YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The Youngstown Symphony Orchestra will soon begin a new era of its nearly 100-year history.
The season opener will be the first performance with Erik Ochsner as music director and conductor.
It will also be the first show under the YSO’s new owner and operator, Stambaugh Auditorium.
The hiring of Ochsner and the transfer of ownership from the Youngstown Symphony Society to Stambaugh were announced in September.
Ochsner is already familiar with the YSO. He led it in concert nine times in the past few years as a guest conductor.
The New York resident is also a regular in concert halls worldwide, leading orchestras in performances of movie scores while the film is shown on a screen on stage.
He performed “Ghostbusters,” “Home Alone” and “Back to the Future” with the YSO in the past few years.
The YSO was unable to add a movie performance to the 2025-26 season because it wasn’t in the budget or the timeframe. But the shortened four-concert season will include two pops shows with guest artists and two classical performances.
It starts Dec. 22 – unusually, a Monday – with “Home for the Holidays” featuring Valley vocalist Amanda Beagle.
The second pops show will take place March 13 with guest pianist-singer Tony DeSare, who will pay tribute to Frank Sinatra.
The classical shows will be “Fantastique!” on Jan. 25 and “Inextinguishable” on May 15.
All concerts are at Stambaugh Auditorium, and tickets are now on sale.
Ochsner is hopeful the shortened season will be a one-time affair.
“We’re hoping the number of shows can go up to seven or eight in the future,” he says. “We just have to see. A lot of it depends on funding. This is what we were able to do given what we have available to us right now.”
Ochsner’s reign will get off to a festive start with the holiday concert with Beagle at the microphone.
A Howland native, she is well-known throughout the area. The former Miss Ohio (2004) is a singer and an educator who runs a vocal studio with dozens of students.
“I’m really honored to be the guest artist on the opening concert and thankful we have our Youngstown Symphony thriving,” she says. “I’m happy to share my voice and shine a light back on them.”
Beagle has never performed with the full YSO before, although she did a cabaret show with its jazz combo in 2021. She has also performed with the Greenville Symphony, the Warren Philharmonic and the W.D. Packard Band.
“I come from a background of performing in cabaret-style settings, including work aboard cruise ships, so I’ve always loved connecting with audiences in a personal way,” she says.
Beagle says she’d like to continue working with orchestras.
“The pandemic shifted my focus from auditioning and performing to putting down roots and helping others find and strengthen their voices,” she says.
In addition to her studio, Beagle also teaches with Students Motivated by the Arts in Warren City Schools.
“But I always look for opportunities to share my own voice,” she says. “I’m often putting others on stage but it’s great to get out there and share my voice with the communities.”
Introductory Concert
Ochsner will be formally introduced as the new leader of the YSO at the second concert of the year on Jan. 25.
“It will be my official kickoff concert,” he says. “I want to introduce myself to the orchestra and the audience.”
The programs for the two classical concerts were assembled by Ochsner, and he made them personal.
“I made it a little bit biographical for me,” he says. “Every piece that I programmed has some really close personal connection.”
While Ochsner has no favorite composer, Richard Wagner is high on his list. “Fantastique!” will open with a movement from Wagner’s “The Ring” cycle.
“We’re playing a small orchestral excerpt of it,” Ochsner says. “It’s a famous excerpt from the final opera called ‘Gotterdamerung’ (The Twilight of the Gods.”
The second half of the concert will be what gives it its name: the 49-minute “Symphonie Fantastique” by French composer Hector Berlioz. It will mark just the fourth time the YSO – which was launched in 1926 – has performed the piece. It was also done in 2005, 1996 and 1972.
“It’s a staple of the orchestral repertoire, and it’s hard for an orchestra,” Ochsner says. “But I want to push. I want to demand that we do the highest level performances that we can… We have an amazing symphony orchestra here.”
Many smaller professional orchestras have more than their fair share of economic issues, and the YSO is no different.
But the orchestra is here to stay, and that’s why Ochsner titled the May 15 concert “Inextinguishable.”
Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, which is subtitled “The Inextinguishable,” will be played at the show. But the word gets a double meaning here – it underscores the permanence of the YSO, which has overcome the difficulties in its path.
Nielsen wrote the dramatic symphony against the backdrop of World War I. It features a “battle” between two sets of timpani.
The May concert will be the first time the YSO has ever played any piece by the composer.
“‘The Inextinguishable’ was sort of a comment that Nielsen was making about the politics at the time, but I took it as a pun to play on [gossip] that the YSO was going bankrupt,” Ochsner says. “In fact, we were not. We never were. It was just a reorganization [of ownership and duties]. So, we are ‘inextinguishable!’”
The remaining concert, “Sinatra & Beyond,” will feature a “totally flashy” guest entertainer in DeSare, who both sings and plays piano.
“It’s a Frank Sinatra-based show,” Ochsner says. “He’ll be singing Sinatra tunes, or songs that made Frank famous. And then he’ll perform some of his own music that he wrote [in American Songbook style].”
About Ochsner
Ochsner is a graduate of Dartmouth College and attended the Pierre Monteux School in Maine. He speaks French, German and Italian, and has lived and studied in all of those countries.
The YSO is the first symphony orchestra that has hired Ochsner as music director. But he’ll also remain busy with his career as a guest conductor, and will continue to lead Sonos, the project-based chamber orchestra he started in New York.
As a freelance conductor, Ochsner has made a global name for himself with the popular movie soundtrack concerts. It keeps him in many airports.
“This summer, I was conducting two different Disney films,” he says. “I had six performances in Saudi Arabia,” leading an Armenian orchestra that was hired.
In early December, he will head to Edmonton, Canada, to conduct “Star Wars: the Return of the Jedi” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
Then he’ll head to New York for a short spell before returning to Youngstown for the Holidays concert.
After that, he’ll head to Poland to conduct a pops concert, then to Oman for “The Lion King,” before returning to Youngstown.
Ochsner has his own artistic vision, but he plans to listen to the public before making any changes regarding the YSO.
“This is a machine that runs very well, with the right people on the right teams,” he points out.
As a conductor, Ochsner says he remains beholden to the composer’s intentions.
“I feel like my job is to be a slave to the composer,” he says. “I’m not a composer, and my job as conductor is to recreate what those people wrote. The way Mozart wrote something is different from the way Stravinsky wrote something, which is different from the way John Williams or Howard Shore wrote something. They all have their own way of notating things. It’s something you learn over the years.”
To learn the correct style of a piece, Ochsner does research to learn when it was written, why it was written, and what else was happening at the time.
“The Nielsen piece [‘The Inextinguishable’] is actually a political commentary, and some of those politics are battles,” he says. “At the end of the fourth movement is a battle between timpani drums and it’s super dramatic. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, we’ll just hit the drum.’ No. You need to know that you’re in a fight.”
Looking Ahead
Ochsner and the Stambaugh staff are exploring ways to do more with the YSO in the future.
He would like to resurrect the YSO’s Stained Glass Series, in which portions of the orchestra play shows in local churches.
He would also like to launch a chorus, which would allow the orchestra to play more and different pieces.
A few circumstances that took a lot of time to sort out delayed Ochsner in getting the season mapped out.
The transfer of YSO ownership to Stambaugh, contract talks with the musicians and the Youngstown Symphony Society’s switch to JAC Management as its booking agent for the DeYor delayed the planning that is usually done in early summer. The Symphony Society was the former owner of the YSO.
As a result, Ochsner and the Stambaugh team had to pick concert dates after many dates were already booked.
That explains why all of the YSO concerts are on Fridays, Sundays and Mondays this season.
Next season, more weekend dates will likely be available.
The YSO will also perform some shows in Powers Auditorium and possibly the smaller Ford Family Recital Hall, both at the DeYor, in the 2026-27 season, Ochsner says.
Pictured at top: Erik Ochsner is the new music director and conductor of the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra.