My first experience having student and adult orchestra musicians “mix it up” was as music director of the Elgin Area Youth Orchestra back in the early 90s. Our high school orchestra was invited to share a concert with the local, professional Elgin Symphony Orchestra. For the finale of the program we all performed Tchaikovsky’s Marche […]

On the face of it, a barbershop chorus and a symphony orchestra have very little in common. Generally a barbershop choir concert is centered around a group of songs, but is deliberately infused with movement (some choreographed, some simply the movements that each individual singer creates to fully perform their part), and oftentimes punctuated with […]

One of our great delights as a community orchestra serving the far eastern Twin Cities metro is making the acquaintance of other local performing artists and arts organizations.(1) Thus when long-time orchestra hornist Dwight Erickson introduced me to Elena Pirastro, a local piano teacher who was also an immigrant from Russia, I knew almost immediately […]