The Greenwich Village Orchestra (GVO) is a semi-professional orchestra based in the heart of Greenwich Village. It is made up of volunteer musicians and performs six scheduled concerts per season from September to June. Concerts are usually held in the auditorium of the Washington Irving High School.
The Greenwich Village Orchestra (GVO) has a roster of nearly 60 musicians. The GVO is governed by a board of directors and is run by an all-volunteer staff.
The Greenwich Village Orchestra (GVO) was founded in 1986 by Robert Grehan and a group of musicians from the New York Metropolitan area. Its membership is very diverse with members hailing from all walks of life, geographic locations and cultural backgrounds.
The Orchestra has had three music directors; Robert Grehan (1986–1995), Scott Jackson Wiley (1997–2001) Barbara Yahr (2002-present). The GVO has also enjoyed the musical insights brought by several guest conductors including David Amram, Michael Gilbert, Alejandro Guzman, David Leibowitz, Mark Mandorano, Gregory Ortega, Ki-Sun Sung, Peter Szep, and Sybille Werner.
The GVO has performed a wide repertoire ranging from Bach to Beethoven to Bruckner and beyond. Over its history, the orchestra has commissioned new music, provided composer contests, and performed world premieres such as the 1990 premiere of Bruce Wolosoff's When Fire Flows like Water. In 2005 the GVO was a commission partner with orchestras in all 50 states and performed the New York City premiere of Joan Tower's Made in America.
Other musical highlights include Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (performed in 1992 with the Stonewall Chorale and in 2003 with the chorus Seraphim), and Handel's Messiah. In 2005, the Orchestra performed Copland's Lincoln Portrait, narrated by former Senator Bob Kerrey. The Orchestra pas performed more than 120 concerts over the last 20 years.
The GVO has featured many world acclaimed soloists, including: Stanley Drucker (clarinet), Kenneth Gordon (violin), Robert Langevin (flute), Philip Myers (horn), Sheryl Staples (violin), Colin Jacobsen (violin, first at the age of 12 and then a decade later), Adele Anthony (violin), Edward Arron (cello), Harvey DeSouza (violin), Nancy Goeres (bassoon), Indira Koch (violin), Clancy Newman (cello), Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt (cello), and Carol Yahr (soprano).
Equally notable are the many talented musicians of the GVO that who have been showcased as soloists over the years, such as: Gene Citronbaum (former Principal Trumpet), Gary Dranch (Principal Clarinet), Simon Dratfield (Principal Flute), Gerard Gordon (Marimba and Principal Timpani), Ricardo Cox (former Principal Trumpet), Amy Mendillo (former Principal Oboe), Dan Purgason (English Horn), Warren Wernick (Principal Trumpet), Daryl Nuccio (Principal Cello), Midhat Serbagi (former Principal Viola), and Robin Zeh (former Concertmaster).
As a volunteer community orchestra they put special value in reaching out to their community, audience and neighborhood. In 2005, they performed their first benefit concert for the Performing Arts House at Washington Irving High School, their main venue. This collaboration included active participation from the school's teachers, choral students, dance students and jazz band.
For many years they have performed a family concert each season with the special focus on inspiring, educating and entertaining young audiences. In 2004, through a partnership with Play it by Ear Productions, the GVO reached out to even more school children. The GVO has also instituted an annual Young Artists' Competition and have invited their winners to perform with them for the past few seasons. They have performed summer concerts in Gramercy Park in collaboration with the Gramercy Park Block Association, and in the Summer of 2000 they performed in the Austin J. Tobin Plaza at the World Trade Center.
They also perform every Summer in Union Square Park, at their outdoor concert series sponsored by the Union Square Partnership, bringing symphonic classical music to a greater audience.
References:
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
A musical ensemble, also known as a music group or musical group, is a group of people who perform instrumental and/or vocal music, with the ensemble typically known by a distinct name. Some music ensembles consist solely of instrumentalists, such as the jazz quartet or the orchestra. Other music ensembles consist solely of singers, such as choirs and doo-wop groups. In both popular music and classical music, there are ensembles in which both instrumentalists and singers perform, such as the rock band or the Baroque chamber group for basso continuo and one or more singers. In classical music, trios or quartets either blend the sounds of musical instrument families or group instruments from the same instrument family, such as string ensembles or wind ensembles. Some ensembles blend the sounds of a variety of instrument families, such as the orchestra, which uses a string section, brass instruments, woodwinds, and percussion instruments, or the concert band, which uses brass, woodwinds, and percussion.
An orchestra is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families. There are typically four main sections of instruments:
In music, a cadenza, is, generically, an improvised or written-out ornamental passage played or sung by a soloist(s), usually in a "free" rhythmic style, and often allowing virtuosic display. During this time the accompaniment will rest, or sustain a note or chord. Thus an improvised cadenza is indicated in written notation by a fermata in all parts. A cadenza will usually occur over either the final or penultimate note in a piece, the lead-in, or the final or penultimate note in an important subsection of a piece. A cadenza can also be found before a final coda or ritornello.
A concerto is, from the late Baroque era, mostly understood as an instrumental composition, written for one or more soloists accompanied by an orchestra or other ensemble. The typical three-movement structure, a slow movement preceded and followed by fast movements, became a standard from the early 18th century.
The English Chamber Orchestra (ECO) is a British chamber orchestra based in London. The full orchestra regularly plays concerts at Cadogan Hall, and their ensemble performs at Wigmore Hall. With a limited performance size, the orchestra specializes in 18th-century music and was created to perform Baroque Music. The orchestra regularly tours in the UK and internationally, and holds the distinction of having the most extensive discography of any chamber orchestra and being the most well-traveled orchestra in the world; no other orchestra has played concerts (as of 2013, according to its own publicity) in as many countries as the English Chamber Orchestra.
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s, she had shifted to a postmodernist, neoromantic style. She has been called "one of America's most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers." She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Zwilich has served as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
The Houston Symphony is an American orchestra based in Houston, Texas. The orchestra is resident at the Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts.
Ludwig van Beethoven's Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano in C major, Op. 56, commonly known as the Triple Concerto, was composed in 1803 and published in 1804 by Breitkopf & Härtel. The choice of the three solo instruments effectively makes this a concerto for piano trio, and it is the only concerto Beethoven ever completed for more than one solo instrument, also being the only concerto he wrote for cello. A typical performance takes approximately thirty-seven minutes.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and University Professor of Composition in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, where she is also director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition.
Margaret Brouwer is an American composer and composition teacher. She founded the Blue Streak Ensemble chamber music group.
Liza Lim is an Australian composer. Lim writes concert music as well as music theatre and has collaborated with artists on a number of installation and video projects. Her work reflects her interests in Asian ritual culture, the aesthetics of Aboriginal art and shows the influence of non-Western music performance practice.
The Melos Ensemble is a group of musicians who started in 1950 in London to play chamber music in mixed instrumentation of string instruments, wind instruments and others. Benjamin Britten composed the chamber music for his War Requiem for the Melos Ensemble and conducted the group in the first performance in Coventry.
Rebecca Saunders is a London-born composer who lives and works freelance in Berlin. In a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, Saunders' compositions received the third highest total number of votes (30), surpassed only by the works of Georg Friedrich Haas (49) and Simon Steen-Andersen (35). In 2019, writers of The Guardian ranked Skin (2016) the 16th greatest work of art music since 2000, with Tom Service writing that "Saunders burrows into the interior world of the instruments, and inside the grain of Fraser's voice [...] and finds a revelatory world of heightened feeling."
The Missouri Chamber Music Festival and Adult Chamber Music Intensive (ACMI) was founded in 2010. The goal of the MOCM Festival concerts is to present the fine art of small ensemble music to a wide audience through an accessible, community-based festival. The ACMI workshop is the educational portion of the festival, placing adult instrumentalists in chamber ensembles with Festival artists for coaching and performance.
Juraj Filas was a Slovak composer. His work included more than 100 compositions: symphonies, cantatas, numerous compositions for chamber ensemble, as well as the prize-winning TV opera Memento Mori; a concerto grosso Copernicus; the opera Jane Eyre (2010); The Wisdom of the Wise Man, a cantata for choir, cello and organ; The Song of Solomon, a cantata for soli, choir and orchestra; and the requiem Oratio Spei, which was dedicated to the victims of terrorism.
Orchestral Works by Tomas Svoboda is a classical music album by the Oregon Symphony under the artistic direction of James DePreist, released by the record label Albany in 2003. The album was recorded at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon during three performances in January and June 2000. It contains three works by Tomáš Svoboda, a Czech-American composer who taught at Portland State University for more than 25 years: Overture of the Season, Op. 89; Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra, Op. 148; and Symphony No. 1, Op. 20. The album's executive producers were Peter Kermani, Susan Bush, and Mark B. Rulison; Blanton Alspaugh served as the recording producer.
Darryl Kubian is an American composer, thereminist, violinist, and audio/video engineer. His compositions have been commissioned and performed by North American orchestras, such as the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and Omaha Symphony, and he has written soundtrack scores for the Wildlife Conservation Society, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Pangolin Pictures, NHK, CBS, The Learning Channel, and others. Darryl performs and records as a thereminist, including chamber and solo works by Herb Deutsch, Martinu, and others, and has also been a featured soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia of New York, and the NJ Symphony on theremin. He was the featured theremin soloist for the Lincoln Center Festival production of Danny Elfman's Music from the Films of Tim Burton. Darryl Kubian is a member of the first violin section of the NJ Symphony, and was the principal second violinist of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Indigo Fox Media, Kubian's New Jersey-based audio/video production company, has recorded artists such as the Emerson String Quartet, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, members of the NY Philharmonic, New Jersey Symphony, and the Metropolitan Opera, among many others. He is married to violinist JoAnna Farrer.
The Cello Concerto of Mason Bates is an American concerto for cello and orchestra, dating from 2014. The work was a joint commission by the Seattle Symphony, the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. It received its premiere on December 11, 2014 by the cellist Joshua Roman, former principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony and for whom Bates composed the concerto, and the Seattle Symphony, conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla.
The Rouen Philharmonic Orchestra is a symphony orchestra based in Rouen in Normandy, France. It is housed in the Rouen Opera House.
