GTMF ready for ’25 with music, friends old and new – JH News&Guide

For nearly 150 years, Ludwig von Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 — with its ecstatic fourth movement featuring the choral setting of Friedrich Schiller’s “An die Freude,” or “Ode to Joy” — has been used to celebrate the momentous beginnings and historic unions of peoples from all across the world.

In 1876, Richard Wagner conducted it to open his festival house in Bayreuth, Germany, even though he had it built specifically for productions of his own works, a tradition that stood for decades. Leonard Bernstein led it in December 1989 in Berlin to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, with musicians from East and West Germany, the Soviet Union, the U.K., France and the United States, and replacing the opening word of the chorale movement, “freude” (joy) with “freiheit” (freedom). Seiji Ozawa conducted the fourth movement for the opening ceremony of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, with choristers from Japan, Germany, South Africa, China, Australia and the U.S. And in 2018, Georg Solti led the UNESCO World Orchestra for Peace in a performance as part of a “War and Peace” program at the Royal Albert Hall in London to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

This July, Sir Donald Runnicles will lead two performances (July 3 and July 5, with the free annual Jayne and Al Hilde Jr. Patriotic Pops concert on the Center for the Arts lawn in between) to start of the 64th season of the Grand Teton Music Festival, his 21st season at the podium of the lauded classical music series headquartered at Walk Festival Hall in Teton Village.

The 2025 season will continue through eight orchestral programs — including the season-closing, semi-staged production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel and Gretel” on Aug. 22-23 — with musicians pulled from orchestras from throughout North America and beyond, guest soloists and conductors, Wednesday night chamber music concerts, and a huge number of free events at indoor and outdoor venues across the valley.

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