Photo: Madison Symphony Orchestra Circa 1926
The Madison Symphony Orchestra is celebrating a remarkable milestone, its 100th season. Across Madison media, writers and reporters are capturing the energy, history, and future of this iconic institution. Below, we’ve compiled recent coverage from local outlets, so you can experience the celebration through multiple perspectives. Thank you to all our partners for highlighting this special season! We encourage you to check each article linked under their respective section. Enjoy!
The Cap Times
Madison Symphony looks at 100: Opening concert celebrate ‘pure joy’
By Matt Ambrosio, Special to the Cap Times | Sep 15, 2025
As the Madison Symphony Orchestra opens its 100th season on Sept. 19, outgoing maestro John DeMain wants to set the stage for its next century.
“We think so much of the orchestra as playing things of the past, but there is so much writing right now. We want to make sure we are part of that train,” DeMain said. “That’s what’s exciting to me — that our 100th season has so much new music that points us to the next 100 years.”
DeMain, the MSO’s musical director since 1994, will step down from his position following the MSO’s centenary season. His music selections for 2025-26 aim to celebrate the past and look to the future, featuring some of the most popular pieces of the symphonic repertoire as well as adventurous new works from living composers.
Contemporary orchestral music “desires to have a relationship with the listener,” DeMain said. “The composers write because they want a relationship with the audience.”
This season will see virtuosic long-time friends of the orchestra return to Overture Hall. The first three featured soloists of the season — Olga Kern (piano), Christopher Taylor (piano) and Alban Gerhardt (cello) — have collectively delighted Madison audiences with the MSO over a dozen times.
While this season will include nods to tradition, DeMain wants to introduce “a real diet of new music.” As the orchestra seeks a musical director to succeed DeMain, it will host several guest conductors this season, including Robert Moody, Kazem Abdullah, Tania Miller and Laura Jackson, a process that started last year with Nicholas Hersh, Michael Stern and Joseph Young.
Each candidate “should have an equal opportunity to display their ability to conduct in various styles,” DeMain said. “Each guest conductor has a big piece, but also one from the 21st century.”
Circus and ‘Star Wars’ at a grand opening
Over the weekend of Sept. 19-20, the MSO’s opening celebration features a special ticketed dinner with maestro DeMain and a Friday concert with an all-Tchaikovsky program. The first evening promises light and beautiful fare, starting at an earlier than normal time (6 p.m.) and featuring a few of the composer’s most loved orchestral works.
Following the gorgeous “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy, Olga Kern will join the orchestra for Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat. The melodies are penetrating, and the solo piano part promises a virtuosic showing from Kern that should dazzle even unacquainted audiences.
For curious listeners, the Theme and Variation from Tchaikovsky’s not-often-heard — though utterly charming — Orchestral Suite No. 3 will follow the concerto. The romping polonaise (a Polish dance) at the end of the piece will close the concert in energetic fashion.
The following evening’s concert is quite appropriate for audiences in Madison, a city with a thriving circus scene. Cirque de la Symphonie has been a traveling circus group since 2006, “formed to bring the magic of cirque to the music hall.” The program includes selections from iconic film scores, like “Gladiator,” “Star Wars,” the “Harry Potter” films, “Titanic” and “Vertigo,” all set to choreographed circus acts.
The music and celebration will continue with an after party directly following the concert, featuring DJ Terrence J.
Mahler and more
The first concerts of the subscription season celebrate the MSO’s history while looking toward its future — and the future of orchestral music.
Set for Oct. 17-19, the MSO’s “Primal Light” program juxtaposes two pieces that explore similar biblical subject matter in contrasting fashions: Mason Bates’ recently composed “Resurrexit,” and Gustav Mahler’s time-tested orchestral staple, the Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”).
Having conducted all of Mahler’s symphonies with the MSO, DeMain wanted to perform one during this special season, choosing perhaps the most profound of Mahler’s symphonies. DeMain described the second symphony as “transformative.”
“There are little touches of nostalgia here and there,” he said. “The apotheosis at the end is so mind-blowing in its sonic brilliance.”
Dealing in similar thematic terrain, the concert will begin with Grammy-winning composer Mason Bates’ 2024 work, “Resurrexit.” Bates is one of the United States’ most popular living composers, known for his ability to incorporate electronic elements into his work. Bates is also a DJ and curator, and his opera “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” will open at the Metropolitan Opera later this month.
Even more than Mahler’s “Resurrection,” “Resurrexit” probes deeply into a liturgical setting, with melodies inspired by Middle Eastern scales and atypical symphony instruments, such as the semantron (a large wooden plank hammered by huge mallets, used by Byzantine monks as a call to prayer).
A guest at the podium
The Madison Symphony has been hosting guest conductors as leadership searches for the organization’s next musical director. This influx of new faces has brought new repertoire and invigorating energy.
The first guest conductor of the season, acclaimed maestro Robert Moody, will lead the MSO in November. Along with Joseph Haydn’s lyrical yet energetic cello concerto and Modest Mussorgsky’s sonic depiction of a stroll through an art gallery (that would be “Pictures at an Exhibition”), Moody and the MSO will open with Christopher Theofanidis’s “Rainbow Body,” a work Moody recently performed with the San Francisco Symphony.
Since its composition in 2000, “Rainbow Body” has become a favorite of orchestras and audiences alike. The work’s main thematic melody is based on a chant from 12th century composer Hildegard of Bingen. In “Rainbow Body,” the melody is recontextualized and contrasted with more dramatic orchestral writing, including some spectacular moments for the percussion section.
“Hopefully there is something in every concert that the general symphony-goer knows,” DeMain said. “For them to come, they’ve got to look forward to hearing something that they know, and then they can hear something that they don’t.
“I think it’s important to have balance in the programming,” he added. “But I also had some pieces that I wanted to do because it is my last season as music director.”
Madison Symphony Orchestra celebrates 100 years of magical music | Music | captimes.com
Wisconsin State Journal
John Demain’s tenure to culminate in epic season for Madison Symphony Orchestra
By Shun Graves | July 24, 2025
He had arrived in Madison with an operatic background and an international pedigree. Yet ahead of his 1993 guest program — effectively his tryout for the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s top job — John DeMain implored his future musicians with one simple request: “Don’t forget me.” His utterance stuck with musicians like longtime percussionist Rick Morgan. Here was the Houston Grand Opera’s music director, the conductor who’d premiered works by era defining composers like Leonard Bernstein and raised his baton on five continents, seeking the approval of the orchestra and audiences in Madison. “When I listen to a recording, I like to find performers and conductors who are actually doing what the music says,” DeMain said. They didn’t forget, not then and certainly not today. For here was the man who would transform the MSO into a professional organization, an orchestra that could finally tackle the toughest music and make it more accessible to all. “My ambition was to not baby this orchestra at all,” said DeMain, 81, perched on a couch at his Madison home as he reflected on his tenure, which began after his selection in 1994. As DeMain prepares for his final season as the MSO’s music director, he’ll leave behind an orchestra whose talent didn’t just explode under his baton; it required a new home. DeMain’s last season will also mark the MSO’s centennial.
You can’t separate the two. The triumphant final concert, a free, two-day series at the Overture Center next June, will wrap up the orchestra’s first 100 years by showcasing just about everything DeMain worked to achieve. Back in 1993, when he emerged as one of three finalists after a global search for the orchestra’s next music director, DeMain first had some personal goals. He’d mostly conducted orchestras that accompanied operas, and he found classical music conductors in the U.S. were often pigeonholed into either opera or purely symphonic work. “So when I came to hear this orchestra, I thought, I would like to have my own symphony orchestra,” he said. DeMain would hear some problems too. As he prepared for that guest program in October 1993, DeMain appraised the winds and brass sections of the orchestra as “terrific.” The strings, not so much. The string section’s small size and out-of-tune playing hamstrung the MSO’s version of Richard Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” overture during DeMain’s 1993 guest performance. But his bid didn’t end there, because the rest of the program stunned. In preparing programs, DeMain does something others in classical music sometimes scorn: Listen. DeMain is retiring at the end of the orchestra’s next season.
Michael Allsen, who writes program notes and serves as the MSO’s de facto historian, played in the brass section until 2018. He remembered performing during DeMain’s guest concert with astonishment, especially during his rendition of Dimitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. “It was just tremendously exciting,” Allsen said. One other candidate mounted a solid guest performance but dropped out. The field narrowed to two finalists. In February 1994, not long after the other candidate’s guest performance, DeMain secured the gig to succeed Roland Johnson. After his selection, DeMain told the Wisconsin State Journal he would keep the “existing audience on the edge of their seats.” But change took time. Some of the problems DeMain identified early on stemmed from how the MSO had evolved since its first season, 1926-27. The first three directors had established the orchestra as a Madison cultural institution, but it lacked the standards of many professional orchestras. Case in point: the lack of blind auditions.
Most professional organizations try out prospective musicians by listening to them behind a curtain. Madison’s orchestra didn’t do that, resulting in a “closed shop” culture, he said. Many of the MSO musicians taught at the University of Wisconsin, he said, and would often pick from their students to fill out their respective sections in the orchestra. “We started auditioning behind a screen,” DeMain said. “I made sure that we had a chance to discuss the musicians together, the candidates, and we would make unanimous choices. And gradually we got better and better and better people in the orchestra.” As the orchestra started to attract musicians from places like Milwaukee and Chicago, DeMain also got the OK to expand the string section. That would help ameliorate some of the problems there. His other solution? Rehearsing music slowly and improving intonation, note by note, an intensive but ultimately fruitful method that would help DeMain achieve some of his higher-flying goals. A tiny gold piano sits on a table in DeMain’s Madison home. To familiarize himself with a symphony, DeMain first sits down at his piano and works through the orchestral score.
The DeMain method
He calls it “having integrity with the music.” To become familiar with a symphony, DeMain sits down at his piano and works through the orchestral score, which shows all the different instrumental sections. He marks it up. Green for woodwinds and red for brass, for example. And he listens. “When I listen to a recording, I like to find performers and conductors who are actually doing what the music says,” DeMain said, “trying to find a way to really do what the music is suggesting and says, and doesn’t have a personal interpretation on it that is so distorting that it’s an ego thing, that it’s not trying to really do what the composer wanted to do.” Take a symphony by Gustav Mahler. DeMain can tell within 20 measures — maybe a minute — of a recording whether the conductor followed the music or not. If Mahler says to speed up imperceptibly from one point to another, then do it. Don’t change the tempo somewhere else. Definitely don’t make what DeMain decries as “willful” changes to what Mahler spelled out.
You can’t achieve such small-scale intricacies without a top-notch orchestra. Morgan, the percussionist, remembers how DeMain’s understanding of the music shined when he visited Madison in 1993. In the following years Morgan would learn that to accomplish his musical vision, DeMain had a “forceful” approach and presence, though he would also joke around. That rapport with the musicians, while also pushing them toward what Allsen calls “the next level,” would prove pivotal to DeMain’s longevity as he pushed a number of other changes. He compressed rehearsals into the week ahead of a concert. And the number of concerts multiplied. DeMain pushed the MSO to add a Sunday matinee performance after its traditional Saturday evening showing. Eventually the orchestra would add a Friday show too. The changes accompanied, and sometimes coalesced into, the ultimate challenge for the musicians: taking on the most technically complicated but widely known symphonies. In his opening concert as the MSO’s music director in September 1994, DeMain tackled Mahler’s first symphony in a performance described by the State Journal as “gutsy” but with “shakiness” in some sections. He would go on to conduct the rest of Mahler’s symphonies, compositions considered to rank among the greatest orchestral music. “Repertoire like that also creates orchestras,” Allsen said. “It stretches the orchestra, challenges the orchestra.” But one challenge didn’t emanate from the stage.
New venue another legacy
When DeMain joined the MSO, the orchestra performed at a theater that once screened silent movies. The Capitol Theater, then known as the Oscar Mayer Theater, hosted the MSO and several other performing arts groups. The orchestra sounded great from the mezzanine, DeMain said, but beneath the balcony it sounded completely different. “It sounded like the Salvation Army on a bad night,” he said. “It was horrific sitting under there.” Thus began his push to find a new home for the MSO. He considered the Orpheum Theater but found it had similar acoustic challenges. That meant a completely new venue was in order. Then came Jerry Frautschi, who with his wife, American Girl founder Pleasant Rowland, spearheaded the creation of a new arts center for Madison, ultimately dedicating $205 million toward the project. The Overture Center for the Arts opened in 2004, and “it changed our lives,” DeMain said. Now the performing arts center will serve as center stage for DeMain’s valedictory season. DeMain faces the audience as the symphony finishes the “Star-Spangled Banner” on opening night of the Overture Center on Sept. 18, 2004.
Guest conductors make debut
The MSO’s centennial will open Sept. 19 with an all-Tchaikovsky program. Season highlights include “Cirque de la Symphonie,” a circus show accompanied by the MSO the next night, and programs featuring well-known artists like cellist Alban Gerhardt, pianist Yefim Bronfman, violinist Rachel Barton Pine and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. The four programs each featuring one of those artists will also offer a glimpse into the MSO’s next 100 years. Robert Reed, the MSO’s executive director and a member of the committee searching for DeMain’s successor, said the orchestra has reviewed hundreds of conductors. Last year, the orchestra brought three guest conductors to Madison. Four more will show their chops this season as they accompany those guest artists. Robert Moody leads the Memphis Symphony Orchestra in Tennessee, among other groups. Kazem Abdullah conducts around the world and previously directed the Sinfonieorchester Aachen in Germany. Tania Miller directs the Brott Music Festival in Canada. And Laura Jackson has served as the longtime music director of the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra in Nevada. All told, the selection process seems more dynamic than in 1993, when the MSO presented three distinct candidates.DeMain, meanwhile, plans to attend a rehearsal led by each guest conductor, but he won’t attend the concerts. “Because I don’t want people coming up to me and saying, ‘What’d you think? What’d you think? What’d you think?’” he said. “I’m not supposed to think on those issues. But what I’ve heard is that the level of conductor is very high, and the orchestra is playing really well for them. They’re showing off for each other.” He’s excited to see how the choice of a successor is made, as he’s decided not to have a hand in it. Plus, he has a whole season to prepare for. When John DeMain arrived in Madison as one of three candidates vying to lead the Madison Symphony Orchestra in 1993, he exhorted the musicians not to forget him. After more than three decades, DeMain enters his final season as music director as perhaps the MSO‘s most memorable figure.
‘Community Gift and Dream’
The MSO bills its 100th season’s final concert as the “Community Gift and Dream”: a two day festival in June 2026. Admission will be free. Aside from serving as a gift to the city, the concerts will deliver on another of DeMain’s goals, a challenge faced by classical music everywhere: bringing in new, younger audiences. It’s a future that DeMain sometimes ruminates about. How about adding a visual aspect to the performance? Video close-ups of the musicians, perhaps? “I don’t think we should be running a Coca-Cola commercial while we’re playing a Beethoven symphony,” he said. “I think it should help expand our senses for that particular moment.” For now, though, the baton remains the focus for DeMain. He’s not in the market for another directorship, he joked, but he plans to keep conducting, perhaps as a guest, perhaps with a fancy title like emeritus. “I don’t know how long I’m going to hold up,” DeMain said. “As long as I can hear, see, and the arms go up and down, then I’ll work when asked.” “Repertoire like that also creates orchestras. It stretches the orchestra, challenges the orchestra.” Michael Allsen, brass section member until 2018 and MSO’s de facto historian
Symphony – League of American Orchestras
Madison Symphony Music Director John DeMain to Conclude 30-Year Tenure at End of Coming Season
August 5, 2025
In the August 24 Wisconsin State Journal (Madison), Shun Graves writes that when John DeMain guest-conducted the Madison Symphony Orchestra before being named music director in 1994, “He was the Houston Grand Opera’s music director, the conductor who’d premiered works by era-defining composers like Leonard Bernstein and raised his baton on five continents … Here was the man who would transform the Madison Symphony Orchestra into a professional organization, an orchestra that could finally tackle the toughest music and make it more accessible to all…. As DeMain prepares for his final season as the MSO’s music director, he’ll leave behind an orchestra whose talent didn’t just explode under his baton; it required a new home. DeMain’s last season will also mark the MSO’s centennial…. The triumphant final concert, a free, two-day series at the Overture Center next June, will wrap up the orchestra’s first 100 years by showcasing just about everything DeMain worked to achieve …. Robert Reed [is] the MSO’s executive director and a member of the committee searching for DeMain’s successor … The MSO bills its 100th season’s final concert as the ‘Community Gift and Dream.’ ”
Madison Symphony Heads into Centennial Year, Final Season for Longtime Music Director John Demain
September 18, 2025
In Thursday’s (9/18) WKOW (Madison, Wisconsin), Grace Tuohy reports, “The Madison Symphony Orchestra will open its 100th season Friday night, marking a historic milestone and the final year for longtime music director John DeMain. DeMain, who has led the orchestra for 32 years, will step down at the end of the season. The centennial celebration will begin this weekend with two performances: a traditional classical concert on Friday featuring works by Tchaikovsky and guest pianist Olga Kern, followed by a dinner reception. On Saturday, Cirque de la Symphonie will join the orchestra on stage, combining live music with acrobatic and circus acts … An afterparty with a DJ will follow. DeMain says this season honors the past while setting the stage for the next 100 years, as the orchestra begins the search for his successor. Over the past three decades, DeMain helped shape the modern era of the symphony, including the opening of the Overture Center and implementing blind auditions to promote diversity and fairness in hiring. The orchestra now includes 110 musicians, many of whom have moved to Madison from across the country…. DeMain said the opening weekend’s program is designed to be accessible to everyone—especially new listeners.”
Madison Magazine
The Madison Symphony Orchestra’s centennial trifecta
By Doug Moe | Sep 19, 2025
This season marks Madison Symphony Orchestra’s 100th year, the end of its music director’s 32-year run and new reading material that chronicles it all. When John DeMain arrived in Madison in 1994 as music director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra, his predecessor, Roland Johnson, offered the following counsel: “Make it better and build the audience.” DeMain did both, but to truly take the orchestra to the next level, he needed to find a new home for MSO. The acoustics in the Civic Center’s Oscar Mayer Theatre, where MSO had performed for 25 seasons, were, in places, “beyond bad,” DeMain says. When Jerry Frautschi and Pleasant Rowland came forward with their astonishing gift of $205 million to fund the Overture Center for the Arts, DeMain recalled having heard American-Argentine architect César Pelli once say, “I never put a brick in a wall without having an acoustician by my side.” DeMain mentioned that to Rowland. Pelli was hired to design the venue, and Overture Hall is now widely recognized as a world-class music venue. Looking back, DeMain calls the circumstances of Overture’s creation “a miracle.” Sometimes the stars align, and for MSO, the 2025-26 season is a three-part constellation. Not only is this season the symphony’s 100th anniversary — it was founded in 1925 — it’s also DeMain’s last as music director. This year also brings the publication of a new book, “A Century of the Madison Symphony Orchestra,” by J. Michael Allsen. It’s a comprehensive history that DeMain, who got an early look, calls “phenomenal.” (Another book, publishing in March, is “Working With My Heroes: A Life in Music,” co-authored by John DeMain and the late Gregg Hettmansberger.)
That word might likewise describe the new season, which begins in September with two special Overture Center concerts, and concludes next June with a “Centennial Festival Weekend” featuring an Overture open house and DeMain conducting his final concert as music director. “He’ll have been on our podium for 32 years at that time,” says MSO Executive Director Robert Reed. “It’s going to be filled with great music. It’s probably going to be very emotional for John. We’re looking forward to it.” It’s remarkable that in MSO’s 100-year existence, DeMain is only the fourth music director. Sigfrid Prager, MSO’s music director from 1926-1947, conducted opera through Europe and Argentina before coming to the United States. His successor, Walter Heermann (1947-1961), played principal cello in the Cincinnati Symphony for decades, while Roland Johnson (1961-1994) was a violin virtuoso who later became a respected academic. Like his predecessors, DeMain had an international reputation by the time he came to Madison, having worked with Leonard Bernstein and having won Tony and Grammy awards for a 1970s Houston Grand Opera production of “Porgy and Bess.” “All musically brilliant folks,” Allsen, the author of the MSO centennial history, says of the four. Shortly after arriving, DeMain — heeding Roland Johnson’s early advice — initiated Sunday matinees to build the audience and held blind auditions to ensure MSO seated the best players. The orchestra’s reputation has grown exponentially. Today, musicians come from Chicago and beyond to audition. “It’s a much more professional orchestra today,” Allsen says, “and the standards are much higher.”
In his last season as music director, DeMain is looking forward to conducting Mahler when the season’s subscription series begins this month. In March, he’ll conduct a major new work by Jake Heggie (composer of the opera “Dead Man Walking”) that was specially commissioned for the MSO centennial. (Also in March, DeMain has a memoir coming out, “Working With My Heroes: A Life in Music,” co-written with the late Gregg Hettmansberger and published by the University of Wisconsin Press.) While he won’t be the music director after June, DeMain — who is also artistic director of the Madison Opera — will help plan the 2026-27 MSO season and likely guest-conduct some concerts. According to Reed, the orchestra hopes to have a new music director named by the end of the 2025-26 season in June. “I knew the 100th anniversary was coming,” says Reed, who’s been with MSO since 2022. “I knew there was the possibility of a new music director search. John was indicating he would be stepping down in the coming years. I knew what I was getting into.” Reed hopes — and believes — that the centennial season and its attendant special events will help MSO reach a wider audience, showing them the symphony can be fun. It was a goal on his arrival in Madison, and it’s working. “More people are coming,” Reed says. “More diverse audiences, younger audiences. But it’s work that never ends.” DeMain envisions a lively centennial weekend in June at Overture that will offer music beyond the symphony, including local acts. “I wanted to have a two-day festival that would be free for the public,” he says. “We’ll have different acts going on all day long.” Jerry Frautschi was his inspiration. “When Overture Hall opened,” DeMain says, “Jerry stood at the door and welcomed people off the street to come in and see the hall.” The welcome mat is out again for an exciting centennial.
Doug Moe is a Madison writer and a former editor of Madison Magazine. Find more by Moe in his web-exclusive blog at madisonmagazine.com/dougmoe.
The Madison Symphony Orchestra’s centennial trifecta | MADISON MAGAZINE | channel3000.com
Channel 3000
Madison Symphony Orchestra celebrates 100th season
Sep 17, 2025
Madison Symphony Orchestra celebrates 100th season | Video | channel3000.com