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Chamber Music performance is part of the Williams Center for the Arts’ 25th anniversary season
The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra will perform with sitar master Anoushka Shankar at 8 p.m. Jan. 29 in the Williams Center for the Arts. This Chamber Music series performance is part of the Williams Center’s 25th anniversary season.
Tickets are free for Lafayette students, $6 for students at LVAIC schools, $4 for faculty and staff, and $25 for the public. They can be obtained by calling the Williams Center box office at (610) 330-5009.
Remaining performances in the Chamber Music series are two other appearances by Orpheus with special guests Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg on March 23 for $29 and soprano Susan Graham on May 9 for $29.
In a Williams Center 25th anniversary commission, Orpheus and Shankar perform a new Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra by the great Ravi Shankar. The evening also includes Haydn’s Symphony No. 99, incidental music from Mozart’s Thamos, King of Egypt, and Zoltan Kodaly’s tone poem, Summer Music. The Shankar commission was generously supported by funding from Joan Moran and the Amaranth Foundation.
Schooled in the Indian classical music tradition by her father, the legendary Ravi Shankar, Anoushka Shankar had already dazzled thousands with her accomplished musicianship by the time she had reached her teens. Nominated for a Grammy Award in 2003, she has released five albums, with latest being Breathing Under Water in 2007. Shankar has worked with performers such as Sting, George Harrison, and Norah Jones, who is her half-sister.
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.