New music director readies for first Central Oregon Symphony concert
Published 1:30 pm Wednesday, October 21, 2026
In June, the Central Oregon Symphony Association appointed Jonathan Moore as its new music director and conductor of Bend’s community orchestra, succeeding Michael Gesme, who led the orchestra for 30 years.
This weekend, Moore is poised to make his debut appearance leading the orchestra in the annual Fall Concert, in performance Saturday and Sunday at Mountain View High School.
Moore and his family have lived in Bend just shy of a decade, where he has worked as conductor of Central Oregon Youth Orchestra and taught at Redmond Proficiency Academy. In his new role, he now teaches at Central Oregon Community College, which operates the community orchestra in conjunction with the Central Oregon Symphony Association. He also conducts the Cascades Winds Symphonic Band, which will hold its season-opening concert Nov. 8 at Summit High.
The early years
Moore was born in France into a musically and artistically inclined family, his father a professional French horn player and his mother a French ballet dancer.
“They met in Germany working in an opera house there, and then I was born in Nice, where my dad had a job with the orchestra,” he said last week.
Moore began studying piano and French horn at an early age and, after moving to the U.S. at age 11, went on to study French horn performance and political science at the University of Florida before moving to Texas and earning Master of Music degrees in instrumental conducting and French horn performance from Southern Methodist University. In Dallas, he conducted the SYZYGY New Music Ensemble, leading performances of contemporary chamber orchestra repertoire and premiering new works. He served as a cover conductor for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Meadows Symphony Orchestra and has participated festivals including the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Burgos International Music Festival and the Monteux School and Music Festival.
With Bend being his next stop after Florida and Texas, Moore joked that he’s slowly “moving westward. I guess the next step would be Japan.”
Not quite yet.
He and his wife “moved out here originally thinking it would only be temporary and then sort of fell in love with Central Oregon, and then I started working with the Central Oregon Youth Orchestra. I had a high school teaching job at RPA in Redmond. And then I played horn in the orchestra, kind of on and off for the last 10 years.”
Three years ago, he heard from a friend who plays in the orchestra that Gesme was thinking about retiring. Though a target date hadn’t been announced, Moore thought, “This is the only job I want in town. This is the only job that I think will allow us to stay here,” he said.
“So with my wife, we were deciding if we were going to stick around and take the chance on the off chance that this worked out for us, and it did,” Moore said. “I’m so relieved. It was quite a competitive process too. I mean, it was a national search. I think there were anywhere between 55 and 85 applicants for the for the job. So it was quite a long process with multiple rounds and I’m really grateful I got the gig in the end.”
Fall concert
For his first concert leading the C.O. Symphony, Moore said he isn’t going with a theme, other than one running season, a celebration of America at 250, including one American composer on each of the three seasonal concerts.
That composer for the Fall Concert: Leonard Bernstein, whose 1956 overture to “Candide” will be performed.
“(It’s) just a really fun piece. It exudes a lot of personality and character. Sort of like Leonard Bernstein was such a larger than life musical figure, and you really hear that in this piece, and the middle section has this absolutely beautiful melody, just very warm, heart on your sleeve. I just thought that would be just a great way to open up my first concert.”
The second tune is Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, “a shamelessly beautiful, romantic violin concerto,” Moore said.
The soloist on the concerto is John Fawcett, a musician who grew up in Bend and began playing violin at age 5, going on to win the Symphony’s Young Artist Competition at age 8, among many other accolades. This year he was appointed concertmaster of the Boise Philharmonic and artist in residence at The College of Idaho, where he serves on the violin faculty and performs in the Langroise Trio. Fawcett will teach a masterclass in partnership with COYO and visit Mountain View High School.
After intermission, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 will close the concert. One of Moore’s all-time favorite compositions, the symphony is also known as the “Pastoral Symphony,” and “sort of moves through this experience of life in the countryside,” Moore said. “Beethoven loved to go for long hikes and long walks in the woods, something that we all love about being out here, and so it just seems like a good way to sort of have our first concert connect with our audience.”
‘Uniquely Central Oregon’
That walking-in-woods tie-in hints at Moore’s aims during his time on the podium.
“My goal is to at least try to tie this symphony orchestra to our community more, to our identity as a community, to make it very uniquely Central Oregon,” he said. “And so I’m hoping to collaborate with some other organizations in town and program things that I know our audience is really going to connect with. … We have a pretty diverse audience. Not everybody is a diehard classical music fan, and so I also tried to put something fun on every concert, for the kids that come, for folks that are maybe coming to a symphony concert for the first time.”
If You Go
What: Central Oregon Symphony Fall Concert
When: 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday
Where: Mountain View High School, 2755 NE 27th St., Bend
Cost: Free for Central Oregon Symphony members
Contact: cosymphony.com