Mozart, Haydn and Bach will have to hang up their wigs and chill out. The only way to give a proper sendoff to the Lansing Symphony Orchestra’s maestro of 20 years, Timothy Muffitt, is to kick things up to cosmic scale.
And that’s just for openers.
The orchestra’s 2025-‘26 season, Muffitt’s final season as music director, is packed with meaty, major works — most of them from the 20th and 21st centuries — and high-profile soloists like superstar violinist Ray Chen, acclaimed pianist Jon Nakamatsu and the LSO’s own principal percussionist, Matthew Beck.
To drive home the message that this is not an ordinary year, the Oct. 4 season opener will dispense with the customary overture and launch straight into “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,” a full-scale, 40-minute mélange of orchestral, choral and visual stimuli by Minnesota-based composer Jocelyn Hagen.
For a chaser, the orchestra will soar through “The Planets,” Gustav Holst’s celestial epic.
Muffitt jumped into the da Vinci work at the recommendation of Sandra Snow, choral conductor at MSU, who will add the university’s massed choral forces to Hagen’s immersive extravaganza.
“From the first moment, I was just taken with it,” Muffitt said. “The text is all from da Vinci, and the projections are a beautifully collected collage of his work. It’s on a huge scale, and it’s a portal into a different way of thinking about music.”
“The Planets,” unheard in Lansing for over a decade, was an obvious follow-up.
“With those spiritual and scientific threads connecting them, it just felt so right to put them together,” Muffitt said. A women’s chorus, drawn from the da Vinci work, will even be on hand in the second half to wordlessly evoke the rings of Saturn.
Some of the “greatest hits” of Muffitt’s tenure, including Béla Bartók’s concerto for orchestra (Nov. 7), Brahms’ First Symphony (Jan. 9) and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (March 27), will get reprises next year, but Muffitt shrugged off the idea that he’s encoring his past glories.
“I put a couple of cherries on top here and there,” he said. “Mostly, it’s just a continuation of what we’ve been doing for the past two decades. What have we done and what haven’t we done in the past decade? What haven’t we done at all?”
LSO composer-in-residence Jared Miller is also marking his final season. The Jan. 9 concert will feature Miller’s gripping “Shattered Night” concerto, with one of the fiercest and most adventurous young pianists on the scene, Taiwanese-born Han Chen.
Miller wrote “Shattered Night” to mark the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogroms carried out by Nazis against the German and Austrian Jewish populations. Members of Miller’s family perished in Nazi camps.
“It’s one of the most deeply felt pieces of music of our time I’ve ever heard,” Muffitt said.
He recalls sitting in his study with earbuds on and being stunned by the music’s visceral power.
“It left me breathless,” he said. “There’s a great deal of conflict, angst and drama in it, and it’s very unsettling in the beginning, but he turns a corner toward the end, where there’s a sense of peace. I’ll leave it to the listener to figure out what it means, but it’s one of the most beautiful endings of a piece of music.”
In Muffitt’s tenure as music director, a remarkable number of dynamic star soloists have worked with the orchestra, many of whom can write their own ticket in New York, Rome or Shanghai but are drawn in by the high reputation and exuberance of the LSO. That won’t change next season, except, perhaps, for an increase in wattage. After cruising the cosmos in October, the orchestra will bring in one of classical music’s hottest superstar soloists, violinist Ray Chen, to play Max Bruch’s grand violin concerto on Nov. 7. (Chen will also appear at the Wharton Center on Jan. 26 to play with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.)
Chen has played with the foremost orchestras in the world, from Berlin to Paris to New York, wielding a 1714 Stradivarius formerly played by Jascha Heifetz. He’s also a comfortable denizen of the 21st century: a lively blogger, educator, gaming fanatic and musical consultant for the video game developer Riot Games.
“He’s a very special kind of musician, not only in his exquisite playing but in his connection with audiences,” Muffitt said. “It’s like Lang Lang. Only a handful of people have that: a power they bring to live performance that transcends just normal great playing.”
The Bruch concerto is dear to both men’s hearts. Chen played it at the 2012 Nobel Prize ceremonies with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic.
“Every moment of it reaches you in such a direct and beautiful way,” Muffitt said. “I’m thrilled to have Ray here because it will really line up with his gifts.”
Muffitt has also made a point of featuring top LSO players as soloists, often performing innovative and fresh music. A crackling marimba concerto by Kevin Puts will highlight the mallet work of LSO principal percussionist Matthew Beck on March 27.
Muffitt has long wanted to feature Beck front and center.
“Because there’s so much nuance in percussion playing, such an infinite palette of possibilities, I’ve probably talked to Matt more than any principal player in the orchestra,” Muffitt said. “I’ve always admired and appreciated his creativity and the seriousness he brings to his work. We’ve been so lucky to have him, and I’m really excited to bring him out front.”
The May 15 season finale brings another major star, pianist Jon Nakamatsu, winner of the 1997 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, for a Lansing encore after a 2023 performance of Brahms’ epic Second Piano Concerto. Nakamatsu will play Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.”
“Jon is one of my favorite people and one of the most beautiful pianists playing today,” Muffitt said.
The evening will also feature a world premiere, and Lansing swan song, from Jared Miller.
The music hasn’t even been written yet, and that’s exciting for Muffitt.
“It will be written just for us,” Muffitt said. “It will grow out of his experience with the orchestra as he’s gotten to know the individual players and the community. We’ve left space for it to be a significant work.”
To crown it all, Muffitt will lead the orchestra in Respighi’s kaleidoscopic showpiece “Pines of Rome.” The music ends with a crushing crescendo appropriate for a big occasion, but it makes no grand statements about civilization, humanity or Muffitt’s last day on the job.
True to form, the maestro skipped the chance to give himself a self-aggrandizing apotheosis like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration.” He referred to “Pines of Rome” as “four postcards” that follow a thread of 20th-century romanticism shared by several other pieces on next season’s slate.
“It’s so evocative. It just takes you to a place, creates a landscape full of vivid details, color, drama and splendor,” he said.
And don’t let the Roman legions distract you from that sublime third-movement nocturne.
“Very few pieces of music have captured the peace and tranquility of nighttime the way this does,” Muffitt said. It’s nice of the maestro to tuck us in before turning out the light and leaving the room.
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