A Season of Firsts

The 2024-2025 MasterWorks Series

The MasterWorks series is the main reason why the Canton Symphony Orchestra exists as a nonprofit performing arts organization. Exploring the vast orchestral music canon, we perform traditional favorites, contemporary and new works, and showcase composers previously undiscovered or under-appreciated throughout history.

Classical music is a rich, vibrant genre that spans centuries, continents, and cultures. There is so much to appreciate and to discover.
We hope you will join us!

MasterWorks I:
Kanneh-Mason Plays Coleridge Taylor

Saturday, October 12, 2024 | 7:30PM | Braimah Kanneh-Mason, violin

We are delighted to welcome British violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason to Canton for his Umstattd Hall debut to kick off our 2024-2025 season. A semi-finalist on Britain’s Got Talent and a veteran of performances at the BBC Proms and the Royal Albert Hall, Kanneh-Mason introduces to Canton, for the very first time, the violin concerto of his fellow countryman Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
 
• Violin Concerto in G minor – Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
• Symphony No. 1 in Ab major – Edward Elgar
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MasterWorks II:
Star Wars & Its Influences

Saturday, October 26, 2024 | 3:00PM | Dean Zhang, piano

Don your Darth Vader mask, zip up your wookie suit, and clip on your stormtrooper helmet for this costumes-encouraged presentation of the Star Wars Suite! Our 2024-2025 Family Concert will surely delight audiences of all ages, as John Williams’ incomparable score has done for generations of fans over nearly fifty years. The first half of the concert will feature music that inspired John Williams to create the most beloved film music in history.
 
• Kings Row Suite – Erich Wolfgang Korngold
• The Planets: Mars – Gustav Holst
• Piano Concerto No. 2, 2nd mvt. – Camille Saint-Saëns
• The Transit of Venus – Nancy Bloomer Deussen
• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – Paul Dukas
• Star Wars Suite – John Williams
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MasterWorks III:
The 100th Anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue

Saturday, November 23, 2024 | 7:30PM | Baron Fenwick, piano

Happy Birthday to Rhapsody in Blue! And what a centennial it will be for one of America’s most beloved musical masterworks. Pianist Baron Fenwick joins the Canton Symphony for a smorgasbord of orchestral favorites inspired by the world of jazz. Opening the evening is ragtime king Scott Joplin’s overture to his only opera, Treemonisha.
 
• Overture to Treemonisha – Scott Joplin
• A Suite of Serenades – Victor Herbert
• Piano Concerto No. 1 – Dmitri Shostakovich
• Music for the Theatre – Aaron Copland
• Rhapsody in Blue – George Gershwin
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MasterWorks IV:
All Things Majestic

Saturday, January 25, 2025 | 7:30PM | David Hayes, Conductor

Ever aware of the shadow of Beethoven looming over any German composer who dared to write a symphony in the 19th century, Johannes Brahms took nearly fifteen years to write his first, and it has been nearly that long since it was last heard on the Umstattd Hall stage. This beautiful and emotion-filled work helped to usher in the romantic period of symphonic writing, which produced some of the most beloved pieces in the orchestral canon.
 
• Carnival Overture – Antonin Dvořák
• All Things Majestic – Jennifer Higdon
• Symphony No. 1 in C minor – Johannes Brahms
 
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MasterWorks V:
Sunday with Sibelius

Sunday, February 16, 2025 | 3:00PM | Konrad Kowal, violin

You can almost feel the crisp, Arctic air on your face and see the sun glistening on a vast tundra of freshly fallen snow when listening to Jean Sibelius’ first symphony, audibly influenced by life in his native Finland. At times cold and bleak while at others warm and shimmering, it is the perfect piece for a chilly, February afternoon in Canton.
 
• Concert Overture in D major – Elfrida Andrée
• Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor – Max Bruch
• Symphony No. 1 in E minor – Jean Sibelius
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MasterWorks VI:
Tetzloff Plays Beethoven's 1st Piano Concerto

Saturday, March 22, 2025 | 7:30PM | Reed Tetzloff, piano

Fresh off recording the complete Beethoven piano concertos with the Prague Philharmonic, Reed Tetzloff comes to Canton to perform the first of these five beloved works. Hailed as “the lyric hero” of the prestigious Tchaikovsky International Competition in 2015, Tetzloff brings his interpretation to an early work that foreshadows the groundbreaking influence Beethoven would have on the world of Classical music.
 
• Symphony No.1 in D major “Classical” – Sergei Prokofiev
• Symphony No. 1 – Adolphus Hailstork
• Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major – Ludwig van Beethoven
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MasterWorks VII:
A Voyage on the High Seas

Saturday, April 26, 2025 | 7:30PM | CSO Chorus
Dashon Burton, bass-baritone
Bonnie Frauenthal, soprano

Welcome aboard on our grand voyage through Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 1 “A Sea Symphony”. With a text taken from American poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the piece tells of the ocean itself, with its whistling winds and racing waves, while also exploring the sea as a metaphor for the journey of the soul through time and space and through this life into that which is to come.
 
• A Sea Poem – Ina Boyle
• Symphony No. 1 “A Sea Symphony”– Ralph Vaughan Williams
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Programs and Artists Subject to Change Without Notice