The Illinois Symphony opened its 2025-26 season last month with a pops concert dedicated to music from Star Wars, with guest conductor Vince Lee at the podium. Music director Taichi Fukumura leads the first concert of his second year in Bloomington-Normal on Saturday, Nov. 8, with a trio of masterworks by Beethoven, Béla Bartók and Miklós Rózsa.
Collectively titled Hero's Journey, the program is also Fukumura’s first since becoming assistant conductor of the Cleveland Symphony, a job he said is like “watching magic happen in front of you every single day.”
Fukumura said the entire season is designed to take listeners on a journey, inspired by the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Route 66 Centennial. Another consideration: Major renovations to their usual performance hall in Springfield meant rearranging certain aspect of the season which trickle down to their dual presence in the Twin Cities.
“In a way, our season is a very particular moment in time; it’s a very particular journey,” Fukumura said. “There’s a little element of celebrating both what is American and our culture here through the Route. This season features a lot of American composers, as well as many composers who immigrated to the U.S.”
That includes Bartók and Rózsa, a pair of Hungarian composers whose careers led them to New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Rózsa is perhaps best recognized as a film composer (The Green Beret and Ben Hur being the most popular).
“He was very well known for his film scores, but at the same time, he was very successful writing for the orchestra,” Fukumura said.
Rózsa got a call from violinist Jascha Heifitz, widely regarded among the world’s best violinists, requesting a concerto from the composer.
“Rózsa answered, ‘If you’re Heifitz, I’m Mozart,’” Fukumura said. “He thought his friend was pranking him. He flat out rejected it.”
Rózsa did eventually write a violin concerto for Heifitz, premiering it in 1956 with the Dallas Symphony. Up and coming Canadian violinist Blake Pouliot plays the work next week for his Illinois Symphony debut.
“It’s a very powerful dialog between the violin and the orchestra,” Fukumura said. “It reminds very much of Bartók. It has those folksy elements combined with that modernistic element… It’s tonal, but it’s not always purely classical.”
Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances opens the evening, another example borrowing from folk melodies and rhythms for a blend of flavors looking to the East and the West.
“With Star Wars, we had a fictional hero’s journey,” said Fukumura. “This is very much not about an individual person, but about identity as a nationality, identity as a society. A hero’s journey is one where you have a struggle. You have to find yourself. That’s very much the case for Bartók and Rózsa through their lives, as well as in their music.”
Originally, Beethoven’s third symphony, which caps the program, was indeed directed toward an individual person, with the dedication intended for Napoleon Bonaparte.
“Once he declared himself emperor, famously, Beethoven scratched it out and you can see the hole in the original documents where the name used to be,” Fukumura said. “Beethoven was furious.”
The dedication is gone, but the symphony survived, dubbed the Eroica, or Hero, and dedicated to a more abstract interpretation of the word.
“Beethoven was a very politically conscious person. We have a war-torn Europe, post-French Revolution, fighting and trying to discover a society—trying to create a society according to these principles that Beethoven and many others, Napoleon initially, represented. He was a heroic figure who represented the wishes and needs of the common people for equality, for justice, for individual freedoms. That concept, that principle he was going for remains the same. The name of it has changed, but still this is one of the most philosophical, revolutionary pieces of music.”
The Illinois Symphony's Hero's Journey takes place Saturday, Nov. 8, at ISU's Center for Performing Arts, 400 W. Beaufort St., Normal. Tickets are $30-$65 at ilsymphony.org.
