For twenty seasons, if you held tickets to the Billings Symphony, you knew who would raise the baton before the house lights dropped at the Alberta Bair Theater. The 2025-2026 season marked Anne Harrigan's twentieth as Music Director, long enough that an entire generation of subscribers has never experienced a Billings Symphony concert conducted by anyone else. That certainty is gone this year, and the orchestra decided not to hide the reason why.
The 2026-2027 season is titled The Search, and the name is not marketing shorthand. Six finalists for the next Music Director will each conduct one full concert at the Alberta Bair Theater between now and next April, and the winner won't be announced in a press release drafted behind closed doors. It happens on stage, at the season finale, in front of whoever bought a ticket.
What "The Search" Actually Means for a Ticket Buyer
Most executive searches, at an orchestra or anywhere else, happen the way you'd expect: a committee reviews resumes, narrows a list, and the public finds out who won after the decision is final. The Billings Symphony flipped that. Each of the six candidates spends a full week in Billings, rehearsing with the orchestra, sitting for interviews, and meeting community members before conducting their concert. The audience that shows up on a given Saturday night is watching the same audition the board will eventually score.
Tonight, September 10, the Sukin Series opens the season with classical guitarist Rafael Aguirre, a warmup act ahead of the real drama. The first Music Director candidate doesn't take the podium until September 26, when Eric Garcia opens the Classic Series with Dvorak's Symphony No. 8, paired with Valerie Coleman's Umoja and Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto featuring guest artist Timothy Chooi. Individual tickets for that concert and the rest of the season went on sale in July, and subscriptions are still open through the symphony's own season page.
The Six-Concert Ballot
Here's the full arc of the Classic Series, the sequence that carries the search from opening night to announcement:
| Concert | Date | Conductor | What's On the Program |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dvorak No. 8 | Sept 26, 2026 | Eric Garcia, finalist | Coleman's Umoja, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with soloist Timothy Chooi |
| Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 | Oct 24, 2026 | Finalist, announced closer to the date | Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 |
| Tchaikovsky No. 4 | Dec 19, 2026 | Finalist, announced closer to the date | Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 |
| Elgar's Enigma Variations | Jan 23, 2027 | Finalist, announced closer to the date | Elgar's Enigma Variations |
| Brahms No. 2 | Feb 20, 2027 | Jacob Joyce, finalist | Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto with soloist Fabiola Kim, Brahms's Symphony No. 2 |
| Sibelius No. 2 | March 20, 2027 | Finalist, announced closer to the date | Sibelius's Symphony No. 2 |
| The Cycle of Beginnings | April 24, 2027 | Robert Moody, guest conductor | Smetana's The Moldau, Montana premiere of Christopher Tin's The Drop That Contained the Sea, new Music Director announced |
The symphony hasn't yet matched all six names to a date. Two are locked in, and they happen to bracket the calendar nicely: Garcia opens the season, and Jacob Joyce takes the podium for Brahms No. 2 in February. The other four candidates fill the gaps as the season unfolds.
The Two Names Already on the Calendar
Garcia currently serves as Music Director of the Boise Philharmonic and Artistic Director of the McCall MusicFest in Idaho. Before Boise, he was Assistant Conductor of the Seattle Symphony, where he led subscription and community concerts and produced recordings for Naxos. His official bio describes him as bringing
"elegant and expressive"
conducting to the podium, and his opening-night program pairs a contemporary piece, Coleman's Umoja, with a Billings Symphony favorite in Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, a combination that reads like a candidate trying to show range in a single evening.
Jacob Joyce brings a different resume. He's the Associate Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and hosts a podcast built around helping general audiences understand classical music, a detail that matters for a city where the symphony's stated mission includes reaching listeners who might not otherwise walk into a concert hall. His February concert pairs Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, performed by soloist Fabiola Kim, with Brahms's Symphony No. 2.
The Other Four
Wilbur Lin is a Taiwanese-American conductor currently serving as Music Director of the Missouri Symphony and Associate Conductor of the Colorado Symphony, with opera credits across multiple continents. Tristan Rais-Sherman has received the Solti Foundation's U.S. Career Assistance Award three times, an honor built specifically to track promising American conductors early in their careers. Conner Gray Covington has been praised by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, one of the most recognized names in orchestral conducting today, and made debuts with several major American symphonies last season. Deanna Tham rounds out the six. Each of them will step onto the Alberta Bair stage sometime between October and March, and which concert belongs to whom will surface on the symphony's website as the season progresses.
How the Search Actually Ends
The finale on April 24, 2027, isn't conducted by any of the six candidates. Guest conductor Robert Moody leads that concert instead, pairing Smetana's The Moldau with the Montana premiere of Christopher Tin's The Drop That Contained the Sea, performed with the Billings Symphony Chorale. Tickets for that night start at $48 and run to $80 depending on seat location, a price built for what the symphony is calling the biggest announcement in its recent history. Somewhere between the Smetana and the Tin premiere, the audience will learn which of the six candidates becomes the next Music Director.
That person's first performance in the role isn't at the Alberta Bair. It's outdoors, at the 55th Annual Symphony in the Park at Pioneer Park on June 27, 2027, a free community tradition that predates most of the people who'll be watching a brand-new conductor lead it for the first time.
Why This Is Worth Building a Fall Around
Billings has one professional symphonic organization within 130 miles, and it hasn't changed leadership in two decades. That kind of stability is rare and mostly invisible until it ends. What's unusual here isn't that the Billings Symphony needs a new Music Director. It's that the organization decided the community should watch the process happen in real time rather than read about the outcome after the fact. You won't cast a formal vote. But you'll sit in the same room as the search committee, hear the same six interpretations of six very different composers, and form an opinion that plenty of other people in that theater are forming right alongside you.
If you've let a symphony subscription lapse, or never had one, this is an unusual year to start. Six chances to hear a different conductor's read on Dvorak, Brahms, or Sibelius won't repeat again for a long time. Anne Harrigan's run lasted twenty years. Whoever wins this search will likely be around for a while too.
Living in a city where a cultural institution invites its residents this close to a defining decision says something about the kind of place Billings is becoming, one where community input still shapes the biggest calls, not just the small ones. If you're weighing a move to a neighborhood that offers this kind of civic texture alongside its housing options, the team at Heidi Brosovich knows Billings block by block and can help you find the right one. Request a free home valuation or reach out to start the conversation.
