South Bend Symphony Orchestra renews Alastair Willis' contract through 2025
Maestro Alastair Willis refers to a Post-It Note he has by his phone during a recent interview about the delayed start of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra’s 2020-21 season.
It reads: “Keep it positive, Willis.”
“I have to look at the glass as half-full,” he says. “That’s been my challenge every day.”
Despite the damage to people’s lives, the economy and, yes, the arts caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Willis did receive two pieces of news this summer to help him “keep it positive”:
• In June, the SBSO renewed his contract as music director through 2025.
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• This past week, he announced that he has been named the principal conductor and artistic adviser of the Symphonia Boca Raton, a chamber orchestra based in South Florida.
“It’s so exciting,” Willis says about his contract extension. “To be growing in my relationships with everyone, this is the point. I’ve moved here, and everything is deepening.”
The SBSO hired Willis with a four-year contract in May 2017 to replace longtime music director Tsung Yeh, and his first season began that September.
So far in his time here, Willis has brought several new initiatives to the orchestra, including an annual collaboration with musicians and composers from Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, with which he is affiliated; a three-year performance cycle of all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies to celebrate the 250th anniversary this year of the composer’s birth; and an annual “Alastair Presents” concert, a themed program of music paired with a narrative written and performed by Willis, who also has worked as an actor.
“I feel I’ve got more to offer (here), and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do that and for their faith in me,” he says. “The future is quite bright, despite the coronavirus.”
The SBSO also announced in June that John Axelberg has been elevated to president of its board of directors. The CEO of South Bend-based General Stamping & Metalworks, he has been on the SBSO’s board since 2015 and is its outgoing vice president.
The Beethoven cycle won’t be completed until it’s safe for the orchestra and the large chorus it requires to perform together. Otherwise, the Silk Road collaboration and “Alastair Presents” series will continue.
Willis also has other new ideas he plans to introduce. One involves increasing the number of works the orchestra regularly performs by African American composers as a response to the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement this year. He praised the SBSO for its long-standing annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day concert and how that has already made the orchestra’s grasp of African American music “considerable.”
“We’ve been discussing having more of that in our main season,” he says, “and what’s happened recently has opened the door for that to happen, and not a moment too soon. … The world is changing in all these respects, and we will reflect that in the South Bend Symphony in the next few years. That’s going to make it new and exciting for me, and, I’m sure, for our musicians and audience, too.”
His commitment with the Symphonia Boca Raton, Willis says, won’t interfere with his position in South Bend, because it entails only two or three trips to Florida each year.
He began guest-conducting there in 2005 and launched his “Alastair Presents” series there, although it was called “New Directions” then.
“I’m able to try new things in either place,” he says, “and see what works.”
For now, Willis continues to study his scores for the SBSO’s next season, which begins in January, and plans to conduct the LaPorte County Symphony Orchestra’s “Hoosier Star” singing competition as a livestreamed event Sept. 12, albeit with only five musicians and the vocal competitors on stage.
In the meantime, he has his Post-It Note and its important message.
“We have to keep it positive, because the arts have the power to do that,” Willis says. “We’re thirsting for good news and hope, and it’s few and far between these days.”
