Michael Avagliano conducts The Summit Symphony Orchestra.
Michael Avagliano often finds himself walking down the same hallways he did as a teenager, and it always fills him with pride. “Local boy makes good,” he quips. He is the music director of The Summit Symphony Orchestra, and Summit High School is both his alma mater and the place where the Orchestra rehearses and mainly performs.
“Even 11 years in, it is still a bit surreal to walk down the hallway toward the band room and past the locker I had junior year, but it is great to be part of my hometown in this way,” says Avagliano, who has devoted the last decade to rebuilding the Orchestra’s ties to the town that raised him.
The orchestra will open its 2026-27 season at Summit High School, Oct. 4, with a family concert titled “The Orchestra Grows Up!” There will be no admission charge, as has always been the case since the Orchestra was founded almost 90 years ago.
The program of popular masterworks was designed to show the audience how the art form evolved over time by adding instruments, piece by piece. “The origins of what we call a symphony orchestra began with small string groups in the Baroque era with Vivaldi and Bach,” Avagliano says. “Then as composers started adding instruments and looking for new sounds and timbres, the orchestras got bigger and bigger.”
That growth will happen onstage, in front of the audience, as the concert progresses. Each piece will add instrumentalists to the ensemble until the stage is full. “It is always great, especially for the kids in the audience to see: ‘Oh wow, all of a sudden the tuba shows up and the harp shows up!’ ” says Avagliano. “By the time we get to the 20th century, you’re hearing music that has lots of brass, percussion, harp and piano — but still has the strings and winds from when we were playing Vivaldi — and it gives you this clear idea of how things evolved.”
Woodwind players in The Summit Symphony.
There will be an interactive twist, too. “Because we keep adding the instruments over the course of the concert, the strings have to get bigger in order to be able to match them in sound,” Avagliano says. Each time that happens, he will turn to the audience and ask them to call out, “More strings, please!,” at which point more string players will come onto the stage.
“That keeps happening over and over again, just so the audience knows that we’re not going to try to make this small group that we started with compete with trumpets, trombones and percussion. It’s a nice way to introduce the audience to not just the instruments of the orchestra, but to show them how they interact with each other.”
The repertoire is mostly crowd-pleasers, opening with Vivaldi and building to the sprawling orchestrations of the 20th century, including Stravinsky’s “The Firebird” Suite. Avagliano will take detours along the way with composers who were writing significant music at the same time as their more famous contemporaries. One of those is Joseph Boulogne, the 18th-century French composer of African descent, also known as Chevalier de Saint-Georges. He composed in Mozart’s time for ensembles of similar sizes but never rose to the same level of popularity.
The concept is not new for Avagliano. He conducted a concert of the same name in 2016, during his second season with the Orchestra. A decade later, he will revisit it with a new perspective. “It is nice to be able to come back to it, but you don’t want to do the same exact thing twice, so I’ve changed the pieces a little bit,” he says. “But the basic concept remains the same.”
The Orchestra has also changed since 2016. Avagliano went into the first rehearsal for this year’s “The Orchestra Grows Up!” show thinking that most of the musicians would remember the program from a decade ago, only to realize that there were many new faces. “I looked around the room and realized there’s a fair number of people who weren’t here (then) and who have joined the Orchestra since then, because The Summit Symphony has grown over the last 10 years. It was nice to be able to say, ‘No, actually, some of you haven’t seen this program yet, and that’s a good thing!’ ”
Founded in 1938, The Summit Symphony Orchestra has always had the same mission: to give qualified nonprofessional musicians a place to rehearse and perform orchestral music, and to present free concerts to residents of Summit and the surrounding communities.
MICHAEL AVAGLIANO
Membership fluctuates between 50 and 65 players, and the majority are volunteers. The concertmaster and a handful of others are paid since they act as section leaders, and as coaches for the volunteer core. “We like to think of the Orchestra as having almost a continuing-education/adult-education aspect to it,” says Avagliano. “There’s the social aspect of being able to play together and make music together, and the musical aspect, of course. But there’s also the educational aspect of continuing to grow on your instrument and learn about how an orchestra and an ensemble works. That’s what those professional players are there for.”
The musicians come from all walks of life: Music teachers from local schools, lawyers, doctors etc. “It just goes to show how broad the appeal of being able to play and make music together really is,” Avagliano says.
Avagliano says the door is always open to members. There are no formal auditions; members play at the highest level they can.
Avagliano joined the Orchestra in 2015 after a nationwide search for a music director. He had been music director of The Somerset Symphony Orchestra, so he was already familiar with many members of the local music scene.
One of the things he is proudest of is rebuilding the ties between the Orchestra and the town that once sustained it. It was formed by the Summit Board of Recreation, but as often happens with orchestras of this type, he says, the formal relationship faded over the years, along with the Orchestra’s connections to local businesses and organizations.
His Summit roots helped him repair some of those relationships, including with Summit Downtown, a nonprofit organization that represents businesses in the downtown district. “Because I knew people that I had grown up with who were now working with these organizations, I was able to rekindle some of the relationships,” he says. “That’s something we’re very happy about because it’s allowed us to have a more vibrant connection to the community. That’s a big part of what a community orchestra needs to do.”
Another big part of the job is creating the right culture. “The music director’s job, especially with a community orchestra, is conducting rehearsals, but that’s only about 15 percent of it,” Avagliano says, adding that the remaining 85 percent is about “fostering the right vibe, the right sense of community and making sure everyone is enjoying the work that they do. People are coming to learn and to make the performance as professional as they can, but at the same time, they’re all there as volunteers. They’re doing it because they love it, and you want to make sure that they continue to love it.”
Avagliano, who trained as a violinist and a violist, can trace the moment he wanted to become a conductor to a single week at The Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts, when he was 15.
Leonard Bernstein came to guest-conduct a rehearsal with the student orchestra the same week that Avagliano happened to be in the concertmaster’s chair. “I was sitting right in front of him. No pressure, you know? No big deal — you’re just playing for Leonard Bernstein!” he jokes.
MICHAEL AVAGLIANO
Avagliano was starstruck, but what impressed him most was Bernstein’s gifts as a connector and a communicator. “It was really amazing how much one rehearsal — just that one set of three hours — showed me what making music was really all about,” he says. “He wasn’t rehearsing us, saying, ‘Okay, now let’s do this again; take this slowly and do it like this.’ Instead, he was showing us where the music led and what the notes were trying to say to people without using words.
“That’s the essence of what music is: This universal language that everyone can understand, because it speaks in emotions. I had this feeling of, ‘Okay — I get it. I’m trying to say something to my stand partner, to the oboe and to the audience, all at the same time.’ That was really an eye-opener.”
This was the transformative moment that led him to pursue music as a profession. He holds degrees from Indiana University and a doctorate in orchestral conducting from Rutgers. He has been music director of The Somerset Symphony Orchestra, which is based in Somerville, since 2008, but will step down at the end of the season.
The 89th season of The Summit Symphony Orchestra will include three more concerts. The next one, on Dec. 6, will include Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (featuring Carlos Avila), Brahms’ First Symphony and Jessie Montgomery’s Soul Force. “It’s exciting for me because it’s music we don’t get to do all that often,” says Avagliano, who is a friend of both Avila and Montgomery. “It’s also a big thing for me to program music from our time.”
The March 14 concert will pair two enormous symphonies: Beethoven’s “Eroica” (to commemorate the composer’s 200th death year) and Mozart’s “Haffner.” “The players really rise to the challenges of great, massive music,” Avagliano says. “Last season we did Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, a devilishly difficult piece of music, but they jumped right into it and gave it a great performance, and that’s what I’m looking forward to with the ‘Eroica.’ ”
Another piece designed to bring the musicians out of their comfort zones is Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, which will be played at the May 16 season finale. Everyone gets a solo, from the concertmaster to the second clarinet and second trombone. “There’s no place to hide!” Avagliano jokes. “I know they’re looking at that piece with a combination of excitement and a little bit of trepidation, and that’s okay! It’s a wonderful musical story that gives you a vivid picture of what’s happening without having to tell you in words.”
ANDRES SANCHEZ
The concert will also feature Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto, played by another longtime friend of Avagliano, Andres Sanchez. The two first played together when Sanchez was just 11 years old.
Now 28, Sanchez won this year’s edition of the prestigious annual Sphinx Competition, which provides career advancement for musicians from the Black and Latino communities. Sanchez last played with The Summit Symphony Orchestra in 2015 and Avagliano has always wanted to bring him back.
“That’s one of the great things about community orchestras,” Avagliano says. “You can get young artists who are on the cusp of getting out into the world and really making a name for themselves, but they’re here with us, making great music on the stage at Summit High School.”
The Summit Symphony Orchestra will perform “The Orchestra Grows Up!” at Summit High School, Oct. 4 at 2 p.m. There will be no admission charge. For more about this show and others in the 2026-27 season, visit summitsymphony.org.
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