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Bringing together brand new staff members, new trustees, long-standing staff and trustees, and musicians!

It was a great summer for Orpheus and nothing short of uneventful! A picnic was the perfect bookend to the close of summer and to the beginning of an exciting new season.

There were a few slight worries about the meteorologists’ forecast for Saturday’s storm coming a day early, but the weather was perfect!

There was a tad too much food left over, so…we’ll need more empty stomachs next year! Violist Nardo Poy made an unforgettable hummus. There was also some very tasty fried chicken from Director of Operations, Ryun Schienbein. Do I foresee a possible Orpheus cook-off or eating competition next summer?!? I’ll bring the TUMS!

-Da Ping Luo, Executive Assistant and Staff Secretary to the Board

Orpheus is pleased to announce its…

2008-2009 CARNEGIE HALL SERIES:
“INSPIRED INVENTION”

Thursday, October 16th, 2008
with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Piano

HAYDN: Symphony No. 59 “Fire”
PAUL MORAVEC: Brandenburg Gate*
IBERT: Hommage à Mozart
SAINT-SAËNS: Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor

Saturday, December 6th, 2008
with Jonathan Biss, Piano

HAYDN: Overture to L’infedeltà delusa
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major
IVES: The Unanswered Question
ELLIOT CARTER: Symphony No. 1 (100th Birthday celebration)

Saturday, January 31st, 2009
with Anoushka Shankar, Sitar

MOZART: Incidental Music from Thamos, King of Egypt
RAVI SHANKAR: Concerto for Sitar & Orchestra (World Premiere, Orpheus Commission)
KODÁLY: Summer Evening
HAYDN: Symphony No. 99 in E-flat

Saturday, March 21st, 2009
with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Violin

HAYDN: Symphony No. 6 (Le Matin)
PIAZZOLLA : Four Seasons of Buenos Aires for violin & orchestra
MELINDA WAGNER: New Work*
BRAHMS: Variations on a Theme by Haydn

Monday, May 11th, 2009
with Susan Graham, Mezzo-soprano

HAYDN: Symphony No. 26 in D minor (Lamentatione)
NED ROREM: Songs (New orchestrations by Rorem & new songs)
RAVEL: Pavane pour une infante défunte
STRAVINSKY: Danses Concertantes

*World Premiere, Commissioned by Orpheus as part of The New Brandenburgs

June 4, 2008: Seoul 

It took us five hours to travel from Seoul to Busan, so we are looking at about a five-hour journey back to Seoul. To add a level of suspense to our journey, Maya Gunji, Orpheus’ timpanist, decided she would offer the orchestra a chance to guess the exact time of our journey, for the price of 1,000 Korean won per estimate. This was a winner-take-all opportunity. The whole orchestra participated, leaving a pot of nearly 40,000 won (approximately $40) for the winner. Maya was extremely clear about the timing rules: it was the “rolling time” - from wheels up at the hotel to wheels down at the other hotel - and would include all wrong-turns, rest stops, etc. Anticipation was thick in the air. Who would win? How would the winnings be spent? Did Ryun Schienbein, Director of Operations, and Zev Greenfield, General Manager, have insider information? Would Priscilla Lee, the only Korean in the orchestra on this tour, use “home court advantage” to walk away smiling? She had won the previous day’s wager.

And so, the clock began at 9:02am as we departed Ulsan for Seoul. A word about Ulsan - this is Hyundai town. Hyundai owns Ulsan. The Hyundai cars that most of us would know the company for is merely a part of a vast array of businesses and industries under the Hyundai umbrella. Everywhere you turn in Ulsan, you are reminded who signs your paycheck. We stayed at the Hyundai Hotel. Played in Hyundai Hall. And shopped in Hyundai Department Store. And for those of us up at 7am, you could watch the wave of like-uniformed workers arriving to build ships at the Hyundai ship yard. According to Mrs. Chang (Sarah’s mother), it holds many records for size and advanced technology.

The concert at Ulsan was good, although the hall not one of the great acoustics in the world. However, a huge reception and ovation greeted the orchestra, and for those not able to hear the concert in the hall, you could sit outside in Hyundai plaza and listen via a closed-circuit tannoy. As I left the concert a little early to join a conference call with members of the Orpheus Board of Trustees, I enjoyed the Tchaikovsky “Serenade” along my journey.

As we arrived in the outskirts of Seoul, many of us saw victory slip through our fingers as our estimated arrival times were defeated by the midday Seoul traffic. The suspense mounted as we got very close to the hotel, as by then, every minute counted. As we pulled into the hotel, Maya’s announcement was eagerly awaited. Victory was secured by Artistic Director, Eric Wyrick, who promptly ran a victory lap around the parking lot.

The concert at Seoul Arts Center was the jewel in the schedule thus far. The hall is an acoustic gem and the performance was recorded to be televised for later broadcast on one of the largest Korean TV networks. This concert was also the focus for MetLife, our very generous sponsor, with a pre-concert reception, open rehearsal, and three hundred guests for the performance. Quite a busy night for all of us. I thought that it was somewhat like pulling off a Carnegie Hall performance, but with just three members of staff instead of our usual complement. Not something to be done on a regular basis!

The concert was an incredible success - the orchestra really used the great acoustics to produce intensely nuanced phrasing and shaping for the Mozart and broad range of color for the Tower. Sarah Chang also found new depth in the Bruch and fired up her tempos in her encore, “Zigeurnerweisen” by Sarasate.

-Graham Parker, Executive Director

Tuesday, June 2, 2008: Bulsan

“Best of Best”. A wonderful grammatically awkward phrase used on the concert poster by the promoter in Busan to describe the combination of Orpheus and Sarah Chang performing together. Grammatically awkward, perhaps, but certainly not musically. This really was the “Best of the Best”.

After a full day of rehearsal in Seoul on Sunday, the orchestra left the comforts of Seoul to begin exploring the delights of the southern tip of the penisula with visits to Busan and Ulsan.

Our long-ish bus trip from Seoul to Busan, scheduled to be about 3-4 hours, turned into a nearly five hour trip after unscheduled stops by our small-bladdered bus drivers. However, the rest stops gave us all a chance to explore Korean highway snack food: fish cakes on sticks, roasted potatoes with sugar, spicy rice cake stew. Also, our stops brought us together with over five hundred Korean middle-school students, who must have been on a class trip. If you were going in the wrong direction, against the flow of student traffic, it was best to stand still and wait for the tide to pass! As we were trying to leave, a couple of students boldly came over to practice their English, while giggling and taking pictures. Our musicians gladly obliged with idle banter and posed for Kodak moments.

We finally pulled into the hotel, with barely 90 minutes standing between our arrival and departure for the concert. This was becoming quite an exhausting day, and it was only 2pm!

As the orchestra started a full rehearsal before the 8pm concert, I met the president of the Busan Concert Hall. A thoroughly pleasant meeting began, with the usual small talk and enthusiasm about the upcoming concert exchanged. A very special guest was attending the concert that evening, Mr. Roh, the most recent former President of Korea. A resident of Busan, he and his wife were great classical music fans and were especially excited to hear Sarah Chang with Orpheus.

Towards the end of the meeting with the ‘other’ president (of the hall), I was handed a concert program. While I flipped through, I noticed that the concert was listed to begin at 7:30pm. We had the concert on our schedule at 8pm; the rehearsal was not scheduled to finish until 7:15pm, and we had a lot of hungry musicians to feed between the rehearsal and concert. I looked at the production manager from our Korean management company, also acting as translator - we needed to deal with this problem quickly. If there was an error, we needed to cut the orchestra’s rehearsal early by 25 minutes, and there was a lot of repertoire to re-warm since last it last it was rehearsed in New York.

We found Ryun Schienbein, Orpheus’ Director of Operations, backstage and confirmed the discrepancy in the schedule. As only Ryun can, he diplomatically broke the news to Jonathan Spitz, our rehearsal coordinator. The orchestra was notified and the problem solved. Less time for all pieces, and one of the encores would not be rehearsed (more on this later)!

The concert was just tremendous, with both the orchestra’s arrival on stage and Sarah’s subsequent appearance greeted by loud applause and cheering. At intermission, Sarah, Ronnie Bauch, Orpheus’ Managing Director and member violinist, and I were ushered past numerous security guards and press to meet President Roh for a terrifically formal exchange of pleasantries.

The orchestra played a truly incredible second half of the concert - Joan Tower’s “Chamber Dance” received a warm response, and Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony in D Major, a knock-out punch! The audience screamed for more, as the orchestra came on and off the stage for multiple bows. The Bartok “Romanian Dances” was the first encore, but the crowd simply wanted more. So, the winds left the stage, allowing the second encore to be played - the Waltz from Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings”. If you remember, this piece had not been rehearsed at all! Thank goodness for the fearless Orpheus musicians and a collective musical memory of this work. Eriko Sato sat in the concertmaster chair and led the work seemingly effortlessly. After more ovations, the orchestra left the stage for the final time. Perhaps next time, we should pack more encores!

On to Ulsan…

-Graham Parker, Executive Director

On May 29th, thirty-six musicians and three administrative staff packed their bags and their instrument flight cases and headed to John F. Kennedy International Airport, to board the Japan Airlines flight that would launch a two-week trip to Japan and Korea, including eight concerts in eight cities.

This is the second consecutive year that Orpheus has traveled to Asia with violinist Sarah Chang, and expectations are high. This time, Ms. Chang will front the orchestra for the performances in Korea, and Mr. Ryu Goto, younger brother of violinist Midori, and rising violin super-star in his own right, will be the soloist for the performances in Japan.

Although this is only Orpheus’ second trip to Korea, the orchestra has been returning to Japan for over twenty years!

We have included the tour programs and the tour itinerary here, but you may also be interested in what the orchestra is doing OTHER than playing concerts! Here are a few non-performance items from the schedule:

May 31 (Seoul), FREE DAY for the orchestra, but not for Executive Director Graham Parker, who is meeting with officials and local dignitaries, shoring up logistics and finally making the acqaintances of people he has been corresponding with via phone and email for nearly a year!

June 2 (en route from Seoul to Busan) On the bus! On the tour bus with Orpheus, you will find people sleeping, reading, listening to music, stretching, and resting. These firebrands in the concert hall rest hard so they can play hard.

June 3 (Ulsan) 6:30-7:15, Audio Visual Adjustment and Dinner! It’s important to take time to make sure of the acoustics and the lighting in each new space, and also to be well-fed before the concert.

In the words of Director of Operations Ryun Scheinbein, “Korea makes us hungry.”

The Hyundai Arts Center takes the typical “turn off your cell phone” announcement to a new level…

June 6 (Nagano) 9:30pm, arrival in Japan. The hotel promises to have a buffet dinner available after check-in. Did we mention that meals on tour are of vital interest to the orchestra?
 
June 9 (Nagoya) FREE DAY! What is the point of being in a famous chamber orchestra and touring the world if you don’t have time to head out and see the sights? Ryun has reminded the orchestra to keep everything they will need until the next day in an overnight bag, because their luggage is being sent ahead to Osaka!
 
June 12 (Tokyo): Back on the plane for the flight back home, to greet happy family members, pets, friends, and familiar places left behind (for example, the Orpheus offices in Riverside Church, which have undergone a dramatic change in the orchestra’s absense, due to on-going construction on the building. Take a look next time you are driving down the West Side Highway, just past Grant’s Tomb. We are encased in scaffolding!) The flight leaves at Tokyo at 9:45am, and arrives in New York at 11:00am. How about that? 

Orpheus Tour of South Korea
with Sarah Chang, violin

Mozart - Ballet Music from “Idomeneo” - Movements 1 and 2
Bruch - Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26, with Sarah Chang
Joan Tower - “Chamber Dance”
Mozart - Symphony No. 35 in D Major “Haffner”

June 2, 2008 - Busan, South Korea (Gimhae Arts Center)
June 3, 2008 - Ulsan, South Korea (Hyundai Arts Center)
June 4, 2008 - Seoul, South Korea (Seoul Arts Center)
June 5, 2008 - Ilsan, South Korea (Goyang Art Center)

Orpheus Tour of Japan
with Ryu Goto, violin

Mozart - Symphony No. 35 in D Major “Haffner”
Joan Tower - “Chamber Dance”
Vivaldi - “The Four Seasons”, with Ryu Goto

June 7, 2008 - Matsumoto, Japan (Bunka Kaikan)
June 8, 2008 - Nagoya, Japan (Aichi Prefectual Art Theater)
June 10, 2008 - Osaka, Japan (Symphony Hall)
June 11, 2008 - Tokyo, Japan (Suntory Hall)

Feb. 4, 2008

Another Orpheus tour, another set of adventures!

We just finished a U.S. tour of 5 concerts in 6 days, along with one unplanned appearance at…. Chicago’s O’Hare airport!

After successful concerts in Selinsgrove, PA, Buffalo, NY (where we almost didn’t make the concert due to blizzard conditions) and Omaha, NE, we were looking forward to Friday, our single non-concert day of the week. The winds left on an early flight Fri. morning from Omaha back to New York, while the string section stayed behind to give a process demonstration and caught a later flight. What was originally a one-hour layover in Chicago turned into almost six hours, due to freezing rain in New York. So we sat, and ate. And sat some more. At one point, cellist Susannah Chapman took her instrument out briefly to check on it, and it reminded me of the time I was stuck in the very same airport years ago, and played for a couple hours right there in the terminal (I have made somewhat of a habit of playing in airports). I mentioned this to some of the Orpheus members around me, and we decided that if we were there in another two hours, we would play.

So, time continued to drag on, and when a United employee announced for the umpteenth time that our departure time was pushed back another hour, we hopped out of our seats, got out our instruments, and serenaded our fellow disgruntled travelers. Literally, that is, with the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings! I think I can speak for everyone in the orchestra when I say it was the highlight of our day, and judging by the number of thank-you’s we received (even at 11:30 PM when we finally arrived at LaGuardia), we made the day better for a whole lot of people.

We all walked away from that experience with goofy grins on our faces. Ah, the power of music in unlikely places.

-Sarah Kapustin, Orpheus guest violinist

It was in the newly renovated Kresge Auditorium of DePauw University that I first experienced Orpheus. As an undergrad sophomore viola performance major, I was intrigued by the idea of a “conductorless” orchestra and the implications that came with it. When the musicians began to play, I was in absolute awe at the teamwork that was taking place on stage and the important role that each of the players possessed. Little did I know that in roughly two months, I would be working for the office of Orpheus as an intern.

I came to Orpheus for only three weeks for the term at DePauw known as Winter Term. On this trip were several other DePauw students working in various arts organizations around New York City. In my short time at Orpheus, I worked a week each for the Development, Marketing, and Operations departments.

Whether I was working with Jessica in Development, Beth and AJ in Marketing, or Aaron and Ryun in Operations, I learned many valuable things in relation to the arts administration world. I had never really known about any of this before—I am now a big advocate for the promotion of arts admin education at any music school!

My experience in the office was not completely unlike what I had observed in the performance at DePauw. Each person in the office plays a vital role in the management system, much like the orchestra. Every person is equally important, though his or her specific job title may be different. As an intern, I was told multiple times that my opinion was valuable – this made me feel comfortable and at home in the office, and now that I am back at school, I truly miss the Orpheus environment!

The friendliness of the staff was unsurpassed, and I am so lucky to have had the experience. I can only hope to educate my fellow students at DePauw about Orpheus the orchestra as well as Orpheus the staff. It all works together as a uniquely crafted machine and I am so glad to have taken a very small part in it!

~Kelly Houpt, DePauw University Class of 2010

Matthew Dine, serenading the newest addition to his family (and Orpheus recruit!).

My Orpheus experience was spectacular. 

These incredible musicians, so dedicated and full of energy, welcomed me with open arms.  We rolled up our sleeves and proceeded to tackle repertoire that-without a conductor-gave me pause!  Schoenberg, Opus 9, is an Orpheus ‘chestnut’, but Brahm’s 1st Piano Concerto?  How could we co-ordinate so many musicians without a guy with a stick?  Well, no worries!  These folks are so in-tune with each other, so devoted to making music that it was marvelous.  A nod from cello, a nudge from clarinet and we were together! 

Sherry Sylar on-stage at DePauw University

I came away from those 2 weeks feeling a great sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.  I came away knowing I had 40 new and wonderful friends!

 - Sherry Sylar, Associate Principal Oboe, New York Philharmonic

Though Orpheus recently launched its season with several concert tours and our opening night concert at Carnegie Hall, we had a few events around New York City to keep us busy alongside getting ready for our first concert.

Season Preview

A few seasons ago, Orpheus began hosting “season previews” that give our subscribers and donors a sneak peek at the season.

Our most recent one took place at the Museum of the City of New York last month, and was hosted by Executive Director Graham Parker and Managing Director (and violinist) Ronnie Bauch, with Orpheus musicians Stewart Rose, Richard Rood, Eric Wyrick, Maureen Gallagher, and Jonathan Spitz along with guest pianist Margaret Kampmeier.  Pianist Jonathan Biss was also on hand performing an excerpt from a Beethoven Sonata, and Christopher Theofanidis joined us to chat about his upcoming commission, titled Muse.

Richard Rood, Eric Wyrick, Maureen Gallagher and Jonathan Spitz perform an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s First String Quartet

Jonathan Biss warms up before the Season Preview

Young Orpheus

Orpheus opened the fall social season with a wine tasting and soiree concert at a restaurant in Manhattan’s meatpacking district.  Orpheus musicians Alan Kay and Liz Mann were joined by Angela Cordell, Alexandra Knoll, and Damian Primis, performing a pairing of works with wine specially selected (and generously donated) by 56 Degree Wines based in Lawrenceville, NJ.

The wine tasting was the season kickoff party for Young Orpheus, the young patrons group of the orchestra. Members enjoy parties and events like this throughout the year, as well as  tickets to concerts and champagne receptions at Carnegie Hall.

More photos from the event are on NewYorkSocialDiary.com

Young Orpheus was also recently featured in the October issue of Quest magazine.

Fima For Food Bank

Orpheus partnered with Yefim Bronfman and the Food Bank For New York City during the Food Bank’s “Go Orange” campaign, an effort to raise awareness about hunger throughout the city.   The Food Bank is an organization that provides food for over a million New Yorkers per year. Throughout the week, the Empire State Building, the Lincoln Center fountain, and other public spaces were lit up orange.

On Wednesday October 17, Yefim Bronfman donned an orange suit for the cause and performed a free concert at Grand Central terminal to launch the official start of an online auction that benefited the Food Bank For New York. The winner of the auction, affectionately know as “Fima For Food Bank,” will receive a private concert in their home.  What’s more, after the auction, the winner will get to keep the piano, donated by Steinway, in their home for six months.

The Grand Central Terminal event

During our Carnegie Hall concert on October 23,  many of the Orpheus musicians, in support of the cause and Fima, wore Orange pins.

CultureFest

Orpheus was represented for the first time at CultureFest NYC 2007, a FREE, two-day arts festival at Battery Park in lower Manhattan.

Orpheus musicians Ronnie Bauch, LP How, Christof Huebner, Alan Kay, Stewart Rose, Eric Wyrick and Orpheus staff greeted visitors at our booth both days.

A couple of photos from the event:

Beth Holmgren, our Marketing and Development associate, chats to the newest Young Orpheus members