The ‘Converse Conductor’ Fighting Elitism in Classical Music

By Javier C. Hernández Reporting from Baltimore

July 16, 2024, Updated 11:39 a.m. ET

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra had just finished performing Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” on a recent evening when the ensemble’s new music director, Jonathon Heyward, returned to the stage at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

Rugs and chairs had been brought out to evoke a living room, for an intimate, late-night conversation with the audience about music and life. Wearing Converse sneakers and sipping from a glass of Scotch, Heyward, 31, discussed Respighi, his first season as music director and becoming a father. (His daughter, Ottilie, was born in May.) It was the kind of casual gathering that Heyward, who takes the helm of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center this month, has championed as he works to expand the audience for classical music.

“This art form is for everyone,” he said in an interview later. “We want everyone to feel welcome here.”

Heyward’s efforts to break down barriers in the concert hall have earned him a nickname: the Converse conductor. He is part of a generation of young maestros, including Teddy Abrams in Kentucky and Anthony Parnther in California, who are trying to shed classical music’s elitist image. These rising stars are also hoping to help their orchestras get beyond the disruption of the pandemic by embracing a diverse array of artists and genres, and bringing more music into the community.

Those ideas were on display on a recent night in Baltimore, when about 3,000 people gathered at Fort McHenry, a national monument, to hear Heyward lead a concert that paid tribute to construction workers killed in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The Baltimore Symphony performed somber works like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and Florence Price’s “The Deserted Garden,” as well as pieces by local artists, including the hip-hop performer Anthony Parker, who goes by the stage name Wordsmith.

Heyward, the son of a Black father and a white mother — and the first person of color to lead the Baltimore Symphony in its 108-year history — says that orchestras have an obligation to reflect their communities.

“Music has always been a unifier,” he said. “That is the importance and the power of what we do.”

Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, who has gotten to know Heyward since his arrival in Baltimore last fall, said that Heyward had reminded people “of our connectivity and how close we all are to each other.”

“He was very clear and very intentional that he was creating music for the world, that he was creating music for every community, and that he wanted to be part of that community,” Moore said. “It takes a special soul to be able to embrace that.”

Heyward’s next challenge is in New York, where he has been tasked with helping remake Lincoln Center’s summer ensemble as its music director. For a half century, the group has been known as the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. Now the orchestra is being rebranded as the center works to appeal to new and more diverse crowds.

Some audience members and music critics have complained that Lincoln Center is not doing enough to promote classical music — once a fixture of festivals there, but significantly reduced in recent years. Heyward has promised a robust slate of traditional offerings as well as more contemporary fare, including a world premiere this summer by Hannah Kendall, a friend of Heyward’s.

He is experimenting with concert formats, including by inviting audience members to curate a program this summer by listening to symphonic excerpts and then voting for the works they want to hear more of. And Lincoln Center is presenting an augmented-reality exhibition about mental health and Robert Schumann, who suffered from depression, hoping to bring the composer to life in all his complexity.

“I don’t plan on just throwing out the Beethoven symphonies, the Schumann symphonies or Mozart,” he said. “My hopes and dreams and aspirations for this ensemble are based on the very music that this orchestra has done for many, many years.”

Heyward grew up in Charleston, S.C., the son of a waitress and a cook. As an adolescent, he often accompanied his parents during their shifts, spending hours waiting tables and washing dishes, an experience that he says taught him the importance of fast and efficient work.

Though he had not listened to much classical music — his parents favored jazz and classic rock — he took up the cello at 10 and later enrolled at the Charleston County School of the Arts, a magnet school. He conducted a student orchestra for the first time at 13, when a substitute teacher drew his name from a hat.

He paid for cello lessons by cleaning and babysitting for his teacher, who played in the Charleston Symphony. As a student, Heyward’s confidence and determination were evident, said Sarah Fitzgerald, a high school teacher.

“There was an easiness about him, a sense of humor and a star quality,” she said. “He was present, and not all the kids are like that.”

By the time he was a senior, Heyward had made his ambitions clear, writing in a school newspaper that his “huge overall dream is to become a music director of a major symphony orchestra and give back to the community” by 2020. (He missed the mark by just three years.)

Heyward continued his studies at the Boston Conservatory. He attended classes during the day, led opera rehearsals in the evening and worked overnight shifts at diners to help pay tuition (“It was the one job that I knew how to do,” he said).

In 2015, at 23, while studying Royal Academy of Music in London, he won the International Besançon Competition in France, a prestigious contest for young conductors, one of a small number of Americans to do so.

His victory helped elevate his profile, and in 2016 he landed a job as an assistant conductor at the Hallé orchestra in Manchester, England, under its longtime music director, Mark Elder. Heyward later became chief conductor of the North West German Philharmonic in Herford, Germany.

In Britain, he met his wife, Millie Aylward, and he acquired a British accent, which has supplanted his Southern cadence. (He compared himself to a chameleon: “I’m always listening and picking up my surroundings.”) At a concert for students in Manchester, he forgot his formal shoes and wore red Converse sneakers instead. The response was emphatic: The children cited his shoes as a highlight of the concert, and he soon made them a staple of his conducting wardrobe.

He burst onto the global scene in 2021 after leading Britain’s National Youth Orchestra in Beethoven’s Third Symphony at the BBC Proms. The Guardian called the performance “exuberant, exhilarating stuff,” saying that under Heyward’s baton the music exploded “like fireworks in the hall’s dome.”

In Britain, he met his wife, Millie Aylward, and he acquired a British accent, which has supplanted his Southern cadence. (He compared himself to a chameleon: “I’m always listening and picking up my surroundings.”) At a concert for students in Manchester, he forgot his formal shoes and wore red Converse sneakers instead. The response was emphatic: The children cited his shoes as a highlight of the concert, and he soon made them a staple of his conducting wardrobe.

He burst onto the global scene in 2021 after leading Britain’s National Youth Orchestra in Beethoven’s Third Symphony at the BBC Proms. The Guardian called the performance “exuberant, exhilarating stuff,” saying that under Heyward’s baton the music exploded “like fireworks in the hall’s dome.”

“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston can fall in love with this music,” Heyward said at the time, “then anyone can.”

Heyward, who first conducted the Mostly Mozart ensemble in 2022, was a favorite of the musicians. “He gets what he wants without offending anyone,” said the flutist Jasmine Choi. “We really enjoyed his democratic approach.”

His appointment in Baltimore was a milestone for the city, where Black residents make up more than 60 percent of the population, and for American orchestras, which have long been led almost exclusively by white men.

Heyward, whose role models include the pioneering conductors Dean Dixon and James DePreist, said he saw his race as a “badge of honor.” He was moved when a longtime Baltimore resident told him that she never thought she would see a Black conductor in the city.

“There comes an immense amount of responsibility of being the first,” he said. “That is something I really take very seriously.”

The Baltimore Symphony has emphasized Heyward’s humble roots in its marketing, noting that he got his start in a public music program. “Don’t let his accent fool you,” said one social media post, “he’s a Southern boy.”

Heyward has worked to help the orchestra, which has a budget of about $33 million, recover from the turmoil of the pandemic, which exacerbated long-term declines in ticket sales and forced the ensemble to look for new ways to reach audiences. Attendance at concerts has recovered somewhat recently, though it remains below prepandemic levels.

In the 2022-23 season, the most recent for which data is available, attendance was 51 percent of capacity, down from 62 percent in 2018-19. The orchestra has reduced the number of concerts it presents at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, to 85 this past season, down from 100 in the 2018-19 season.

Heyward said he was confident that the orchestra’s community-focused approach would help drive ticket sales. He hopes to expand the orchestra’s free after-school programs, which serve more than 1,800 children, building on the work of Alsop. He also wants the orchestra to play more opera and jazz.

The loss of some performances at the main hall has provided an opportunity to play music elsewhere, Heyward said.

“We have to pivot,” he said. “While that may look like or feel like we’re taking something away, I think it just opens an opportunity for us to be able to explore where else we can perform.”

Mark C. Hanson, the Baltimore Symphony’s president and chief executive, said the excitement around Heyward’s debut was helping expand the orchestra’s fan base. More than a third of audience members this past season were new, he said.

“Jonathon is so unique, so approachable, and is a real shot in the arm,” he said, “not only for the B.S.O., but for the art form in Maryland.”

In recent weeks, Heyward has been learning to balance his jet-setting schedule with the demands of fatherhood. While he keeps an apartment in Baltimore, he and his family have recently been spending time in the seaside town of Folkestone, England, where they also have a home.

On Father’s Day, after a morning spent meditating and chatting with his wife and daughter, Heyward was back at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall for the final concert of the season. Backstage, he spoke with the soprano Christine Goerke, the ensemble’s artist in residence, who joined the orchestra to perform songs by Richard Strauss.

Goerke said that Heyward was able to “bring out the best in everyone.”

“He never makes it feel intimidating or exclusive,” she said. “Everything is inviting. I felt all those things in the first half-hour that I met him. It was that palpable.”

At intermission, Heyward retreated to his dressing room, where he flipped through musical scores, singing to himself and tapping his knee. “I have this thing,” he said, “where I have to just look at all the pages before I go onstage.”

As he gathered his scores, he said he was proud of his first season in Baltimore and that he was looking forward to his time in New York. He planned to pack five pairs of Converse for his concerts there.

“It’s all about connection,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”

Javier C. Hernández reports on classical music, opera and dance in New York City and beyond.