Troy Webdell

Troy Webdell conducts youth orchestra concerts and family programs with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic. His upcoming appearances include youth orchestra showcases and story-driven concerts aimed at young and first-time listeners, pairing orchestral classics with newer works written for family audiences.

Webdell's Fort Wayne programs are built around introducing orchestral sound to younger and newer listeners. His youth orchestra concerts mix familiar tunes, like the strutting brass theme from Bizet's Carmen and the folk melody Jasmine Flower, with more substantial repertoire such as Haydn's compact Symphony No. 12 and Xian Xinghai's Yellow River Piano Concerto, a work built from Chinese revolutionary songs with dramatic piano writing. His family concerts lean on narration and illustration, including Bates's Philharmonia Fantastique, which uses animation to show how instruments work, and a Paddington Bear program aimed at very young audiences. A spring concert pairing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake with a newer piece called The Nightingale suggests a taste for pairing old and new work around a single image or story, in this case birds and water.