaret Heminway Wells Fund

Mildred L. Roehr & Herbert W. Roehr Fund

Hamparian Family Foundation

Theodore W. Batterman Family Foundation

Westbury Bank

$1,000 and above

Albert J. & Flora H. Ellinger Foundation

Anthony Petullo Foundation, Inc.

Clare M. Peters Charitable Trust

Curt and Sue Culver Family Foundation

Delta Dental of Wisconsin

Educators Credit Union

Gardner Foundation

Greater Milwaukee Foundation

Bechthold Family Fund

Carrie Taylor & Nettie Taylor

Robinson Memorial Fund

Cottrell Balding Fund

George and Christine Sosnovsky Fund

George and Joan Hoehn Family Fund

Irene Edelstein Memorial Fund

Gruber Law Offices LLC

Japan Foundation

Loyal D. Grinker

Steinway Piano Gallery of Milwaukee

Townsend Foundation

Usinger Foundation

$500 and above

Barney Family Foundation

Greater Milwaukee Foundation

Robert C. Archer Designated Fund

Roxy and Bud Heyse Fund/Journal Fund

MLG Capital

MATCHING GIFTS

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra gratefully acknowledges the following corporations and foundations who match their employees’ contributions to the Annual Fund.

Abbvie

ATC

Aurora Health Care

Benevity Community Impact Fund

BMO Harris Bank

Caterpillar Foundation

CyberGrants, LLC

Eaton Corporation

GE Foundation

Google Inc.

Johnson Controls Foundation

Kohl’s Corp.

Microsoft Corp.

National Philanthropic Trust

Rockwell Automation

SherwinWilliams

Stifel

Thrivent Financial

United Way of Greater Milwaukee and Waukesha County

Wisconsin Energy Corporation

GOLDEN NOTE PARTNERS

The MSO gratefully acknowledges the following organizations and individuals for their gifts of product or services:

Becker Design

Belle Fiori – Official Event Florist of the MSO

Beth and Michael Giacobassi

Brian and Maura Packham

The Capital Grille

Central Standard Craft Distillery

Coffman Creative Events

Downer Avenue Wine & Spirits

Drury Hotels

Encore Playbills

Eric and Brenda Hobbs

GO Riteway Transportation Group

Hilton Milwaukee

Kohler Co.

Peter Mahler

Marcus Hotels & Resorts

Marcus Corporation

Susan and Brent Martin

Ogletree Deakins

Sojourner Family Peace Center

Steinway Piano Gallery of Milwaukee

Studio Gear – Official Event Partner of the MSO

Wisconsin Public Radio

MARQUEE CIRCLE

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra proudly partners with the following members of the 2024.25 Marquee Circle.

We thank these generous partners of our annual corporate subscription program for their charitable contributions and for connecting their corporate communities with the MSO.

DeWitt Law Firm

Ellsworth Corporation

Hupy and Abraham, S.C.

Walker Forge, Inc.

TRIBUTES

In honor of Jacob and Shayna Bilsky

Adam Bilsky

In honor of Barry Blackwell, M.D.’s 90th Birthday

Elliot and Eva Lipchik

In memory of Dr. Henry Burko

Burko Memorial Fund

In memory of Thallis Hoyt Drake

Charles Q. Sullivan

In memory of Alan I. Ettinger

Ms. Suzy B. Ettinger

Frank Loo and Sally Long

Eugene Guszkowski

In memory of Robert Fewel

Janet Bollow

Dale and Darlene Kirchner

Ann Terwilliger

In memory of Bob Fono

Terry Burko and David Taggart

Fred and Kay Austermann

Christel Mildenberg

Mary and James Connelly

In memory of Michael Patrick Hauer

Marlene Cook

Linda Cutler

Gertrude Czajkowski

Jean Czajkowski

Jim and Nancy Czajkowski

Paul and Naomi Dang

Sandra Degeorge

Mary Duffy

Joan Hauer

Don and Debbie Hecker

Greg and Dawn Hecker

Yuqiu Jiang

Tributes

Julianne John

Patricia Krajnak

Debby Lazich

Christel Mildenberg

JoAnna Poehlmann

Jane and Jim Schneider

In memory of Christine Hausladen

Alex Kaker

Cheryl Limmex

Laurie Reid

Carol Walsh

In memory of Joseph J. Jochman

Carolyn Jochman

In memory of Dolores Johnson

Lynda Johnson

In memory of Dr. Michael J. Kuhn

Joan Callan

Margaret Christman

Laura and Eric Koepp

Kathleen Thometz

W. Gregory and Carla Von Roenn

In honor of Tim Klabunde’s long career with the MSO and retirement

Dr. and Mrs. David Daniels

In honor of Jennifer & Dion Lewis

Jennifer and Dion Lewis

In memory of Ann Loder

Caitlin, Trey, and Charlie Bagwell

The James Hennes Family

Shirley Haugen

Tim Hennes

Lauri Romine

Kari and Keith Seelig

Bruce and Lizz Loder

Will Loder

Monica Meyer

Barb Osborn and Family

Lynda Read

Howard and Judy Tolkan

Karin Wentz and Mark Otness

Thomas Wentz

In memory of Jean Mano

Eileen Kehoe and Bud Reinhold

In honor of the 70th Wedding

Anniversary of Wayne and Marguerite Lueptow

John and Linda Zimmermann

In honor of Susan Martin’s service on the board of the MSO

Caroline Ham

In honor of Susan and Brent Martin

Sarah Nordstrom

In memory of Dr. A. Stratton

McAllister

Dr. Caryl McAllister

In memory of Ken McHugh

Mr. and Mrs. Michael Hauer

In honor of our wonderful, joygiving, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra

Judith Gregor

In honor of the MSO’s Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Work

Tina Itson

In memory of Dr. Alan Pohl

Robert and Nan Ciralsky

Kathleen Eilers and Barry Blackwell

Linda Frank

Alan and Iris Goldberg

Anne Hazelwood

Dr. and Mrs. Gordon E. Lang

Ari Osur

Dr. Carol Pohl

Vera Ries

Dr. and Mrs. Neville Sender

In memory of Dave Rierson

Jack and Donna Hill

Judy and Gary Jorgensen

Patricia Rieselbach

Jim and Sandy Wrangell

In memory of I. Carl Romer

Beulah Romer Erickson

In honor of Patrick Schley

Imogene Schley

In honor of Kara and Brian Sichi

Kara Krueger Sichi

In memory of Jane Tisdel

Dr. Paul Loewenstein and Jody

Kaufman Loewenstein

In memory of Frank Thometz

Mr. and Mrs. Anthony W. Asmuth, III

Charles Brennan and Beth Stohr

Mary and James Connelly

JoAnn Corrao

Gregory Custer

Nancy Einhorn

Dr. Bob Henschel

Judy and Gary Jorgensen

Edmund Jung

Spencer Marquart

Dan and Susan Minahan

Christine Rahardt

Dr. and Mrs. Neville Sender

Michael and Cathy White

In honor of Alice Valkenburgh

The Valkenburgh Family

In memory of Judith Margaret Wagner

Steven A. and Lisa L. Wagner

MSO Board of Directors

OFFICERS

Susan Martin, Chair

David Uihlein, Honorary Co-Chair

Julia Uihlein, Honorary Co-Chair

Gregory Smith, Secretary; Chair, Governance Committee

Patrick Murphy, Treasurer; Chair, Finance Committee

EX OFFICIO DIRECTORS

Douglas M. Hagerman, Chair, Chair’s Council

Ken-David Masur, Music Director, Polly and Bill Van Dyke Music Director Chair

Mark Niehaus, President & Executive Director, Michael and Jeanne Schmitz Chair

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Susan Martin, Chair

Jennifer Dirks

Douglas M. Hagerman Chair, Chair’s Council

Eric E. Hobbs

Robert Klieger, Chair, Players’ Council

Mark A. Metzendorf, Chair, Advancement Committee

Christian Mitchell

Patrick Murphy, Treasurer; Chair, Finance Committee

Mark Niehaus, President & Executive Director, Michael and Jeanne Schmitz Chair

Michael J. Schmitz

Gregory Smith, Secretary; Chair, Governance Committee

Pam Stampen, Chair, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion (EDI) Task Force

Haruki Toyama, Chair, Artistic Direction Committee

ELECTED DIRECTORS

Daniel Byrne

Jeff Costakos

Steve Hancock, Chair, Education Committee

Renee Herzing

Alyce Coyne Katayama

Peter Mahler, Chair, Grand Future Committee

Teresa Mogensen

Robert B. Monnat

Leslie Plamann, Chair, Audit Committee

Craig A. Schmutzer

Jay E. Schwister, Chair, Retirement Plan Committee

Dale R. Smith

Herb Zien, Chair, Facilities Management Committee

DESIGNATED DIRECTORS

City

Sachin Chheda

Theodore Perlick Molinari

Pegge Sytkowski, Chair, Marketing & Advocacy Committee

County

Fiesha Lynn Bell

Rene Izquierdo

Garren Randolph

Niko Ruud

PLAYER DIRECTORS

Robert Klieger, Chair, Players’ Council

Ilana Setapen, Player-at-Large

CHAIR’S COUNCIL

Douglas M. Hagerman, Chair

Chris Abele

Laura J. Arnow

Richard S. Bibler

Charles Boyle

Roberta Caraway

Judy Christl

Mary E. Connelly

Donn R. Dresselhuys

Eileen Dubner

Franklyn Esenberg

Marta P. Haas

Jean Holmburg

Barbara Hunt

Leon Janssen

Judy Jorgensen

James A. Kasch

Lee Walther Kordus

Michael J. Koss

JoAnne Krause

Martin J. Krebs

Keith Mardak

Susan Martin

Andy Nunemaker

James G. Rasche

Stephen E. Richman

Michael J. Schmitz, Immediate Past Chair

Joan Steele Stein

Linda Tojek

Joan R. Urdan

Larry Waters

Kathleen A. Wilson

MSO ENDOWMENT & FOUNDATION TRUSTEES

Bruce Laning, Trustee Chair

Amy Croen

Steven Etzel

Douglas M. Hagerman

Bartholomew Reute

David Uihlein

PAST CHAIRS

Andy Nunemaker (2014-2020)

Douglas M. Hagerman (2011-2014)

Chris Abele (2004-2011)

Judy Jorgensen (2002-2004)

Stephen E. Richman (2000-2002)

Stanton J. Bluestone* (1998-2000)

Allen N. Rieselbach* (1995-1998)

Edwin P. Wiley* (1993-1995)

Michael J. Schmitz (1990-1993)

Orren J. Bradley* (1988-1990)

Russell W. Britt* (1986-1988)

James H. Keyes (1984-1986)

Richard S. Bibler (1982-1984)

John K. MacIver* (1980-1982)

Donn R. Dresselhuys (1978-1980)

Harrold J. McComas* (1976-1978)

Laflin C. Jones* (1974-1976)

Robert S. Zigman* (1972-1974)

Charles A. Krause* (1970-1972)

Donald B. Abert* (1968-1970)

Erhard H. Buettner* (1966-1968)

Clifford Randall* (1964-1966)

John Ogden* (1962-1964)

Stanley Williams* (1959-1962)

* deceased

MSO 2024.25 Administration

EXECUTIVE

Mark Niehaus, President & Executive Director, Michael and Jeanne Schmitz Chair

Bret Dorhout, Vice President of Artistic Planning

Tom Lindow, Vice President & Chief Financial Officer

Monica K. Meyer, Vice President of Advancement

Terrell Pierce, Vice President of Orchestra Operations

Kathryn Reinardy, Vice President of Marketing & Communications

Rick Snow, Vice President of Facilities & Building Operations

Marquita Edwards, Director of Community Engagement

Sean McNally, Executive Assistant & Board Liaison

ADVANCEMENT

Michael Rossetto, Senior Director of Advancement & Major Gifts

William Loder, Gift Officer

Kathryn Hausman, Individual Giving Manager, Research & Discovery

Julie Jahn, Campaign Manager

Tracy Migon, Development Systems Manager

Andrea Moreno-Islas, Advancement Manager

Mitch Nelles, Giving Manager, New Acquisition

Leah Peavler, Institutional Giving Manager

Abby Vakulskas, Giving Manager, Advancement Communications

EDUCATION & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Rebecca Whitney, Director of Education

Courtney Buvid, ACE & Education Manager

Nathan Hickox-Young, Concerts for Schools & Education Manager

FINANCE

Nicole Magolan, Controller

Jenny Beier, Senior Accountant

Arianis Hernandez, Accounting Coordinator

Cynthia Moore, Human Resources, Diversity & Inclusion Manager

MARKETING

Lizzy Cichowski, Director of Marketing

Erin Kogler, Director of Communications

Adam Cohen, Patron Systems Manager

Katelyn Farebrother, Marketing Coordinator

David Jensen, Publications Manager

Josh Marino, Content and Communications Manager

Zachary-John Reinardy, Lead Designer

BOX OFFICE

Luther Gray, Director of Ticket Operations & Group Sales

Al Bartosik, Box Office Manager

Marie Holtyn, Box Office Supervisor

Adam Klarner, Patron Services Coordinator

OPERATIONS

Sean Goldman, Director of Operations

Antonio Padilla Denis, Director of Orchestra Personnel

Kayla Aftahi, Operations Coordinator

Paul Beck, Principal Librarian, James E. Van Ess Principal Librarian Chair

Maiken Demet, Assistant to the Music Director

Albrecht Gaub, Artistic Coordinator

Matthew Geise, Assistant Librarian & Media Archivist

Emily Wacker Schultz, Artistic Associate

Lisa Sottile, Production Stage Manager

Tristan Wallace, Production Manager/Live Audio, MSO | Technical Director, BSC

Christina Williams, Chorus Manager

FACILITIES & EVENT SERVICES

Sam Hushek, Director of Events

Donovan Burton, Facilities Manager - 2nd Shift

Travis Byrd, Facilities Manager

Lisa Klimczak, House Manager

David Kotlewski, House Manager

Zed Waeltz, Event Services Manager

RESONANCE FOOD CO.

Josh Langenohl, General Manager of Premium

Ben Bartlett, Executive Sous Chef

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