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Jamie Reeves Opens Landmark Season in Collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma
MONTGOMERY, AL — Jamie Reeves will lead the opening concert of Montgomery Symphony Orchestra’s 50th Anniversary Season on Sunday, September 20 at 3:00 p.m. at Davis Theatre for the Performing Arts, joined by internationally acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma for one of the orchestra’s most anticipated performances in recent years.
A 20-time Grammy Award winner, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, United Nations Messenger of Peace, and founder of Silkroad, Yo-Yo Ma remains one of the most influential artists in classical music. His discography includes more than 120 albums, from landmark recordings of the classical canon to genre-defying collaborations such as Goat Rodeo Sessions with Chris Thile, Edgar Meyer, and Stuart Duncan. Through initiatives including the Bach Project and Our Common Nature, Yo-Yo Ma has continued expanding classical music’s role in cultural dialogue worldwide.
The opening program reflects the artistic direction Jamie Reeves has cultivated in Montgomery—balancing contemporary voices with cornerstone repertoire. The concert opens with Carlos Simon’s The Block, followed by Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite. Following intermission, Yo-Yo Ma joins Jamie Reeves and the Montgomery Symphony Orchestra for Antonín Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor. Read More
From the Screen to the Stage: Jamie Reeves on Film Music, Community, and Why the Concert Hall Needs Both
How John Williams, Back to the Future, and an imaginary baton led one of America’s most purposeful conductors to the podium
When Reeves became Music Director of the Montgomery Symphony, one of his earliest strategic imperatives was clear: expand the audience, and expand it quickly.
Film-in-concert programming was part of the answer — not as a concession to populism, but as a deliberate bridge. “I knew that programming films, especially the iconic scores of John Williams, would inspire our community to come to the concert hall,” he says, “in the same way they inspired me to come to symphonic music as a young musician.”
“Community participation is worth exponentially more than the ticket sales. Bringing audience members to the theatre, especially those coming for the first time ever, to enjoy the thrill of a full-length film with a live orchestra playing the score, synced in real time, cultivates a burning desire to have this experience again and again.”
Film scores, he argues, resonate across generations precisely because they are already woven into the fabric of people’s lives. The music of John Williams is not background — it is memory. It is the sound of childhood wonder, of first experiences of grandeur and loss and triumph. To hear it played live, by a full orchestra, in the moment, is to understand for the first time what an orchestra actually does.
That understanding, Reeves believes, does not stay in the concert hall. It follows people home. Read More