Orpheus Chamber Orchestra

The famed Orpheus Chamber Orchestra returns with a program featuring a new piece by Billy Childs titled “Each Moment Is a New Discovery.” Critically acclaimed pianist, Garrick Ohlsson, joins Orpheus as a trusted Mozart partner hailed for his “muscular technique and the sensitivity and restraint with which he deploys it (The New York Times).”

Wise musicians understand that the future exists in the past. Just ask the young Brahms, who mined Handel (and Bach and Beethoven) to craft what he later called his “favorite work.” The even younger Mozart melded styles from near and far in his first truly brilliant piano concerto. Composer and six-time Grammy winner Billy Childs infuses classical traditions with his jazz roots in a new work.

Members of Orpheus first performed at the Morris Museum in October 2020 as part of the inaugural Lot of Strings Music Festival. The relationship continued in the spring of 2021, bringing in-person performances back to our outdoor venue. Now Orpheus regularly performs with their full ensemble in the intimacy of the Bickford Theatre to sold-out audiences.

The Program

• Billy Child’s Each Moment Is a New Discovery Commissioned by Orpheus & The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra

• Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major K. 271, Jeunehomme
  Garrick Ohlsson, piano 

• Brahms’ Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24
  orchestrated by Michael Stephen Brown

The Morris Museum thanks Will and Mary Leland, and F. Gary Knapp for their leadership support of this season’s presentations of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

About Garrick Ohlsson (Piano Soloist)

Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. Although long regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire, which ranges over the entire piano literature. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Mr. Ohlsson has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. To date he has at his command more than 80 concertos, ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century, the most recent being “Oceans Apart” by Justin Dello Joio commissioned for him by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and now available on Bridge Recordings. Also just released on Reference Recordings is the complete Beethoven concerti with Sir Donald Runnicles and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra.

About Orpheus

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is a radical experiment in musical democracy, proving for fifty years what happens when exceptional artists gather with total trust in each other and faith in the creative process. Orpheus began in 1972 when cellist Julian Fifer assembled a group of New York freelancers in their early twenties to play orchestral repertoire as if it were chamber music. In that age of co-ops and communes, the idealistic Orpheans snubbed the “corporate” path of symphony orchestras and learned how to play, plan and promote concerts as a true collective, with leadership roles rotating from the very first performance.

It’s one thing for the four players of a string quartet to lean in to the group sound and react spontaneously, but with 20 or 30 musicians together, the complexities and payoffs get magnified exponentially. Within its first decade, Orpheus made Carnegie Hall its home and became a global sensation through its tours of Europe and Asia. Its catalog of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, Nonesuch and other labels grew to include more that 70 albums that still stand as benchmarks of the chamber orchestra repertoire, including Haydn symphonies, Mozart concertos, and twentieth-century gems by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ravel, and Bartók.

Ticket & Visitor Information

For assistance and to make purchases by phone, call the box office at 973-971-3706. The ticket price includes a non-refundable $3.00 service fee. Programs are subject to change.

Photo by Dario Acosta. Orpheus photo by Jack Grassa.