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The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra will perform with violinist Ryu Goto 8 p.m. Monday, May 3, in the Williams Center for the Arts. A pre-performance rehearsal starting at 6:15 p.m. is free and open to the public. This will be the final concert in the 2009-10 Williams Center Performance Series.
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 program will include Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 and Max Bruch’s soulful Violin Concerto. Bruch’s piece will feature the Japanese-American prodigy Goto. Following in the footsteps of Yo-Yo Ma, the 21-year old cultivates an active performance career while studying as a Harvard undergraduate. In Japan, he is revered for the many recordings and recitals he did as a teenager, and Orpheus offers him the platform to showcase the wondrous ease of his playing, at once lyrical and loaded with drama.
The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1972 by cellist Julian Fifer and a group of fellow musicians who aspired to perform chamber orchestra repertory through their own close collaborative efforts, 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.
WDIY 88.1 FM, Lehigh Valley Community Public Radio, is a media partner for this concert.
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.