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The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra will perform with pianist Angela Hewitt at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 5, in the Williams Center for the Arts.
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. Orpheus will conduct an open rehearsal at 6:30 p.m., which will allow students to hear the group’s sound check and observe “the Orpheus process” of performing symphonic music without a conductor.
Other performances in the 2009-10 Chamber Music series will be the Brentano String Quartet, March 31, $18, and another appearance by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with guest violinist Ryu Goto May 3, $29.
Hewitt’s first collaboration with Orpheus showcases her in two works: Bach’s D minor Concerto and a new work by Peter Maxwell Davies, inspired by Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. Also on the program are Igor Stravinsky’s Concerto in D Major (Basel) and Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings.
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 through their own close collaborative efforts, and without a conductor. Orpheus developed its approach to the study and performance of this repertory by incorporating 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.
Ottawa-born Hewitt excels at the music of many composers, but it is with the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach that her genius truly shines. Hailed by The Guardian as “the pre-eminent Bach pianist of our time,” Hewitt has recorded the complete works of Bach on Hyperion, which was praised by The Sunday Times as “one of the record glories of our age.”
The 2009-2010 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 its extraordinary support.