First, our deep appreciation to the Boston Musical Intelligencer for all you do to support classical music in the area. And specifically, your commitment every summer to provide detailed information about the Boston Landmark Orchestra’s season. The full schedule is HERE.

It’s important to add that when you offer a concert series for free, you’re entirely dependent on the generosity of your supporters. Everything we do comes about because of the people and organizations behind the music, none so important as the Free for All Concert Fund. Deep thanks to all our philanthropic supporters.

This summer’s series is especially full, showing the breadth of what we do as an organization. For one thing, there is an additional week of concerts compared to what we’ve offered recently. You’ll also notice an unusually wide array of artistic partners. Some are new to us and some are old friends. And the stylistic range of the programs is particularly broad, even for us. We haven’t performed Peter and the Wolf in decades, and we’ve never done a Mahler symphony. We perform music of Chinese American composer Zhou Tian for the first time as well and look deeper at a tradition we’ve explored several times in recent seasons: the music of Haiti.

There also appears to be an abundance of family friendly fare.

Yes, that’s especially true this summer. Any of our programs would be a great way to introduce someone young or old to classical music. We begin the 2025 summer season this Sunday, July 13^th, with our annual Musical Kickoff Party, featuring performances by Fly by Brass Band, the Brazilian drummers Grooversity, and an Instrument Petting Zoo led by Johnson String Instrument. Games are courtesy of Knucklebones, and as always, we have balloon twisting, face painting, and the Maestro Zone, front and center.

On July 30^th—Peter and the Wolf and More—we’re thrilled to collaborate for the first time with Wheelock Family Theatre in a performance of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Nick Vargas directs and Carolyn Saxon narrates. Child actors portray a host of birds, animals, and hunters. It’s been a long time since Landmarks performed Peter and the Wolf, but the work was a favorite of our founder, Charles Ansbacher. It provided the model for all the wonderful Landmarks Music for Children he commissioned.

Performing on the same program is the remarkable young violinist Keila Wakao, who has already earned an astonishing number of accolades and awards, including First Prize in the 2021 Menuhin International Violin Competition Junior Division. She performs showpieces by Kreisler, as well as “Spring” and “Summer” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Appropriately, Vivaldi composed these works for  the brilliant young women of the famed Ospedale della Pietà in Venice. They were teenagers themselves.

But wait, there’s more! Our longtime choreographer-partner Peter DiMuro brings together intergenerational and family dancers to perform in Benjamin Britten’s Soirées Musicales, colorful orchestrations of works by Rossini. Children always dance at our concerts anyway; this makes it official.

Once again, we’re proud to present Four Strings Academy, a summer training program led by Mariana Green-Hill in our Prelude Concert beginning at 6:30. They will stay on stage as we begin the 7 pm concert, joining the Landmarks Orchestra in Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Bamboula.

“The Best of Boston” concert on July 23^rd features some gems by beloved New England composers. How did you pick these works?

The challenge in doing a Best of Boston concert is not what to include, it’s what to leave out. I wanted to include the Third Symphony of Florence Price, George Chadwick’s Tam O’Shanter, and a host of the current generation of Boston composers. But we couldn’t, partly because before you’ve even introduced the subject of such a program at the Hatch Shell, it’s a given that there will be music by John Williams and Leonard Bernstein. And so there is, plenty of it.

The big event is a performance of a major American work, the inexplicably neglected Piano Concerto by Amy Beach, featuring pianist Asiya Korepanova. Amy Beach lived only a few blocks away from the Hatch Shell, and in 1900 performed as soloist with the Boston Symphony in the work’s premiere. Korepanova writes, “This concerto holds a special place in my heart. I am trying my best to advocate for it everywhere, to give it as much stage time as possible.”

Our performance coincides with the 25^th anniversary of adding Amy Beach’s name to the exterior of the Hatch Shell. We’ve worked closely for many years with Dr. Liane Curtis, who spearheaded that effort in 2001, the same year the Landmarks Orchestra was founded. We’re tremendously excited to make this happen.

Despite such a full Boston-based program already, we found just enough room for a magnificent arrangement by the eminent, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, John Harbison, his orchestral refashioning of Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear.” 

The brilliant young musicians of Boston String Academy perform in our Prelude Concert at 6:30, and then they join the Landmarks Orchestra in a performance of Florence Price’s Juba from Symphony No. 1.

You have two guest orchestras this year (Longwood Symphony Orchestra and Mercury Orchestra)…why did you want to feature these two ensembles?

They’re both longtime partners for us. Longwood Symphony has performed at the Hatch Shell longer than the Landmarks Orchestra has. They are a natural partner for us because they have such a strong social mission, as do we. They have contributed greatly to our understanding of the relationship between music and health, and especially mental health. We’re proud to present them once again this year, under the baton of Ronald Feldman.

The Mercury Orchestra is a much newer ensemble, and they’re outstanding. Music Director Channing Yu always puts together imaginative programs, typically advocating for important works that deserve our attention. This year they perform Gerald Finzi’s Intimations of Immortality, a gorgeous setting of one of the most celebrated odes by William Wordsworth. The evening concludes with one of the great orchestral showpieces, Respighi’s Pines of Rome.

Tell us more about what we can expect at the August 20^th concert with Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony alongside music by Haitian composers and electronic music by Val Jeanty. How did you decide to put those two different genres together? 

There are three points of focus to this program: the birth of our nation 249 years ago; the spirit of revolution in Europe that animates certain works of Beethoven; and the evolution of a distinctly Haitian culture out of a colonial past. What’s fascinating to me is how intertwined these histories are.

Our guest artist is the multi-talented Val Jeanty, a tremendous musician and a vital creative spirit. We’ve worked with Val on a couple of programs before. She is the Music Director of the Jean Appolon Expressions dance company. We’ve collaborated with her several times in that capacity. A couple summers ago she also performed with us in Terri Lyne Carrington’s Seen-Unseen during the NAACP national convention in Boston. Here Val offers three works relating to different aspects and historical moments in Haitian culture: a folk song, an original work in which she serves as composer and “turntablist,” and a march-hymn composed by her great-uncle, Occidente Jeanty. He was the most important composer of concert music in Haiti in the late 19^th century. This anthem became, for a time, Haiti’s national anthem. It is still performed frequently today.

The Haitian Revolution was a direct aftermath of the French Revolution, which was in turn inspired by the American Revolution. All three occurred within a generation of each other. No work conveys the revolutionary spirit in Europe better than Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, premiered in 1804, the culminating year of the Haitian Revolution. Beethoven dedicated his Third Symphony initially to Napoleon Bonaparte. But when Napoleon declared himself emperor, Beethoven famously crossed Napoleon’s name out, tearing a hole in the title page. According to his student Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven cried, “He is nothing but an ordinary mortal! Now he will trample all the rights of men under foot to indulge his own ambition!”

Two guest artists bring additional dimensions to this program. Adrian Anantawan, a frequent guest artist with Boston Landmarks Orchestra and Artistic Director of Shelter Music Boston, performs in Beethoven Romance No. 1 for violin and orchestra, and also in Val Jeanty’s music. And guest conductor Damali Willingham leads the orchestra in three works. This is a return engagement, as Damali, conductor, composer, bassoonist, and educator—and former student at Berklee College of Music—previously conducted the Landmarks Orchestra in the 2023 season.

Landmarks also performs several concerts in Boston’s neighborhoods… why are events in neighborhoods and for surrounding communities important to the organization?

This priority is part of our identity. Our name comes from the idea that the orchestra performs in important locations throughout the city: sites of historical interest; public parks or areas of aesthetic distinction; and in underserved neighborhoods of the city. We’ve established long-term partnerships with many community groups, summer youth programs, and area churches. Some of these venues have become regular performance venues for us. Since the beginning, providing great music for free to all Bostonians has been a mission-level priority.

This summer brings us back to Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain—practically a second home for us now—and a return visit to Roxbury’s Twelfth Baptist Church, led by their inspiring pastor, Rev. Dr. Willie Bodrick, II.

One of the interesting collaborations you have had for several years is with the New England Aquarium to perform music base on inspiration from nature and the sea. How did this partnership come about and what do you have planned for this concert?

We are thrilled to welcome the New England Aquarium back to the Esplanade on August 13^th. My co-host will be President and CEO Vikki Spruill, who first appeared with us in 2018, within a few days of the start of her tenure. The partnership originated ten years ago when we invited the Aquarium to collaborate in a performance involving whale song. One of their chief scientists, Scott Kraus, now Emeritus Scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life introduced us to recent recordings of humpbacks that were acoustically —and one could say, musically—breathtaking.

Again this year, we will project images demonstrating the Aquarium’s research, conservation, and protection of marine resources on a large video screen. One video will show their extensive program of rescue and rehabilitation of threatened and endangered sea turtles in its Sea Turtle Hospital in Quincy, Mass. The pictures show the human side of the operation; the music underscores the devotion and joy inherent in this heroic work. Similarly, videos of North Atlantic right whales will go with Ravel’s A Boat on the Ocean, music that reflects the extraordinary beauty of these critically endangered animals.

We are privileged to partner again with one of our Trustees, former Boston Globe Reporter David Arnold. He has created a stunning photographic essay, Then and Now: Changes from Above and Below. It demonstrates the dramatic change in recent decades to the vitality and structure of glaciers and coral reefs. His video montage is set to Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Never has that American masterwork been used with greater emotional effect, treating a subject that is at once awe-inspiring and devastating.

It is unbelievable that in all this time, Landmarks Orchestra hasn’t performed Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe or Mahler’s Symphony No. 1^st, but you’re performing them both for the first time in your final concert on August 27^th. How did this come about?

I don’t know that there is a concrete explanation for why these two masterpieces receive their first performances in the final week of our season. They are both scored for very large orchestras, but we’ve performed many works for large orchestra before: Host’s The Planets; Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra; and Debussy’s La mer, for that matter. I think it’s just that every year we have to make choices, and things we want to do sometimes have to wait.

All three works—including Zhou Tian’s powerfully evocative The Might River Runs Eastward—treat the subject of mankind’s relationship with nature. This is also a longstanding feature of Landmarks programming, often highlighted by Charles Ansbacher.

Our season closes in a fitting way by emphasizing our important relationships with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and with the Esplanade Association. The DCR is our host, making available the Commonwealth’s Hatch Shell—a venue first established for free symphonic music, led by Arthur Fielder, in 1929.

The Esplanade Association has done so much to support our work over the course of 25 years, including renovating the lawn that provides the listening and picnic space for our concerts. They continue to develop projects that enhance the beauty of this extraordinary linear park. Founded in 2001, it is the non-profit that works to revitalize and enhance the Charles River Esplanade, sustain its natural green space, and build community in the park by providing educational, cultural, and recreational programs for everyone. We are proud to partner with the Esplanade Association in the closing concert of our 2025 summer season.

Christopher Wilkins was appointed Music Director of the Boston Landmarks Orchestra in the spring of 2011. Since then the orchestra has helped reaffirm founder Charles Ansbacher’s vision of making great music accessible to the whole community.