Music Director Jonathon Heyward leads the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and soloist Jess Gilliam in Anna Clyne’s Grasslands. Photo by Washington Classical Review.

In Sunday’s (1/12) Washington Classical Review, Charles T. Downey writes, “Jonathon Heyward opened the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s new year with a striking concert of mostly contemporary fare, Saturday night in the Music Center at Strathmore. The program … combined music inspired by three different kinds of revelatory arcana: Biblical, folkloric, and astrological. The evening began with Sukkot through Orion’s Nebula, a piece from 2011 by James Lee III, this season’s BSO composer-in-residence. Lee … drew on his faith as a Seventh-Day Adventist for inspiration…. Lee’s style, mostly tonal, often sounded akin to a film score, and the alluring central section of this score, awash with celesta and mysterious metallic percussion, might have accompanied a science fiction scene set in outer space…. The enigmatic slow section [featured] low sounds from the horns and the occasional distant rumble of thunder sheet and bass drum. Above these sounds hovered a limpid, floating melody suspended in time … Anna Clyne’s Glasslands [featured] young British saxophonist Jess Gillam. Premiered by Gillam in 2023 with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the work evokes, says the composer, ‘an imaginary world of three realms governed by the banshee—a female spirit’… The haunting sound of a banshee’s wail came across clearly in extended writing for the instrument’s upper range…. Like most of Clyne’s music, this inventive, surprising work will likely reward repeated listening. Heyward closed with the concert with Holst’s The Planets.”