The Wheeling Symphony Orchestra is gearing up for its 2025-26 season, with the theme of “The Place I Belong.” (File Photo)

The Wheeling Symphony Orchestra will celebrate the community around us — along with a stop long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away — with its 2025-26 season, unveiled today.

The theme of the season is “The Place I Belong,” taken from John Denver’s iconic “Country Roads.” Maestro John Devlin, WSO conductor and music director, said the four Masterworks performances, three Pops performances and numerous special community concerts will explore the idea of home, celebrate the Ohio Valley and create a feeling of home when patrons attend a performance.

Devlin said the theme was born in part from the United States’ upcoming 250th birthday in 2026. In developing the theme, the WSO ultimately decided to celebrate the Ohio Valley specifically, highlighting what it means to be an American at the local level.

He said he was especially inspired earlier this week when he worked with the symphony’s community choir during a rehearsal.

“It just reinforced to me that there are people in that room and the orchestra assembled on the stage of all different political ideologies and backgrounds and ages and religious beliefs and every different type of division that we describe,” he said, “but everybody puts those things aside and comes together to foster a goal of creating beauty for the audience. And I think that Wheeling is a place that feels that way, too.”

The season will kick off with its first Pops concert, “Prohibition,” at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 20. The performance, featuring guest vocalists Sarah Uriate Berry, Myra Maud, and John Risen, will celebrate the music of the “Roaring ’20s.”

“We are going to try to start a little tradition here of an opening night party with the Wheeling Symphony,” Devlin said. “And that flapper era, Prohibition-style feel is such a natural theme around which to create a celebration.”

That party, he said, will be complete with the Capitol Theatre ballroom transformed into a speakeasy.

The other two Pops concerts — all three are sponsored by WVU Medicine — will be “Endless Love” at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 12, 2026, with guest vocalists Chestor Gregory and Shayna Steele singing some of the timeless love songs for the Valentine’s Day holiday, as well as the latest edition of the WSO performing a movie score along with the film itself.

After performing the score for a pair of “Harry Potter” films, the symphony will turn at 2 p.m. April 18, 2026, to another film series with an iconic John Williams score, “Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope.”

Devlin is a huge fan of Williams himself, and can’t wait to lead the WSO from the legendary first note of the “Star Wars” score.

“I imagine that it’s going to feel the same way it would feel if you were in that universe and you press the on button to a lightsaber in your hand for the first time – electricity, just power,” he said. “We think that this is going to be a celebration. We want people to come in costume. We want people to be cheering. We want people to be remembering their childhood.”

The four-concert Masterworks series – each titled after lyrics from “Country Roads” – will once again feature works by American composers, most of them living composers, a mission that Devlin has had since he first arrived in Wheeling. It also will feature collaborations with guest performers from the world of music, guest performers from around the Ohio Valley and even a special guest lighting and art design.

That guest, Doug Fitch, will have his hand in the WSO’s first Masterworks concert, “Painted on the Sky,” set for 7:30 p.m. Oct. 25.

“There are going to be dozens of visual design elements created in the concert hall bespoke to the Capitol Theatre by one of the great geniuses of visual design and direction,” Devlin said.

The Oglebay Institute School of Dance will be integral in the execution of that design, Devlin added. OI’s dancers will perform to choreographed numbers where they will manipulate those 40-foot fabric panels lit throughout the performance.

The second Masterworks concert, “All My Memories” at 2 p.m. Jan. 17, 2026, will feature concert pianist Maxim Lando, a 22-year-old who in 2015, became the first American to win the Nutcracker International Television Contest for Young Musicians in Moscow. The third Masterworks concert, “Her Voice,” is set for 7:30 p.m. March 20, 2026 and will feature vocalist Shara Nova, the lead singer of the band My Brightest Diamond and collaborated with noted artists such as Sufjan Stevens, The Decemberists and David Byrne, founding member of Talking Heads.

That will be the second of two performances Nova will lead that week, Devlin said. The first will be March 17, 2026, at Towngate Theatre, where Nova and a reduced orchestra will perform “Penelope,” a modern-day retelling of “The Odyssey” from Penelope’s perspective.

That pair of concerts is a way Devlin hopes to engage younger people to enjoy the WSO.

“I will be there at that concert conducting, but I’m also going to speak to them about, if you like what you see here … Shara is singing again at the Capitol on Friday night with the orchestra, and we’re going to perform one piece by Tchaikovsky along with that, that I also think you’ll like. Can you give us a try?” Devlin said.

The Masterworks series concludes May 8, 2026, with “Take Me Home,” featuring violinist Tracy Silverman. The season once again will include the community performances that make the WSO unique — the July 4 Celebrate America Tour, the Labor Day Music Under the Stars performance and Symphony on Ice at WesBanco Arena.

“That is a defining feature of how the symphony connects to the community and what makes Wheeling special,” Devlin said, “because we have those gems.”

For more information on the WSO’s 2025-26 season, visit wheelingsymphony.com, contact the WSO office at boxoffice@wheelingsymphony.com or call 304-232-6191.