Destination

On behalf of the Board of Directors of the Ashland Symphony Orchestra, welcome to our 56th season! I feel such warmth and pride that our small town supports a professional symphony orchestra. The ASO is truly a gem of our community, sharing the joy of orchestral music with people of all ages and backgrounds. Our Grammy-award winning Music Director and Conductor Michael Repper and the talented professional musicians of the ASO have created another incredible season for your enjoyment. We are eager for you to hear the beautiful, powerful, soul-filling music that they have prepared for you. Meanwhile, our Executive Director Martha Buckner continues to provide innovative opportunities, such as the ASO Fan Club, that support the development of young musicians throughout Ashland County and beyond. I am deeply thankful to our musicians, staff, board members, and supporters for making this season possible. And to our patrons, please know that your presence at ASO performances means so much! Whether you are joining us for a pops concert, a concert in our Saturday night subscription series, or one of our concerts presented especially for young people, your attendance lifts up the ASO. Thank you for choosing to spend your time with us!

Diane Bonfiglio, Ph.D.
President, ASO Board of Directors

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the Ashland Symphony Orchestra’s 2025–2026 season! It is a joy and an honor to continue this musical journey with you as your Music Director.

This year, we invite you to come aboard for a season of imagination, discovery, and connection—a musical journey that takes flight and carries us to every corner of the world. Like a great plane ride full of wonder and anticipation, each concert is a stop on a global adventure. You’ll hear the brilliance of Beethoven, the soul of Coleridge-Taylor, the energy of Jessie Montgomery, the lyricism of Schubert, the fervor of Borodin, and so much more. These works, drawn from across time and cultures, remind us that music is a language that speaks to the heart.

One of the highlights of our season is a groundbreaking spring concert that reflects our deep commitment to community and innovation. In partnership with Goldberry’s Coffee, we’ll combine music with global storytelling and curated coffee tastings—an immersive, sensory celebration that brings people together in a truly unique way. This collaboration is one of many ways we continue to grow as a vibrant cultural hub in Ashland and beyond.

Whether you’ve been with us for years or are joining us for the first time, your presence is what gives our music life. Thank you for supporting live orchestral music and for being a vital part of our ASO family.

I look forward to sharing the season with you—and to welcoming you on this musical adventure.

With warmest regards,
Michael Repper
Music Director
Ashland Symphony Orchestra

Executive Director’s Message

I am thrilled to have you join us on our ‘round the world tour of classical music! From the old masters to the new trailblazing composers, the musicians of the ASO will bring the pieces to life.

Hanna Strickland, ASO Administrative Assistant, and I had great fun creating the theme of “Your Passport to Great Music” and naming the concerts, and we hope you enjoy the journey.

The $100,000 challenge set forth by Bob and Jan Archer was met and they have established a new $1 million endowment to benefit the ASO. My challenge to you is to invite friends and family to each of the concerts this season.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight!

Martha Buckner, Executive Director

Conductor Michael Repper’s work spans six continents. In 2023, he became the youngest North American conductor to win a Grammy® Award in Best Orchestral Performance. He has an international reputation for engaging and exciting audiences of all spectrums, and for promoting new and diverse musical talents.

Repper is currently the Music Director of the Ashland Symphony Orchestra, Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, and the Northern Neck Orchestra of Virginia.  He recently concluded tenures as Music Director of the New York Youth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, and as Principal Conductor of Sinfonía por el Perú, the elite youth orchestras and choruses of one of South America’s most versatile social impact music programs. Repper was the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Conducting Fellow for two seasons, and he served as the BSO’s New Music Consultant. Recognizing his success at these ensembles, and his growing profile as a guest conductor all over the world, Repper was awarded a Solti Foundation US Career Assistance Award in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.

His album with the New York Youth Symphony, which features debut recordings of works by Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery, and Valerie Coleman, achieved widespread critical acclaim, reached #1 on the Billboard Chart, and won a Grammy® Award, marking the first time a youth orchestra achieved this milestone.

Repper has collaborated on large-scale productions of symphonic and theatrical works with the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Ravinia Festival, Peabody Institute of Music, and the New School of Music, among others. An avid pianist, he regularly performs as a soloist alongside his orchestras.

​Alongside the standard repertoire, Repper is especially invested in programming new music and showcasing fresh talent. His ensembles have performed dozens of world premieres and pursued innovative commissions, as well as a variety of Carnegie Hall premieres from established and emerging composers.

His experience with choruses has been recognized with significant positions, including his tenure as the Music Director at the Baltimore Basilica, the first Catholic Cathedral in the United States. Internationally, Repper has performed with highly regarded ensembles and in the world’s greatest venues, including the São Paulo Symphony, and at the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona, Carnegie Hall, and others.

His discography includes the aforementioned album of music with the New York Youth Symphony, alongside an album with the Grammy®-Nominated Metropolis Ensemble and Grammy®-Winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus (“Musical America”), and several with the Peabody Institute as an Assistant Conductor. With the New York Youth Symphony during the Coronavirus pandemic, he was one of the first to pioneer the practice of distanced orchestral performance videos, and he made two performance appearances on CNN, the final one with Platinum-Artist Billy Ray Cyrus.

Repper complements his work with professional orchestras with a firm commitment to education, and travels worldwide to work with ensembles of young musicians. As Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Maryland, he ushered in a slate of innovative educational programming, such as the Reinecke Youth Chamber Music Scholarship and Fellowship Program. He has conducted several masterclasses for orchestras from all over the United States on behalf of the New York Philharmonic, and conducts side-by-side and educational concerts with major orchestras, including the Baltimore Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, and the Sarasota Orchestra.
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Repper’s most influential conducting mentors are Marin Alsop and the late Gustav Meier. He believes that a conductor’s main role is to connect people and to use performance as a vehicle for positive change. He aims to promote a diverse and inclusive future for the arts, and to pay forward the passion for community that his mentors demonstrated to him.

Amy Marcy Cheney BEACH [b. 1867, d. 1944, American]

Bal Masqué, op.22 <1893>

Instrumentation: flutes, piccolo, oboes, clarients, bassoons, horns, trumpets, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings

Duration: 5 minutes

Amy Beach was a remarkable woman by any measure.  Without doubt she was this country’s first woman to have carved out an acclaimed musical career that equaled that of any important American male musician, and transcended most.  She enjoyed a noteworthy life as a piano virtuoso, composer, and influential leader in music education, public music advocacy, and music journalism.  But it was as a prolific and highly respected composer of the first water that she made her historical mark in American classical music.  Simply put, she was our county’s first outstanding female composer.   At the time of her early years, American classical music was still very much simply an outpost of Europe, European musicians, and European musical traditions.  Our symphony orchestras were populated largely by Germans, French, and Italians and musical composition by American composers was in its infancy.  A group centered around Boston and Harvard University, known later as the “Second New England School,” constituted the country’s initial efforts as an independent, internationally respected thrust in serious music composition.  The names are still familiar to many (but mostly to musicians): George Chadwick, John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, Edward McDowell, and Horatio Parker.  And in this all-male list of names is that of Amy Beach.  Moreover, her membership was acknowledged in the contemporary stuffy times of Boston!  While the music critics and pundits of those times characteristically simply could not resist couching much of their responses to her work in gender-obsessed language, they never doubted her brilliance and talent.  She was, perhaps grudging, acknowledged as “one of the boys.”

The details of her life, living as she did in public scrutiny, are well known.  But even under today’s close examination, she doesn’t fit any of our contemporary clichés and memes of cultural, political, and gender wars.  On the one hand she seems to have been stultified by nineteenth-century mores, social conventions, and marital norms.  On the other she refused to see herself as constrained and repressed.  She may have been a pioneer in championing women’s pursuit of equality, but she was by today’s standards a decided conservative.  She always voted Republican, hated FDR, happily went by the name of her husband on her published compositions (Mrs. HHA Beach), dallied with admiration of Mussolini during her Italian sojourn, and other than her determined efforts for musical equality, was not a poster child for liberal causes.

Amy Cheney was born in 1867 in a very small town near the center of New Hampshire, and her astounding musical talents were evident almost from the beginning.  Obviously a prodigy, she was singing songs at the age of one, composing for the piano (without its aid) at four, and in general demonstrating amazing musical feats before most children could talk.  Her formal study of piano started early, and she soon was performing in public concerts.  But her musical studies were centered around her home—all her life her family insisted upon a more or less protected atmosphere.  Even after they moved closer to Boston to further her studies, it was not in a conservatory.  As Amy gained more and more of a public reputation, her parents stoutly resisted her move into a larger music circle. In a time when almost all talented Americans went abroad for advanced study, Amy stayed home.  And it was always to be.  She is one of the few significant composers that were largely autodidacts.  She read, studied scores, and translated important musical treatises and texts; she absorbed it all.

Her prowess as a performer led to a triumphal concert with the Boston Symphony in 1885, when she was eighteen. But she married a distinguished surgeon twenty-five years her senior right after that and her active career as a performer ended.   True to the times and his social class her husband forbade her to perform actively anymore, and to stay home and lead a proper life as a woman of high social status.  He did encourage her to compose, and she most certainly did.  But she later said that these years were happy ones.  While the great majority of her life’s work were art songs and chamber music, three large works from the 1890s were highly praised: the Mass (1892), the Gaelic Symphony (1896), and the Piano Concerto (1899).  Unlike so many women composers, she never endured obscurity—the Mass was premièred by the prestigious Boston Handel and Haydn Society, and both the symphony and piano concerto by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  All of these works met with wide and enthusiastic approbation in spite of most pundits’ silly twaddling over her gender.

While the mass, symphony, concerto and chamber music were highly praised works of gravitas, like most accomplished composers, she had a lighter side, as well.  The Bal masqué is clear evidence of that.  Written in 1893, originally for solo piano—an early work in that genre–it is a charming waltz in the best of the salon tradition.  Later, it was artfully scored for full orchestra by the composer.

–Wm. E. Runyan

©2022 William E. Runyan

Franz SCHUBERT [b. 1797, d. 1828, Austrian]

Symphony No.8, D.759, B minor (Unfinished) <1822>

1. Allegro moderato
2. Andante con moto

Instrumentation: flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, timpani, strings

Duration: 25 minutes

The epitaph on Schubert’s tombstone reads: “The art of music has entombed here a rich treasure but even fairer hopes.”   We all lament the “loss” of treasure that we never possessed, none perhaps more than great art that we presume may have come to pass but not for lives cut short in youth.   We must remember that not all composers can live long productive lives like those enjoyed by Verdi and Strauss, for example.   Often those who die young are nevertheless privileged to accomplish much, and Schubert, like Mozart, is exemplary.  His short life was generally uneventful, and his personality still is somewhat lacking in vivid details for us today, but we do know that he lived and worked within a small circle of artists in various fields in Vienna.  His was contemporaneous with Beethoven, but that master’s music exerted little influence upon Schubert; Haydn and Mozart were his models.

Franz Schubert’s short life roughly coincided with that of Beethoven’s—both passing away within about a year of each other.  But what a difference there is between the life and music of these two giants of early romantic music!  Beethoven–world renowned with fiery temperament, and master of struggling to hammer out profundities from modest ideas—strode across the musical landscape of Europe as a conqueror.   Schubert, on the other hand, lived quietly within a circle of close friends, rarely capturing the public’s imagination, while turning out an immeasurable wealth of melodies, apparently with little effort.   In his brief career Schubert composed orchestral music, dabbled in opera, produced masterpieces of chamber music, and created a significant body of compositions for piano.   But his glory, and the world’s musical treasure, lies in his Lieder (German songs).   It is astounding that he composed over six hundred of them, and they constitute the defining repertory within that genre.  No one else—not Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Strauss, nor Mahler—come close to the defining mark of Schubert.   Almost single handedly he created the first masterpieces of German song, and so many, at that.   They are constituted of marvelously imaginative piano accompaniments (which are really equal in importance to the vocal part); innovative harmonies; poetic texts of high artist quality; and an unprecedented gift for an endless variety of exquisite melodies.   And it is an understanding and appreciation of the centrality of song in Schubert’s oeuvre that informs our encounter with his instrumental music, including his symphonies.

He wrote nine symphonies, but two of them have garnered the most prominence:  The “Great C Major” symphony and the “Unfinished.”   Many have claimed that the latter really is “finished,” (owing to its genius), and many others have actually finished it (Fools rush in . . .) by composing the missing last two movements in Schubert’s style.  But, manifestly it is unfinished, but of such gripping quality and beauty that it really doesn’t matter.  Ironically, it did not meet the light of day (literally) until 1865, when it was retrieved, almost as an afterthought, from an obscure personality’s desk drawer.  Schubert never heard any of his symphonies played by a professional orchestra, and none of them were published in his lifetime.   Yet, here is an iconic work of early Romanticism that lay undisturbed almost from the time of its composition in 1822.   In many respects it manifests most of the technical characteristics (and I won’t bother you with those) of late Classical symphonies such as those of late Haydn and Mozart, and perhaps early Beethoven.  The essence of this great work is more elusive:  its dark and reflective tone, its stunning and novel combinations of subtle instrumental color, the characteristic and striking harmonic language—and, of course, the Schubertian melodies.   Technical points pale beside these qualities—the “Unfinished” opens a new atmospheric sound world of Romanticism that is palpable beyond analysis.

–Wm. E. Runyan

© 2015 Wm. E. Runyan

Alexander BORODIN [b. 1833, d. 1887, Russian]

Symphony No.2, B minor (Bogartirskaya simfoniya; Heroic Symphony) <1869-1875>

I. Allegro
II. Scherzo: Prestissimo
III. Andante
IV. Finale: Allegro

Instrumentation: flutes, piccolo, oboes, English horn, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings

Duration: 33 minutes

Symphony No. 2 (Borodin) by Alexander Borodin is inseparable from the extraordinary dual life of its creator. Unlike most major composers of the 19th century, Borodin was not primarily a musician but a distinguished scientist. A professor of chemistry at the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg, he made meaningful contributions to organic chemistry, including early work on aldehydes and what would later be known as the Aldol reaction. By all accounts, he regarded composition as a secondary pursuit, famously referring to himself as a “Sunday composer.”

This divided life profoundly shaped the creation of the symphony. Composed between 1869 and 1876, the work progressed in fits and starts, often delayed by teaching responsibilities, laboratory research, and administrative duties. Borodin’s colleagues in The Mighty Handful, particularly Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, recalled that he would sometimes leave a rehearsal or musical gathering abruptly to attend to chemical experiments, or the reverse. The slow pace of composition was not due to lack of inspiration, but rather the scarcity of uninterrupted time.

Yet this scientific discipline arguably contributed to the symphony’s structural integrity. Borodin’s approach to form is notably economical. Themes are often built from concise, clearly defined motifs that are developed with an almost experimental logic. The first movement’s block-like construction and the scherzo’s intricate rhythmic design suggest a mind attuned to precision and balance, even as the music projects an image of spontaneity and epic breadth.

At the same time, Borodin’s musical voice is anything but clinical. The Andante reveals a deeply lyrical sensibility, with melodies that unfold as naturally as vocal lines, perhaps reflecting the contrast between his rigorous professional life and his artistic imagination. The finale, with its vibrant, dance-like energy, brings together these dual impulses. It is carefully constructed yet exuberantly expressive.

Borodin’s life was also marked by a broader humanistic outlook. He was a passionate advocate for education, particularly for women, helping to establish medical courses for female students in Russia. This commitment to intellectual and social progress mirrors the cultural ambitions of his musical circle, which sought to create a distinctly Russian art that could stand alongside Western European traditions.

In this light, Symphony No. 2 emerges not only as a portrait of heroic Russia, but also as a testament to Borodin himself, a composer and scientist whose rare balance of intellect and imagination produced music of enduring power and individuality.

–Michael Repper

The Ashland Symphony Orchestra thanks

Our ushers and volunteers

Ashland High School staff for technical support

Ashland City Schools for its continued support of the Arts

Roger Price, Professional Voice Actor & Announcer https://rogerzvoice.com/

Hanna Strickland, Administrative Assistant

Seth Morrison, Stage Manager

Bryce Bishop, Assistant Stage Manager

Deken Foster, Stage Manager

Jen Burford, House Manager

Please silence all electronic devices.
No flash photography or audio/visual recording permitted.
No food or drink permitted in the Robert M. & Janet L. Archer Auditorium.

Thank you for your cooperation.

In 1997, Bob and Jan Archer established the first donor fund through the Ashland County Community Foundation to benefit the Ashland Symphony Orchestra. The ASO then partnered with the ACCF in 1999 and created the “Ashland Symphony Orchestra Fund in Memorium of James E. Thomas”. Since then, three new agency funds and fourteen additional donor advised or designated funds have been established! The Ashland County Community Foundation can assist you in creating a fund to benefit the Ashland Symphony Orchestra now or as part of your estate plan. For more information, call the Foundation at 419-281-4733.

Donations may be made to existing endowments at any time. Contact the Foundation for more information www.ashlandforgood.org.

*To contribute to these funds, please send donation to Ashland Symphony Orchestra, 401 College Ave., Ashland, OH 44805.

The Ashland Symphony Orchestra is thankful for the following funds:

Robert M. & Janet L. Archer Fund est. 1997 and 2025

Ashland Symphony Orchestra Fund in Memorium of James E. Thomas est. 1999*

ASO Podium Endowment Fund in Honor of Maestro Arie Lipsky est. 2018*

ASO Harold Weller Music Education Endowment Fund est. 2019*
gift from Nick & Edna Weller Charities: Harold & Betsy Weller and Thomas Weller

ASO Rev. John H. Landrum Memorial Endowed Chair for Flute 2 est. 2020*
gift from Marybelle H. Landrum

Ashland Symphony Orchestra est. 2000

Mary M. Case Memorial Fund est. 2005

Ann K. Guthrie Fund est. 2009

Arie Lipsky Honorary Endowment Fund est. 2010

Kopp Family Fund est. 2011

Dr. Alvin W. Garrett Fund est. 2017

William and Marlene Rose Fund est. 2017

J. Robert and Ruth L. Tipton Fund est. 2017

Dr. JoAnn Ford Watson Fund est. 2017

Dr. Beverly Bixler Fund est. 2018

Billy Harris Charitable Fund est. 2018

Lawrence and Catherine Hiner Endowed Chair for Percussion of the ASO Fund est. 2020

John R. Donelson for the benefit of the ASO est. 2021

Elizabeth Pastor Fund for the benefit of the ASO est. 2021

F. Dean and Joan Bartosic Family Fund for the benefit of the ASO est. 2023

Julia A. Wright Fund for the benefit of the ASO est. 2025

Martha Landrum Buckner Fund for the benefit of the ASO est. 2025