This Friday, Oct. 10, the Illinois Symphony Orchestra begins its 2025-2026 season with a program of “Star Wars Greatest Hits.” The pops concert featuring John Williams’ soaring scores to the popular space opera continues in the vein of recent well-received programs featuring music from classic cartoons and the Harry Potter films, but it also acts as a jumping-off point for one of ISO’s most ambitious and thematically rich seasons yet. The journey will climax with the premier of an original piece specially commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the legendary Route 66, which of course snaked right through Springfield and is still traversed by scores of tourists and U.S. history buffs each year.
“Of course, the orchestra is on its a journey of its own this year,” said ISO music director Taichi Fukumura. The orchestra has long performed its Springfield concerts at the University of Illinois Springfield Performing Arts Center, which is undergoing renovations and will be closed for the duration of this season (the auditorium is projected to be ready to reopen in September of 2026). This season, concerts featuring the full orchestra will be held at First United Methodist Church, 2941 S. Koke Mill Road, with two performances (afternoon and evening) of the popular “Holiday Pops in the Heartland” concert scheduled at the Illinois State Library on Second Street.
“The acoustics of the venue, how well musicians can hear each other, are all very important,” Fukumura explained. Luckily, First United Methodist Church turned out to be almost ideal. “It is great for the audience, great for the orchestra. It gave us both an artistic challenge and also an opportunity because those two venues were physically very different. (The sound in the church) has warmth, but at the same time it has some clarity. So, it gives our sound a nice support,” he said.
The church has a capacity of around 1,100 seats, which may allow for a more cohesive audience experience as concertgoers have sometimes found themselves spread out among the auditoriums’ 2,000 seats.
Coming off of a well-received and artistically varied 2024-2025 season, Maestro Fukumura has ambitious plans for this season’s concerts to follow this week’s Star Wars performance, which will be helmed by guest conductor Vince Lee.
The second concert of the season will be “Hero’s Journey” on Nov. 7, and will consist of music by Beethoven, Bartók and Miklós Rózsa.
“Beethoven’s third symphony is a pivotal moment in the trajectory of symphonic history,” Fukumura said. “Beethoven changed the idea of what a symphony can be – he made it much more of a philosophical statement. And he was a very well-educated and very politically aware person who resonated with the idea of freedom and justice and all of these ideals coming out of the French Revolution.”
Rózsa immigrated from Hungary to the U.S. and wrote music for the stage in addition to composing scores for many famous Hollywood films, including Ben-Hur. Rózsa’s violin concerto will performed by acclaimed soloist Blake Pouliot.
After the “Holiday Pops” show, the first concert of the new year will be a chamber orchestra performance conducted by ISO’s resident conductor Jacobsen Woollen, which will feature the Springfield Choral Society and works by Stravinsky and Mozart. That will take place at First Presbyterian Church in downtown Springfield.
Next will be “Love Notes” on Valentine’s weekend, which will include Tchaikovsky’s symphony No. 5. “It is one of the most heartfelt and most popular symphonies,” said Fukumura, made all the more special by the two solo saxophonists who will perform that evening: Valentin Kovalev on soprano saxophone and Aiwen Zhang are a married couple, driving home the romantic theme.
As 2026 progresses, other concerts will include “Visions and Vitality” (March 6) featuring soprano vocalist Madison Leonard and music by Flagello and Theofanidis along with Mahler’s Symphony No. 4; April 10 will bring “Simple Gifts” featuring Walker’s “Lyric for Strings” Bloch’s “Concerto Grosso No. 1 andCopland’s “Appalachian Spring.”
The season finale on May 1 will be especially exciting, as it will feature the world premiere of a piece specially commissioned by the ISO from Illinois-based composer Michelle Isaac. “I always like when we’re able to commission a work,” said ISO executive director Trevor Orthmann. “We get to actually premiere a new piece of music and just continue to cultivate the future of classical music.”
Scott Faingold is a journalist, educator and musician. He has been an instructor at University of Illinois Springfield, founding editor of Activator magazine, a staff reporter for Illinois Times and co-host of Old School Bleep, a music-centered podcast. He can be reached at scottfaingold@gmail.com.
This article appears in October 9-15, 2025.
