Quality quincunx

Lansing Symphony names five candidates for next music director

The Lansing Symphony Orchestra took a big step toward filling the shoes of departing maestro Timothy Muffitt today (April 1) by naming five finalists for the position of music director.

Muffitt will conduct his final concert May 15. Each candidate will conduct one MasterWorks concert in the 2026-‘27 season, as part of a week of rehearsals and meetings with musicians, staff, board members and community groups. The orchestra plans to announce the new music director in summer 2027.

The announcement marks the start of a transition rarer than the transit of Mercury. Four presidents, three Lansing mayors, three Popes and three “Jeopardy!” hosts (including that guy who lasted only a week) have ruled their respective roosts since Muffitt took the reins in Lansing in 2006.

Beginning in March 2025, a 10-member volunteer selection committee spent hundreds of hours reviewing materials and video submissions from 140 applicants worldwide, according to LSO executive director Courtney Millbrook. The committee comprised five LSO musicians, two community members, two board members and former board President Darcy Kerr, who served as chair.

Artistic vision and musical ability came first and foremost, Millbrook said, but the committee also looked at candidates’ skill at interacting with their communities, the musicians, staff, orchestra boards and donors.

“A huge part of our artistic vision is to continue to program and share the classical works,” Millbrook said. “But also, over the past several years here, we’ve had a real commitment to new music and emerging composers, and that was very important to the committee.”

The committee also looked at ways each candidate reached into the community, “asking for specific examples of how they took the orchestra out of the hall or worked with communities that aren’t obvious for collaboration,” Millbrook said.

Although all five candidates are in their 40s or younger, it would overheat China’s Inner Mongolia data centers to list all their awards and achievements, but the quintessence of this quality quincunx is musical excellence and a passion for communication.

“At this point, when it comes down to the last five, they’re all amazing artists,” Millbrook said. “Yet they’re all so different from each other.”

Scott Seaton (guest conducting Oct. 2) is in his 11th season as music director of the North State Symphony in Northern California and his fourth season as artistic director of the Signature Symphony in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

On the podium, Seaton is athletic and graceful, a frictionless superconductor of musical energy. Off the podium, he’s a marathon runner and virtuoso saxophone player.

Seaton made his international debut in 2007 with the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg. He’s toured all over the world, but he seems to favor the American Midwest, appearing with the Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Detroit symphony orchestras. He’s also a champion of new music. In 2014, he came to Michigan to guest conduct the Jackson Symphony in a program called “A Tale of Two Cold Places,” combining the music of Ann Arbor composer Evan Chambers and Finnish composer Jean Sibelius.

Shanghai-born Yue Bao (guest conducting Oct. 16) has worked with many of the heaviest maestros in the symphonic world, including Michael Tilson Thomas, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Marin Alsop and Itzhak Perlman. She started out as a pianist and later studied conducting at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She made her Chicago Symphony debut at the 2021 Ravinia festival and debuted with the Houston Symphony, where she’s currently assistant conductor, on the opening night of the 2020-‘21 season.

On and off the podium, Bao exudes musical joy and a brightness of spirit. Her conducting style melds clear and precise timekeeping with a bone-deep feeling for the flow of the music. She has conducted several operas and is also an accomplished pianist. In spring 2022, she led the Detroit Symphony in four concerts that combined music by Mozart and Haydn with works by Black composers William Grant Still and Joseph Bologne.

Joshua Gersen (guest conducting Nov. 20) is the former assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic. His podium style is intense and muscular, with a deep-seated pulse that reverberates in his arms, shoulders and torso.

He pulled off a dramatic performance with the orchestra in 2017, when he filled in for maestro Semyon Bychkov on a few hours’ notice. The New York Times took note of his big moment: “Impassioned and incisive, the performance earned a standing ovation and prolonged applause from his colleagues in the orchestra.”

Shizuo Kuwahara (guest conducting Jan. 29, 2027) got a big career boost when he took first prize at the Georg Solti International Conductors’ Competition in Frankfurt, Germany. Born in Tokyo, Kuwahara got his conducting degrees at Rochester and Yale. After scoring big with Verdi and Puccini operas at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, he was named principal guest conductor there.

Kuwahara’s love of opera shows when he’s on the podium, as he channels every second of music with expressive, vigorous, mercurial engagement. His facial expressions alone provide a gripping parallel drama to the sounds coming from the stage.

James Blachly (guest conducting March 20) is music director of the New York City-based Experiential Orchestra and the Johnstown Symphony in Pennsylvania.

Blachly is a strong advocate for contemporary music. His 2020 recording of Ethel Smyth’s “The Prison” won a Grammy and breathed passionate life into a dark and serious choral work from the mid-20th century.

Blachly has commissioned and premiered more than 40 works by living composers, including Jessie Montgomery, Courtney Bryan and Viet Cuong. His Experiential Orchestra lives up to the name, with immersive performances in non-conventional venues like parks and churches.

All the candidates have local ties. Kuwahara spent part of his youth in Michigan. Seaton’s family lived in several Michigan towns when he was a boy. Most of the five have guest conducted with the Detroit Symphony or another Michigan orchestra, and two have worked with retiring LSO maestro Timothy Muffitt. Kuwahara has named Muffitt among his mentors (along with heavy hitters like Leonard Slatkin and David Zinman), and Bao was one of Muffitt’s conducting fellows at the Chautauqua Music Festival in New York state.

The LSO’s old guard is taking pains to keep its fingerprints off of what amounts to a generational handoff. Millbrook did not serve on the committee, but she kept the process moving over a full year of intense research and deliberations, compiling scores and metrics from each member and helping the committee rank the candidates.

Muffitt was not directly involved in the selection process, but he will stay on for the 2026-‘27 season as artistic advisor and help program the chamber series and the LSO at the Robin series.

Muffitt also helped Millbrook draw up guidelines for the five candidates’ audition concerts. (The full programs will be announced shortly after Muffitt’s May 15 swan song.) To ensure a level playing field, all five candidates must use the same size orchestra, program music by a new or emerging composer and avoid works the LSO has played in the past few years.

Each candidate will spend a busy week in Lansing, meeting with musicians, staff and community groups, touring music venues and getting to know the area.

The board will make the final choice after gathering input from the selection committee, the musicians, audience members and other interested parties.

Millbrook was pleased, but not surprised, at the caliber of candidates the committee reviewed and nominated.

“Every one of the candidates we interviewed had such a deep respect for each other and for the orchestra,” Millbrook said. “They really want to be here and be a part of this.”

Under Muffitt, the orchestra’s international reputation has risen to the point where it has attracted some of the world’s top musicians to be guest soloists, from pianists Benjamin Grosvenor and Christopher O’Riley to violinist Ray Chen, harpist Yolanda Kondonassis and Broadway star Audra McDonald.

“He’s put the orchestra in an amazing position,” Millbrook said. “People see his legacy and say, ‘Wow, this is a great orchestra to be at, that musical directors can stay this long and grow the orchestra so much.’”

In a world where everyone, from high-profile arts leaders to the person serving your cappuccino, changes jobs like dirty socks, is it reasonable to hope for another long and stable run on the LSO podium?

“Will we get 20 years, like we did with Tim, or 26, like we did with Gustav Meier? Probably not,” Millbrook said. “But this isn’t a process we want to go through every two or three years. Many music directors have more than one gig. I think we can make it work for the right person.”

The process has now gone as far as it can go on the basis of research, applications and interviews. What’s left is the “X factor” of personal interaction, audition and performance that no spreadsheet or audition video can predict.

 

Several LSO musicians who were around 20 years ago have testified that in spite of the high credentials of all five candidates who took their turn in the transitional 2005-‘06 season, the game was all but over as soon as Muffitt took the podium to crush Sergei Prokofiev’s epic Fifth Symphony. Muffitt’s musical acumen, rapport with the musicians and ease with the Lansing community quickly became evident, almost turning the rest of the season into a formality. Whether the choice will be as clear this time around, or whether the committee will suffer migraines sifting through their quincunx of quality candidates, only time will tell.

“There’s something special when a conductor and an orchestra and a community click, and it’s either there or it isn’t,” Millbrook said. “On paper, we could be happy with any one of these candidates, but we’ll see how it plays out.”