Mansfield Symphony opens season with free Classical Mansfield concert featuring hometown composer Liam Cummins

Liam Cummins walked back onto the stage he first crossed as a teenager — this time as the composer on the program — and at the door on Park Avenue West, nobody had to reach for a ticket. The Mansfield Symphony Orchestra's annual Classical Mansfield concert filled the Renaissance Theatre Main Stage on Sept. 19 with more than 60 of the town's own musicians, led by Music Director Octavio Más-Arocas, admission free or pay-what-you-want.

The night's music

Titled "Radiant & Beautiful," the night brought soprano Shannon Crowley to the stage for Jake Heggie's "Good Morning, Beauty," with the program moving around her through Gala Flagello's "Everything Beautiful," Anna Clyne's "This Midnight Hour," and Christopher Theofanidis's "Rainbow Body."

Más-Arocas, who also serves as Director of Orchestras and a professor of orchestral conducting at Michigan State University, said the program carries listeners "through sound worlds of reflection, storytelling, and transformation."

Crowley, a Virginia Beach native trained at Rice University, was a Pittsburgh Opera resident artist and a finalist in the 2026 Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition.

A Mansfield-born composer

Born in Mansfield in 2004, Cummins played in the Mansfield Symphony Youth Orchestra and the Youth Strings Orchestra from 2015 through 2021 — the local programs begun in 1984 and merged with the Renaissance in 1997 to form the Renaissance Performing Arts Association. On Sept. 19, he was on the program as the composer of "Howard Zinn: A People's History."

Since his youth orchestra years, Cummins has won a 2023 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and a 2022 YoungArts Gold in classical music, and he now studies composition at The Juilliard School with John Corigliano.

The Howard Zinn work honors the historian's commitment to justice and democracy and his insistence on facing uncomfortable truths, setting up two contrasting musical worlds — one sincere, one that tries to cover it up.

The town's own ensemble

The orchestra Cummins came home to was founded in December 1930 by Eugene Weinberger, and on that September night it was still what it has always been: the town's own ensemble — more than 60 of our own musicians on the Main Stage.

Classical Mansfield is a season-opening ritual that returns each September by design — a night when the symphony welcomes the community in and hands the music back to Richland County without a fixed ticket price standing in the way.

Next September, the door on Park Avenue West opens again. When the date is posted, that is the night to bring someone who still thinks the symphony is out of reach — because on that stage this year, the hometown kid was on the program, and nobody had to reach for a ticket at the door.