Mallory Thompson ready for her conducting debut with the Civic Orchestra

After nearly 30 years as director of bands at Northwestern University, Mallory Thompson is enjoying an active retirement. When she’s not traveling the world with her husband, she maintains a robust schedule as a guest conductor and educator, taking advantage of her newfound flexibility to explore a variety of projects.

Among her upcoming engagements, Thompson especially looks forward to two concerts with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago’s wind ensemble at Vernon Hills High School (Feb. 15) and Orchestra Hall (Feb. 16). Although she has collaborated with Civic musicians throughout her career in higher education, these performances mark her conducting debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s ensemble for early-career professionals.

“That is an age and talent profile that I love, because they’re just on the cusp of the big break,” Thompson said in a recent interview. “They’re still honing their skills and building their consistency, but they’re just so close to winning a position. And I love working with them because I want to be a voice of support and encouragement and reminding them of the standard that they want to live up to.”

Thompson’s Civic program includes pieces from the 18th through 21st centuries, many of which she’s known and performed for decades. “It’s a real treat to get to do this wonderful repertoire again at a very high level,” she said. “It’s not only about making music at this level, but it’s about the people and about the potential relationships and interaction.”

Wind-ensemble repertoire offers Civic musicians opportunities to build different skills from those required in a full-orchestra setting. “In many ways, it’s a hybrid of orchestral playing and chamber music,” Thompson said. “One of the big things that they explore is that they’re playing all the time; it’s not carried by the string section. It’s very taxing and mentally demanding to play this repertoire.

“The wind ensemble doesn’t have the masterworks that the orchestral repertoire has — we don’t have as many — but we still have works by master composers and outstanding repertoire in our own right. It’s just that a lot of people don’t know the repertoire,” Thompson said. “But it’s a very entertaining medium, because every piece is vividly in its own sound world.”

Opening with Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (No. 1), an homage to women who “take risks and are adventurous,” Civic’s program continues with Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which was composed as a memorial to Claude Debussy. Two additional pieces are connected by a similar tribute: the finale of Mozart’s Gran Partita and an excerpt from Richard Strauss’ Symphony for Winds in E-flat Major (Happy Workshop). Written late in Strauss’ career, the Happy Workshop draws on a theme from the Gran Partita, and the composer dedicated it “to the spirit of the divine Mozart at the end of a life filled with gratitude.”

The most recent work on the program is Never Forgetting by Henry Dorn, commissioned to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Northshore Concert Band, a community ensemble that Thompson leads as artistic director. Following its premiere at the 79th Midwest Clinic in December 2025, Dorn arranged a new chamber version for Thompson and Civic to perform in Orchestra Hall.  

Intended to evoke a journey from the darkness of night toward a brighter tomorrow, Never Forgetting takes inspiration from a quote by Maya Angelou that Thompson used to display on her office door at Northwestern: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said / People will forget what you did / But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Civic members may take Angelou’s quote to heart during their concert at Vernon Hills High School, where they will perform several works alongside students from the school’s band program. This collaboration marks a full-circle moment for Thompson: one of her former graduate students, Kelley Gossler, now teaches at Vernon Hills High School and will conduct the pieces performed by the combined ensemble.

Based on her early memories as a young trumpeter and her later career in education, Thompson believes that intergenerational collaborations between musicians can be “not only career-making, but potentially life-changing.” She added, “One of the great things about playing music together is that once you’ve done it, you have that in common, and you have some sort of connection.”

Forging meaningful relationships through music has been a throughline of Thompson’s career, and she anticipates a similarly fulfilling experience with Civic. “I’m really looking forward to making music with these wonderful Civic musicians,” she said. “And I hope people will come out for the program, because it’s going to be really fun to listen to.”