Live Arts Toledo

Toledo Ballet is delighted to welcome Isabella LaFreniere, principal ballerina with New York City Ballet, as a guest artist for the 85^th annual production of The Nutcracker, presented by Fifth Third Bank. A proud alumna of Toledo Ballet, Isabella will take the stage as the Sugar Plum Fairy, bringing her journey full circle with the very production where she first danced as a child.

I remember the first time I heard Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs in person. It was April 1997 at the Toledo Symphony. I attended with several high-school friends, and even though I’d been to the opera before, I had never heard anything like the Songs: a tone poem for soprano and orchestra, a human voice floating above a palette of late-Romantic warmth and love. The music stopped me in my tracks.

I love Mahler.

Mahler is my guy. My favorite composer. My personalized license plate.

His music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; it’s thick, personal, and philosophical. For some, his symphonies are a hot drink, not easily consumed. But the Sixth Symphony? It’s pure drama. It soaks you to the bone and makes eighty-five minutes disappear.

When we gather in a concert hall today, it’s tempting to take for granted that orchestral music has always sounded the way it does. We expect it to move us, to stir something deep, but not always to tell a story. In 1830, however, the young French composer, Hector Berlioz, broke through those expectations with a work so daring, so vividly cinematic, that critics didn’t even have the words for it. 

Composer Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was a master of color and clarity—equally at home with intimate chamber textures and orchestral shimmer. Explore the program below with notes and embedded listening.

When we began the journey to reimagine our organization as Live Arts Toledo, we knew we needed more than a new name and logo. We needed a unifying story—something that would carry meaning not only in our performance halls and classrooms, but in the hearts of everyone who calls this organization their own. 

When you sit in The Peristyle as the symphony tunes, when you watch a dancer balance on the edge of silence just before the music begins, when you feel a jazz trio lift the room, you know there is nothing else like live performance. It is profoundly human. It exists in that fleeting, unrepeatable moment, felt as deeply by the people who perform as by the people who witness it. 

This is the essence of what we do. And now, it is the name we carry: Live Arts Toledo.