A music director's last programme note. The Windsor Symphony gives 400 tickets to the cancer centre staff who treated Robert Franz, in the season that will choose his successor.

On the morning of 2 September 2026, one year to the day after its music director died, the Windsor Symphony Orchestra walked into the lobby of the Windsor Regional Cancer Centre and handed out ticket vouchers. Every member of staff at Windsor Regional Hospital's Cancer Program, roughly 200 people, gets two seats to the 2026–27 season. That is about 400 tickets, and it was not the orchestra's idea. It was Robert Franz's, and he raised it so often in his last summer that the executive director eventually told him to stop worrying about it.

Franz was the WSO's sixth music director. Appointed in February 2013 and on the podium from that September, he led the orchestra for twelve seasons. He was first diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in October 2021, was in remission for two and a half years, and saw the cancer return at the start of 2025. A stem cell transplant using his own harvested cells did not hold. He kept working on the 2026–27 season until 31 August 2025 and died two days later, aged 57. (AM800 gives the date as 3 September; the funeral-home obituary, the orchestra and the Windsor Star all give 2 September, and the orchestra marked the anniversary on the 2nd.)

The gift is a kind of last programme note. The season that opens on 26 September was, by his husband's account and the orchestra's, programmed by Franz. The people who will hear it for free treated him. Eight of the season's concert weekends will be conducted by the four finalists to replace him.

The document

The orchestra's own numbers put 400 tickets in proportion.

What was said

AM800's Rusty Thomson was in the lobby at the Met Campus. Patti Lauzon, the WSO's executive director, on why the orchestra was there:

"He talked to me about this probably 12 times, in fact, so many times, I said, 'Don't worry about it. We're going to do it.' It was his wish that he would be the one gifting the tickets. It just didn't work out that way, so we're here doing this in honour of him."

Brandon Atkins, Franz's husband, said the centre had given Robert care and compassion that was above and beyond.

"I think that it's just a realization of a goal that he had that he didn't get to see to fruition. It's a beautiful gift that the WSO has done on his behalf, knowing it was part of his dying wish that the individuals here would be able to get a small thank you and gesture for the work they had done and carried for him at the end of his life."

Then, on what the audience will get this season:

"His particular venue of compassion and joy was bringing music to people; I think it's impactful. Even this season this year, he did all the programming for the last season and this season. People coming to the symphony will still get a piece of Robert in the music that was shared because he wanted to make sure he gave our community the best, and the best is that music and the love he had for it."

The WSO's own release has Lauzon adding that Franz "wanted to come to the hospital and give tickets to the team here. He spoke about it many times last summer." The Windsor Star's Trevor Wilhelm reported dozens of people in the lobby, speeches from Mayor Drew Dilkens and the hospital foundation's Cristina Naccarato, and that Atkins and Franz had been married for nearly eleven years.

One detail on the orchestra's memorial page makes the gift less surprising. Deborah Severs, then the board president, recalled that between his own rounds of treatment Franz volunteered at the same cancer centre, greeting patients, delivering files and sitting with people going through what he had. He was not, in other words, thanking strangers.

The second half is ours

Start with the house. The WSO plays its mainstage concerts in the Pentastar Theatre at the Capitol, which the theatre's technical sheet puts at 620 fixed seats, 500 on the main floor and 120 in the balcony. Four hundred tickets is just under two-thirds of one full house. Spread across a season that last year ran to 45 mainstage performances, it is fewer than nine seats a night, a number a box office can absorb without much notice.

Face value is easy to state and the orchestra has not stated it publicly, so we will. Mainstage single tickets are $69, $57 and $47 for Sections A, B and C, so 400 of them are worth between $18,800 and $27,600 depending on where the vouchers land. It is a five-figure gift from an orchestra that counted 18,619 attendances at its events last season.

The year-ago view is the more interesting one. The 2024–25 Impact Report, the last full season Franz conducted, lists 4,000 complimentary tickets and vouchers given to community partners, a list that runs from the Canadian Mental Health Association and Ronald McDonald House to the Hospice of Windsor and Essex County and the Kidney Foundation. Four hundred more is a tenth on top of a programme that already existed. What is new is not the giving. It is that the music director named the recipients himself, and the organisation did it after he was gone, on the anniversary, with the mayor in the room.

The recipients are a real workforce. Windsor Regional Hospital's cancer pages list 16 medical oncologists, 8 radiation oncologists, 3 palliative care physicians and 4 nurse practitioners on the programme's team, and the WSO's release says the programme handles more than 90,000 patient visits a year.

The nearest Canadian comparison is a different shape. Toronto's Canadian Opera Company has run a free concert series for twenty seasons (236,000 people, nothing charged): open doors rather than named recipients. Windsor's is small, closed and personal, which is why it reads as a bequest rather than an access programme.

Now the tenure figures, because the gift is being read as a coda to them. The WSO's memorial page says the endowment grew from under $750,000 to $5 million during Franz's years. In March 2020, on the first Saturday of the pandemic, the orchestra streamed its concert online rather than cancel it, and says it was the first orchestra in Canada to do so. Its school programmes went digital the same year and, by the orchestra's account, reach over 68,000 students in 16 school boards across North America; last season it gave 27 education concerts and reached 19,000 students. Three weeks after his death the city opened Park In Perfect Harmony, the downtown garage he had proposed, its floors named for Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky with WSO recordings at the lifts, and Mayor Dilkens named the top floor after him.

The search that frames the season

The WSO has done this before. Its history page says the 2012 search that found Franz drew 153 candidates from 28 countries and was cut to eight finalists, each leading a weekend of concerts. The memorial page adds a detail from Barb Kuker, board president at the time: the committee had the field down to ten and was worried, until former music director John Morris Russell told her to wait for the last name on the list.

This time the posting went out in December 2025 and closed on 15 February 2026. A 14-member committee chaired by Deborah Severs, the past board chair, took over 120 applications; Severs told AM800 in February that 20 per cent were Canadian and 15 per cent were women. The shortlist was 13, interviewed on Zoom by a sub-committee, and four names were announced on 17 June 2026. Lauzon had said in October 2025 that the process would take 12 to 18 months; the June release said a full season. The aim, as AM800 reported it in February, is a successor in place for 2027–28, which the orchestra counts as its 80th birthday.

The four, from the WSO's search page:

Cosette Justo Valdés, Cuban-born, most recently Artistic and Music Director of the Vancouver Island Symphony. She opens the season, Opening Weekend: From Paris to Madrid, 26 and 27 September, and returns for From Dawn to Dusk on 22 and 23 April 2027.

Andrew Crust, whose Canadian guest list runs from the National Arts Centre Orchestra and l'Orchestre Métropolitain to Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and Saskatoon. He conducts Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto with Charles Richard-Hamelin on 14 and 15 November, and Classical Prodigies on 18 and 19 February 2027.

Benoît Gauthier, winner of the Canada Council's Jean-Marie Beaudet Award in Orchestral Conducting in 2024 and on CBC's 2025 list of 30 Classical Musicians Under 30 to Watch. A Night in Vienna, 13 and 14 February 2027, then Symphonie fantastique on 8 and 9 May, the season's last Masterworks weekend.

Carolyn Watson, Australian, based in the United States since 2013, Principal Guest Conductor of the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra and Music Director of the La Porte County Symphony in Indiana. Global Dances on 11 and 12 March 2027 and The Music of Harry Potter on 17 and 18 April.

The two-concert structure reads as a test design. Masterworks and Pops weekends play the full Pentastar, Saturdays at 7.30 and Sundays at 2.30. The OnStage and Café concerts, Thursday evening and Friday at 11 in the morning, seat the audience on the stripped stage with the players around them, cocktail or coffee included in the $55 ticket. Audiences are surveyed after each concert, and the candidates spend their week meeting musicians, staff, donors and the youth and community orchestras. A Final Four package, one concert per finalist in Section B, is on sale at up to 20 per cent off.

What the job pays is not public. The WSO's careers page reads "There are no current job postings at this time", the closed posting is not archived on the site, and no salary appears in any report we found. A search of Cadenza's listings for "Windsor", including expired notices, returns nothing, so the vacancy was not carried here. The mechanics will be familiar from this month's ledger: a public call, a stakeholder committee, a season of trial concerts, a board vote.

If you go

Capitol Theatre, 121 University Avenue West, Windsor, unless noted. Masterworks and Pops: Saturdays 7.30pm, Sundays 2.30pm, $69 / $57 / $47 regular, $35 / $30 / $15 student, $15 youth. OnStage: Thursdays 7.30pm, $55. Café: Fridays 11am, $55. Box office 519-973-1238.

• 26–27 September 2026: Opening Weekend, From Paris to Madrid. Cosette Justo Valdés; Graham Lord, clarinet, in Copland's Clarinet Concerto.
• 14–15 November 2026: Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 3. Andrew Crust; Charles Richard-Hamelin, piano.
• 13–14 February 2027: A Night in Vienna. Benoît Gauthier.
• 18–19 February 2027: Classical Prodigies, OnStage and Café. Andrew Crust.
• 11–12 March 2027: Global Dances, OnStage and Café. Carolyn Watson.
• 17–18 April 2027: The Music of Harry Potter. Carolyn Watson.
• 22–23 April 2027: From Dawn to Dusk, OnStage and Café. Cosette Justo Valdés.
• 8–9 May 2027: Symphonie fantastique. Benoît Gauthier.

Not part of the search: Handel's Messiah at Assumption Church on 3 December and in Leamington on 4 December, $45.

The last time the WSO chose a music director, he was the last name on a shortlist of ten. This time there are four, the audience is on the jury, and 200 people who spent last year treating the previous music director have two seats each to watch it happen. The orchestra wants the answer before its 80th birthday season. The question the season will settle is the one that matters to anyone holding a voucher: which of the four will be on the podium when they come back next year?

Sources: AM800 CKLW, 2 September 2026; Windsor Symphony Orchestra media release, 2 September 2026; Windsor Star, 3 September 2026; Slipped Disc, 4 September 2026; WSO, Remembering Maestro Robert Franz; WSO, Music Director Search: Final Four; WSO release, 17 June 2026; WSO History; WSO Impact Report 2024–25 (PDF); WSO ticket pricing; WSO concert packages; WSO careers; Capitol Theatre technical specifications, archived copy; Capitol Theatre history, archived copy; CBC Windsor, 17 June 2026; CBC Windsor, 3 September 2025; AM800 CKLW, 20 February 2026; AM800 CKLW, 28 October 2025; Windsor News Today, 2 May 2026; Windsor Regional Hospital Cancer Program; Cadenza listings API, query Windsor.

Cover photograph: The entrance of the Capitol Theatre, Windsor, Ontario, at night, June 2025. Chris Woodrich (Crisco 1492), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.