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Chamber Music series performance is part of the Williams Center for the Arts’ 25th anniversary season
The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra will perform with award-winning violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg at 8 p.m. Monday, March 23 in the Williams Center for the Arts.
This Chamber Music series performance is part of the Williams Center’s 25th anniversary season. Orpheus will also perform an open rehearsal from 6:30-7:15 p.m.
Tickets are free for Lafayette students, $6 for students at LVAIC schools, $4 for faculty and staff, and $29 for the public. They can be obtained by calling the Williams Center box office at (610) 330-5009. The remaining performance in the Chamber Music series is another appearance by Orpheus with special guest soprano Susan Graham on May 9 for $29.
Coordinated with this concert is the The Sense of Sound exhibit running March 22-May 10 in the Williams Center Gallery. The exhibit is comprised of master photographer Larry Fink’s work shadowing Orpheus musicians over the last 18 months.
The program features Salerno-Sonnenberg in Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. The rest of the program includes Haydn’s Symphony No. 6 (Le Matin), Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, and Little Moonhead, a new Orpheus commission from American composer Melanie Wagner
At the age of 20, Salerno-Sonnenberg became the youngest winner in the Walter W. Naumburg International Violin Competition in 1981. She has been honored with an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1983 and the Avery Fisher Prize for “outstanding achievement and excellence in music” in 1991. She has performed at locations across the globe and has more than a dozen recordings. She was a frequent guest on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, has been featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes news program, and has appeared in numerous PBS and BBC productions.
The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra 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.
Orpheus has received numerous distinctions and awards, including a 2001 Grammy Award for Shadow Dances: Stravinsky Miniatures, a 1999 Grammy Award for its jazz-inspired Ravel and Gershwin collaboration with Herbie Hancock, a 1998 Grammy nomination for its recording of Mozart piano concerti with Richard Goode, and the 1998 “Ensemble of the Year” award by Musical America.
The 2008–2009 Performance Series at Lafayette College is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, the J. Mahlon and Grace Buck Fund, the Croasdale Fund, the Class of ’73 Fund, 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, the Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and New England Foundation for the Arts. Special thanks to the F.M. Kirby Foundation for extraordinary support of the 25th anniversary season, and to Joan Moran and the Amaranth Foundation for support of the Ravi Shankar commission.