On a Sunday afternoon this month, one of the most recognized names in classical music will take the stage at Troy University’s Davis Theatre—not in New York, not in Vienna, but in Montgomery.

When Yo-Yo Ma performs with the Montgomery Symphony Orchestra on September 20, it will mark the opening of the MSO’s 50th Anniversary Season, and for an organization that began five decades ago as a group of volunteer musicians playing for the love of it, the moment carries a weight far beyond a single concert.

“For the past fifty years, Montgomery Symphony Orchestra has focused on building community around symphonic music,” said Music Director and Conductor Jamie Reeves, who curated the anniversary season. “Opening our 50th-anniversary season alongside Yo-Yo Ma, an artist who has done so much for the global music community, is the most rewarding way to begin this monumental season in Montgomery.”

Ma will perform Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor alongside the orchestra, on a program rounded out by Copland’s “Appalachian Spring Suite” and “The Block,” a piece by contemporary composer Carlos Simon. The concert is nearly sold out, though a limited batch of tickets were recently released.

For Executive Director Bryan Reeves, the milestone lands somewhere close to home. He grew up in Elmore County, playing in the Montgomery Youth Orchestra as a teenager, long before he’d help run the organization that shaped him.

“As I think back over the long history of the MSO and how much growth there’s been—certainly in the early days, we spent the last fifty years as a community orchestra, mostly made up of volunteer musicians who did it for their own enjoyment,” Reeves said. Somewhere along the way, that community band became a 501(c)(3), and the organization grew outward, building a youth orchestra, a strings education program, and community initiatives that reached far beyond the concert hall.

“Coming out of COVID, expanding our programming, the kinds of music we play and the difficulty and scope of it, and also the level of our performances and musicians themselves—thinking back, it feels like it’s come full circle,” Reeves said. “I’m really excited for this year, thinking about all the things we’ve done. More new music by living composers has been sprinkled into the season.”

That full-circle feeling shows up throughout the year ahead. October brings two premieres, including one written specifically for Alabama audiences through the Alabama Composers Project. November turns backward, toward the composers who built the classical canon in the first place—Beethoven and Brahms—with a former MSO fellow returning as soloist. By February, the season shifts into opera; by April, a piano soloist takes the stage. It’s a season built, quite deliberately, to hold the orchestra’s past and its future in the same room.

But if there’s a single thread running underneath all of it, Reeves says, it traces back to the organization’s original mission: growing musicians before they’re old enough to know they want to be one.

The Montgomery Youth Orchestra, a full symphonic ensemble for high schoolers, has been doing exactly that for more than 30 years, and remains the only program of its kind in the city.

“It’s an important part of the music education for students here because it’s the only one in town,” Reeves said. “A lot of schools have bands but no strings, and the youth orchestra puts all of that together and brings students together from different schools. I played in it myself, growing up in Elmore County. You get a wonderful experience playing symphonic music, and you make friends for life.”

The pipeline starts even earlier, through the Montgomery Music Project, a strings education program launched in 2011 as a cello fellow’s thesis project. Kids join as early as kindergarten, working their way from scaled-down instruments up through 8th grade, before graduating into the Youth Orchestra itself.

“When kids are really young, they start on scaled-down instruments,” Reeves said. “It’s very heartwarming to see kindergartners on tiny violins—it lets parents try it out, too.” The program provides instruments and supplies, and grants help offset tuition costs for families who might not otherwise have access—particularly outside Montgomery’s magnet schools, currently the only ones in the city offering strings instruction.

“For kids who don’t go to those schools, there’s no place for them to try this out,” Reeves said. Not every student who picks up a violin at five years old will go on to play professionally, and that’s fine by him. “We know it’s not everyone. We know we’re building an audience and an appreciation for what we do.”

That appreciation shows up in different forms throughout the season—not just in the Masterworks series, but in the MSO’s growing programming: an annual holiday concert, a live-to-film series each March (this year, Back to the Future), and Jubilee Pops, a free concert that closes out the season every Memorial Day weekend.

Fifty years after a handful of volunteer musicians first picked up their instruments for the love of it, the Montgomery Symphony Orchestra will open its next chapter with one of the most celebrated cellists alive. Tickets and full season details are available at MontgomerySymphony.org.

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