orchestra21

Great news for the WCFSO – we just received word of five-figure grants from the Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa and the Guernsey Charitable Foundation in support of our youth concerts, family programming and Buck-a-Kid outreach effort. Both grants are up significantly over previous years, proof that prioritizing our role as an educational resource for our community can pay dividends even in an uncertain economic climate. A huge thank you to both foundations for helping us pursue our ongoing goal of offering our very best work to young audiences across northern Iowa.

GPOYW Let us take you into the intense, vivid world of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin EDITION

[Roll over the image to hear our breakdown of this remarkable piece and to see me conduct an excerpt from it.]

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know that I try to share feedback from my concerts whenever I can, especially from young people. Below are the responses of one fifth grade class in Waterloo, Iowa to their experience hearing Beethoven 5 at last week’s WCFSO educational concerts:

• That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen
• I love Beethoven now that I heard his music
• The movements go with his feeling
• Some of the most beautiful music ever
• It sounded like it was fake, but it was not
• The music was absolutely unforgettable
• It sounded as if Beethoven was magic
• I will never forget the symphony

To borrow a phrase from one student, these are the most amazing things I’ve heard about my work in a while. And they offer hope that if those of us at orchestras [my fellow music directors in particular] approach opportunities to perform for young people with the same commitment and excitement we reserve for the rest of our concerts there may be a future for our art form after all.

Beethoven – Symphony no. 5, Allegro con brio [opening]
WCFSO – April 2011

This is how we opened yesterday’s WCFSO concerts for nearly four thousand elementary school students. When we stopped I asked our young listeners – many of whom had never been to an orchestra concert – if they recognized Beethoven’s music. Every hand went up.

Classical music, not quite dead yet.

[And for what it’s worth, the kids’ attentiveness during our subsequent performance of this entire movement and the symphony’s three others was on point. Thanks to all of our area teachers for preparing their kids so thoroughly for these performances.]

Spillville, Iowa as it appeared in the summer of 1893, when Antonín Dvořák lived there with his family. Tomorrow I’ll be playing and conducting the composer’s wind serenade with my WCFSO colleagues at St. Wenceslas Church in Spillville [Dvořák accompanied Mass on its pipe organ almost daily during his stay]. Prior to our evening performance of the serenade we will introduce students from around the region to the history and significance of Dvořák’s Iowa sojourn, following up on a project we initiated several years ago.