Jonathon Heyward, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
“In the June 2010 issue of … his high school magazine, senior Jonathon Heyward wrote that by 2020 his ‘huge overall dream is to become music director of a major symphony orchestra,’ ” writes Mary Carole McCauley in Sunday’s (1/29) Baltimore Sun. “ ‘Well,’ Heyward, said earlier this month, while visiting the Charleston County School of the Arts, ‘I was three years late. But here we are.’ In September, Heyward will become the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s top baton. Since music director appointments are made years in advance, Heyward will likely be the only Black conductor leading one of the nation’s largest classical orchestras—and just the second in U.S. history. At age 31 this fall, he also will be the youngest. That long-ago prediction hints at the personal qualities that propelled Heyward to the top in record time.… How did the son of a waitress and chef, a young man without early exposure to classical music, a kid from a family occasionally without money for the electric bill—let alone music lessons—beat the odds?” The article reports on Heyward’s “return trip to South Carolina to conduct his hometown orchestra,” the Charleston Symphony Orchestra.
