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Orpheus Chamber Orchestra will make its third and final visit to Lafayette’s Williams Center for the Arts this season 3 p.m. Sunday, March 26, with a Scottish-themed program featuring Evelyn Glennie as soloist in James MacMillen’s towering masterpiece, Veni, Veni Emmanuel, a tour-de-force percussion concerto created expressly for her gifts as a performer. Tickets for this performance, the annual Croasdale Concert, cost $27 and are extremely limited in number; requests can be made by calling the box office at 610-330-5009.
Glennie’s performance will be preceded by another selection from a Scottish composer, Peter Maxwell-Davies’ An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, and the program will conclude with Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, “The Scottish.” The public is invited to attend an open rehearsal 1-2 p.m. Sunday, March 26.
In conjunction with the performance, Touch the Sound, an award-winning documentary by renowned filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer about Glennie’s unique musicianship, will be shown 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 21, and noon Wednesday, March 22, in the Farinon Center’s Limburg Theater. Both screenings are free with no tickets required.
Glennie gives more than 100 performances a year worldwide and has collaborated with artists such as Nana Vasoncelos, Kodo, Bela Fleck, Bjork, Bobby McFerrin, Sting, Kings Singers, and Fred Frith. She has commissioned more than 130 works for solo percussion from many of the world’s most eminent composers and also composes and records music for film and television. Her first score for a high-quality drama earned a nomination for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award, the UK equivalent of the Oscars. Among her 22 recordings, Glennie’s first CD, Bartok’s Sonata for two Pianos and Percussion, won her a Grammy in 1988. A further two Grammy nominations followed, one of which she won for a collaboration with Fleck.
She is author of a best-selling autobiography, Good Vibrations, and regularly appears on television across the world, having had spots on “Late Show with David Letterman,” “Sesame Street,” and “The South Bank Show” (UK), and presenting and performing on “60 Minutes,” PBS, and the UK’s “Songs of Praise,” “Commonwealth Games Festival Concert,” and “This is Your Life.”
In 1993, Glennie was honored as Officer of the British Empire for her service to music, one of 70 international awards she has received.
Recognized internationally as one of the world’s great chamber orchestras, Orpheus is celebrating its 33rd season. Williams Center audiences enjoy Orpheus’ final polishing of its award-winning recording projects, major international tours, and numerous Carnegie Hall programs. Its Lafayette series has included many guest appearances by musicians later showcased by Orpheus at Carnegie Hall, from countertenor Andreas Scholl and bassist Edgar Meyer to saxophonist Branford Marsalis and violinist Gil Shaham. Local audiences have been treated to musicians unlikely to be heard in other roles: pianists Jeffrey Kahane, Andre Watts, Cecile Licad, and Olli Mustonen; violinists Shaham and Elmar Oliveira; vocalists Scholl, Nathalie Stutzman, Milagro Vargas, and Carmen Pelton; and bassist Meyer.
Orpheus also has received numerous distinctions and awards, including a 2001 Grammy Award for Shadow Dances: Stravinsky Miniatures, three 1999 Grammy Awards for its jazz-inspired Ravel and Gershwin collaboration with Herbie Hancock, the 1998 Grammy nomination for its recording of Mozart piano concertos with Goode, and the 1998 “Ensemble of the Year” award by Musical America.
Orpheus was founded in 1972 by cellist Julian Fifer and a group of fellow musicians who aspired to perform chamber orchestral repertory as chamber music through their own close collaborative efforts, and without a conductor. Orpheus developed its approach to the study and performance of this repertory by bringing to the orchestral setting the chamber music principles of personal involvement and mutual respect. Orpheus is a self-governing organization, making the repertory and interpretive decisions ordinarily assumed by a conductor. Holt/NY Times Books published a book about Orpheus and its management model, Leadership Ensemble: Lessons in Collaborative Management from the World’s Only Conductorless Orchestra, written by former Orpheus executive director Harvey Seifter and business writer Peter Economy.
Members of Orpheus have received recognition for solo, chamber music, and orchestral performances. Of the 18 string and 10 wind players who comprise the basic membership of Orpheus, many also hold teaching positions at prominent conservatories and universities in the New York and New England areas, including Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory, Montclair State University, Mannes College of Music, and Columbia and Yale Universities.
The Orpheus recording legacy consists of nearly 70 albums. Included in the catalogue of over 50 recordings for Deutsche Grammophon are Baroque masterworks of Handel, Corelli, and Vivaldi, Haydn symphonies, Mozart symphonies and serenades, the complete Mozart wind concerti with Orpheus members as soloists, Romantic works by Dvorák, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky, and a number of 20th-century classics by Bartók, Prokofiev, Fauré, Ravel, Schoenberg, Ives, Copland and Stravinsky. Recent collaborations include a recording of English and American folk songs with countertenor Andreas Scholl (Decca); Creation, a jazz-inspired CD of classics from 1920s Paris with saxophonist Branford Marsalis (SONY Classical); and a critically acclaimed series of recordings of Mozart piano concertos with Richard Goode (Nonesuch).
The nationally recognized Performance Series at Lafayette attracts more than 10,000 people each season. It has been cited for performing excellence by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Dance Project, Chamber Music America, Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, Pennsylvania Arts and Humanities Councils, and Association of Performing Arts Presenters.
The 2005–2006 Performance Series is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, the James Bradley Fund, and the Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, the Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and New England Foundation for the Arts.