From Drake to the suburbs: How TSO's CEO is growing the audience for classical music in Toronto and beyond - Toronto Star

Since joining three years ago, Mark Williams has pushed the Toronto Symphony Orchestra well beyond the walls of Roy Thomson Hall.

“The trope about (the Toronto Symphony Orchestra) being for certain people from certain places that look a certain way is not true,” says Mark Williams. “If you like music, there is a place for you here.”

Since joining The Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) in 2022, CEO Mark Williams says the institution has been meeting Torontonians where they are — literally.

Whether through collaborations with Drake or the Blue Jays, performances in suburbs, live film scores or showcases from international artists, the TSO’s reach now stretches well beyond the downtown doors of Roy Thomson Hall.

“If you want to be Toronto’s Symphony Orchestra — which is not just an orchestra that happens to be in Toronto, but an orchestra that can only be in Toronto — serving broad and diverse communities needs to be at the core of everything you’re doing,” Williams says.

The strategy appears to be working.

Last year the TSO sold 230,000 tickets, 22 per cent of those to new customers.

Its education programs, meanwhile, served another 35,000 kids. In 2026 the TSO continued its decades-long run of non-pandemic surpluses.

Williams says he always had a passion for music, but couldn’t imagine it as a career when he picked up a clarinet in the fourth grade in Cincinnati, Ohio.

After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Music Williams began managing artists in New York, before joining the San Francisco Symphony in 2009. Three years later he joined one of the world’s most renowned orchestras in Cleveland before getting a call from the TSO in 2021.