black history month

best in arts

Jonathon Heyward doesn’t begin his new job until this fall. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t begun planning his inaugural season.

“My whole team is already working on the idea of how we can achieve the ideal of music for all,” said Heyward, who was named music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra last year.

“We’re thinking about what that means and what will that look like in Baltimore. How long should concerts be and how should we program them?”

He has been impressed by the BSO’s Fusion Series, which he said, “pairs Beethoven and Beyoncé in the same concert. Those are the kind of ideas we want to explore further.”

Heyward is poised to become the only Black American conductor leading one of the two dozen biggest-budget American orchestras when he takes the podium at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in September. He also will be the youngest at 31, when he starts the job.

He grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, in a family where music lessons were a luxury. But after picking up a cello for the first time at age 10, Heyward never looked back. He began a trajectory that took him to college at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and graduate school at London’s Royal Academy of Music.

Millie Heyward, an aspiring opera singer, met her future husband when she played the clarinet during graduate school conducting workshops. Even then, she said, he stood out.

“It was like night and day,” she said. “Jonathon would get up on the podium and immediately start producing sounds that would make people feel things. He is like a magician of music.”

In 2015, Heyward defeated 260 other candidates to win a prestigious international competition for conductors in northeastern France. That lead to appointments helming orchestras in England and Germany and a 2017 guest-conducting gig leading the famed Los Angeles Philharmonic.

His success came as no surprise to his brother Anthony Heyward, a sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserve who said he learned command skills from watching his older brother conduct orchestras. “Jonathon leads from the front,” he said. “He will never ask someone to do something he wouldn’t do himself. He’s confident and passionate but he’s also humble. That’s rare, and it makes him an amazing leader.”

— Mary Carole McCauley