By Lawrence Toppman

The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra concert Saturday at Belk Theater left me in a wishful mood.

I wished a winter storm hadn’t crippled New York on the January weekend I’d arranged to fly up, while Kwamé Ryan was conducting “Porgy and Bess” at the Metropolitan Opera. The CSO’s music director gave us a taste of his prowess here with Robert Russell Bennett’s arrangement of music from George Gershwin’s opera, and it was the highlight of the program. The greasy winds in Sportin’ Life’s dissembling number and the jaunty brass in Porgy’s song of affirmation felt just right, even without the voices.

I wished conflicts over scheduling, turf protection and/or money didn’t prevent a “West Side Story” revival connecting the CSO, Charlotte Ballet and first-rate local actor-singers. Ryan also led a snappy rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from that musical Saturday. It started as a slow burn – sometimes too slow, for my money – but picked up energy during the “dances at the gym” sequence and ended with a crackling finale. (Speaking of arrangements, props to the uncredited Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who orchestrated the Broadway show for Bernstein and prepared the expanded orchestration for this suite under his supervision.)

I wished we could regularly have encores again. “Celebration Dance,” written by Jamaican-British composer Eleanor Alberga for Roald Dahl’s re-telling of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” had plenty of jubilant, semi-dissonant craziness. It didn’t do much for me, but I was happy to hear Ryan add an unannounced piece to a short concert.

And to be honest, I wished a different opener had replaced Johan Svendsen’s “Romeo and Juliet,” described as “a fantasia for orchestra.” It comes off as a shorter version of Tchaikovsky without memorable melodies; sections presumably represent a duel or a love duet or the gravitas of Friar Laurence, but it’s the dullest of the nine classical music “Romeos” I know.

Ryan will go head-to-head with memories of former music director Christopher Warren-Green next season, leading Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” (which CWG played at the audition concert that got him the job) and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which Warren-Green conducted strongly but programmed too often, great as it is. So it’s interesting to compare their two styles, with Warren-Green fresh in the memory and Ryan solidly ensconced in his job.

Ryan’s more vocal; he relishes playing the host, chatting with the audience as he did Saturday and making jokes. He’s a showman – this is not a criticism – who conducts with his whole body, stabbing the air for musical accents and hip-swinging whenever dance rhythms take over the lower half of his frame. It’s easy to imagine Warren-Green telling orchestra members to shout “Mambo!” during Bernstein’s dance suite, but it’s hard to imagine him also cueing the opening finger-snaps with a pop of his own digits.

Both music directors were and are committed to lesser-known composers or pieces, hence the snoozy Svendsen, but Ryan is programming more American music and longer works by living composers. Warren-Green let heavyweight masterpieces by Mahler or Beethoven stand by themselves on a program; Ryan will cap programs in the 2026-27 classical season with hefty Ninth Symphonies by Bruckner and Beethoven, but he’ll also conduct shorter works in the same evenings to change up the mood or put the big pieces in context.

I’m a fan of both men. (I hesitate to use the past tense for CWG, though he’s not scheduled to conduct any concerts next season.) Yet whatever their relative strengths may be, there’s a special pleasure in seeing Ryan infuse the CSO with extra juice and panache, as he did Saturday in the Gershwin and Bernstein suites.

By Lawrence Toppman

I had the rare pleasure of taking in three pieces unfamiliar to me Saturday at the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra concert in Belk Theater: Marianna Martines’ historically significant Sinfonia in C Major, the U.S. premiere of Anna Clyne’s revelatory choral work “The Years,” and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5.

Well, yes: I have listened to the “Emperor” concerto dozens of times. I own recorded versions by eight or nine great pianists and have often heard it live. Yet Inon Barnatan’s tender, reflective pianism made me sit up and take in many passages as if they were new.

In the first movement, he and guest conductor Stephanie Rhodes Russell were often a marriage of opposites, but a happy marriage. She roused the orchestra to vigorous, extroverted playing with sharp accents; he drew us in with introverted playing filled with Chopinesque rubato, trusting her to hold the orchestra in check until he flared up in climaxes. (She did.)

They were both serenely deliberate in the central slow movement, floating in a timeless world. In the finale, she again supplied a sturdy rhythmic spine, while he turned dreamy and whimsical. Music that has often seemed dancelike or bold (or both) came across as a dignified kind of fun – not necessarily the way I think of the piece, but a valid approach from a first-rate pianist. He met a genuine ovation from the audience with a poetically simple encore, Myra Hess’ adaptation of the Bach chorale “Sheep May Safely Graze.”

Russell had already proved her worth in works no one in the hall was likely to have heard. Martines (sometimes called Marianne von Martinez) had an interesting life: She lived in the same apartment building as the young Haydn, from whom she took music lessons for three years as a child, was known well beyond her native Austria – she was the first woman admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna – and has sometimes been credited with writing the first symphony by a woman, the one Charlotte got Saturday.

It’s competent, on a par with countless second- or third-tier composers of her era. (To be fair, she was better known as a vocal composer.) Russell and the CSO gave it bounce and polish, but there’s not a memorable or surprising phrase in its three movements.

Russell also had the measure of Clyne’s choral work, which remained both memorable and surprising throughout its 20 minutes. You could hear echoes of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “A Sea Symphony” in the metaphysical poetry (though Walt Whitman aimed higher than Stephanie Fleischmann does here) and in the waves of sound that built slowly to climaxes, subsided and surged forth again. Later, you might have been reminded of Philip Glass’ hypnotic patterns, both in the pulsing rhythms of repeated brass and woodwind notes or the Charlotte Master Chorale’s soft repetition of lines about loneliness: “A moth batters at the screen” or “The years like clouds run through you.” (Hence the title.)

Yet Clyne has her own voice, a soothing one overall in this piece. She wrote it during the COVID-19 pandemic, and I took it to be a reminder to embrace solitude and inner quiet. Occasional stabbing brass or surging strings eventually gave way to vocal and orchestral calm, and this beautifully atmospheric work ended with a transporting feeling of peace.

It’s been around for five years, roughly the length of time the CSO has been playing Clyne’s shorter works. That relationship-building paid off with a major coup: I’ve generally enjoyed the others, but nothing prepared me for the sweep and emotional impact of this one.

By Lawrence Toppman

Resident conductor Christopher James Lees stepped to the Belk Theater podium Saturday night to tell us the linking theme between four pieces on the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra program would be “home.” Those four yielded a joy, a challenge worth taking, a discovery and a novelty that eventually became an embarrassment.

The joy came in Bedřich Smetana’s symphonic poem “Vltava,” colloquially called “The Moldau” and depicting the flow of that river through his native Czech woods and meadows. Lees paced this polished rendition well, if without much indication that whitewater was churning in the middle of it, and the orchestra gave smooth, buoyant pleasure.

You might dub Syrian-American composer Malek Jandali a hometown guy, though he has been a citizen of the world: He graduated from Queens University of Charlotte in 1997 and has returned there as composer-in-residence. His Clarinet Concerto, dedicated to victims of injustice everywhere, anchored the program this weekend.

CSO principal clarinetist Taylor Marino seemed a bit hesitant in the solo part at first but warmed to it. Jandali’s website quotes reviews that address his skillful interweaving of Arabic elements – often folk-inspired – with Western classical construction, and you could hear that in this elusive but attractive piece.

The mood, aptly more melancholy than anything else, relied on swirling clarinet solos, syncopated percussion and subdued, contemplative passages interrupted by bursts from the soloist that might have been cries of despair or outrage. (Cedille Records has made a fine recording with Anthony McGill as the soloist; he played the Copland Clarinet Concerto last May with the CSO.)

The piece I’d never heard was Clarice Assad’s “Sin Fronteras,” which imagined a world without frontiers – an American world, at least, as all the music traced its roots from the United States down to her native Brazil. People often use the term “derivative” dismissively, but it needn’t be: When you combine attractive elements from your influences, you can give a unique pleasure.

So it was here, as lush strings that might’ve graced a Bernard Herrmann soundtrack gave way to a tipsy homage to Aaron Copland’s “El Salon Mexico,” then rhythms that suggested either Leonard Bernstein’s mambo in the gym from “West Side Story” or carnival time in Brazil. Congas, xylophone, marimba and a drum kit added to the jaunty blend.

The concert concluded with the “Boléro” of Maurice Ravel, who’d have celebrated his 151^st birthday Saturday. I like “Boléro” to be woozy, sexy, louche. But you could make a case that playing it with exactitude and some restraint, as Lees and the CSO did, elevates it above a level of vulgarity it often reaches. (Ravel himself preferred a steady tempo without acceleration for effect.) I was reminded that, when it became a ballet, Ravel unsuccessfully suggested a setting with a factory in the background, symbol of the music’s mechanical and repetitive aspects.

CSO management spruced up the familiar piece by setting it to a self-produced film. Unsmiling musicians performed solos in front of the Firebird, on the Truist Field grass, at the entrance to Latta Arcade (where people eating lunch improbably paid no attention to a trumpeter a few feet away.) It became apparent that “home” meant life within a square mile around Trade and Tryon streets, along with brief shots of Plaza-Midwood and a triumphant conclusion at SouthPark.

Did the symphony film at one of the Title 1 elementary schools where its own Project Harmony exposes underprivileged kids – mostly Black and Latino – to classical music? Did it shoot outside a Black or Asian church, near a Hindu temple, an Islamic mosque? Did it film anywhere that wasn’t sparkly clean and used mostly by prosperous white citizens? Nope.

As a friend said, “Look around you. This film was made for the people sitting at this concert.” The CSO blew its chance to refute the old claim that classical music is elitist. What could have been a clever idea became a cliché, and it didn’t look much like “home” to me.

By Lawrence Toppman

Forgive me if, when writing about things that most excite me in the 2026-27 Charlotte Symphony Orchestra season, I blow off Beethoven.

Yes, he’s one of the three greatest composers who ever lived. (The others are Bach and whoever you like, Mozart for me.) But the imminent arrival of his Violin Concerto, his Piano Concerto No. 4 and his Symphony No. 9 seem like business as usual, though Kwamé Ryan has conducted none of them here.

He may want to put his own stamp on the orchestra in his second full season as music director. Beethoven’s Ninth held special importance for Christopher Warren-Green; he conducted it here multiple times, including performances in May 2022 in his farewell as music director. Ryan will also conduct Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” the piece Warren-Green led beautifully at his audition concert 17 years ago to get the job. Meet the new boss – not the same as the old boss.

You can find all the 2026-27 concerts here, from the annual gala with Joshua Bell playing Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 to a musical adaptation of Dan Brown’s book “Wild Symphony” for kids. I encourage you to browse. For now, I’m going to cherry-pick eight things I care most about.

1) Levi Taylor will be the second Spotlight Artist after Gabriel Kahane, who’s with the CSO this season. You can sample Taylor’s music at his website. He’ll open the Classical Series Oct. 9-10 with the curtain-raiser “One Foot After the Other” and be back Jan. 15-16 with a new work the CSO says is “commissioned in honor of the United States’s 250th anniversary (and) draws on the words of civil rights leader John Lewis and his call to make ‘good trouble’.”

2) Americans. Our semiquincentennial (“half of 500 years”) inspired the programming of two piano concertos, Samuel Barber’s (Jan. 15-16, with Orion Weiss) and George Gershwin’s (March 12-13, with Michelle Cann). The latter will join Barber’s Symphony No. 1 and Julia Adolphe’s “Underneath the Sheen” in an all-American program.

3) Bruckner. Warren-Green was something of a Mahler specialist, and I’d be thrilled if Ryan followed a similar path with Anton Bruckner. He’s conducting Bruckner’s Ninth, his unfinished but spiritually powerful final symphony, May 21-23, alongside Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos. Two soloists who distinguished themselves earlier this season, Ran Dank (Prokofiev’s Third) and Soyeon Kate Lee (Beach Concerto), will team up.

4) Schubert’s Ninth, the greatest symphony written before 1850 by someone who wasn’t named Ludwig. It’s paired Oct. 23-25 with Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”), sung by Raehann Bryce-Davis, and Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers,” inspired by a journal entry in which Beethoven surrenders to destiny.

5) The coolest concert of the season, as far as I know now. (I can’t vouch for works I haven’t heard.) It takes place April 30-May 1 under guest conductor Erina Yashima and consists of three playful pieces from the first half of the 20^th century: Lili Boulanger’s tone poem “Of a Spring Morning,” Francis Poulenc’s robust and theatrical “Gloria” (with Charlotte Master Chorale and a soprano TBA), and Stravinsky’s sardonic ballet “Petrushka.”

6) Improv night. Trumpeter Pacho Flores will improvise in Gabriela Ortiz’s “Altar de Bronce” (“Bronze Altar”), called by the CSO “a work of molten textures.” Silvestre Revueltas’ “Tribute to Federico García Lorca” will also heat things up. Those run April 16-17 alongside three short pieces by Debussy and Ravel, conducted by Cosette Justo Valdéz.

7) A big night for Calin Ovidiu Lupanu. The CSO concertmaster will play Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto, a long and juicy piece (some would say too long) full of Armenian folk influences and cinematic flourishes. I never get enough of Dvořák, so his Seventh Symphony will be a welcome pairing, along with the Rachmaninov tone poem “The Rock.” Hans Graf will conduct April 2 – 4.

8) I don’t always include Pops Series entries, but I’ll go out of my way for “The Heart of the Blues” Jan. 22-23. Byron Stripling (conductor, trumpet, vocals), Sydney McSweeney (vocals) and Bobby Floyd (keyboard) pay tribute to Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters and others. That concert also turns up Jan. 23 at 11 a.m. in the Family Series. I had no idea Rainey, Smith and Waters, masters of the double entendre about sex – often the single entendre, actually – sang anything suitable for listeners under drinking age. I live and learn.