The RCO Experience
I’d considered starting this entry with a sentence that might well open any entry on this blog: “There’s a lot happening at the Reno Chamber Orchestra these days.” Planning is well underway for our upcoming concerts on November 10 and 11 featuring pianist Meng-Chieh Liu. Also, the schedule is about 98% complete for the Nevada Chamber Music Festival – we’ll be releasing all the details on performers and repertoire soon, so keep an eye on this blog and our website. Design of the Festival brochure has also begun, and that will be hitting the mail in just a few weeks.
Some of you may be familiar with the name Henry Fogel. For the last four years he has been President of the American Symphony Orchestra League – he recently retired from the position, but will be continuing to provide valuable services to the League – after serving on its Board of Trustees for over a decade. He has also been the very successful Director of the Chicago Symphony, the National Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic. His resume goes well beyond that, and you can read more here. I got to know of him not through any of these activities, but through his writing about music and recordings for Fanfare Magazine, one of my most trusted music information sources for the last twenty-plus years. Fogel’s own record collection is voluminous, and his writings on music always insightful.
In the most recent entry in his blog, Mr. Fogel takes on a subject that is near to our hearts here in the RCO office, the impact, the relevance – the “meaning,” if you prefer to use that term – of great music. Here’s a link to this provocative blog entry, at the end of which he provides some suggestions for further reading. I’m going to be checking these books out myself – along with the most recent effort by that most wonderful author/neurologist, Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain – and perhaps will have further to report in the future.
We at the RCO consider issues like these every day. We know that, as a chamber orchestra, we are not going to be playing a lot of the big, exciting repertoire that’s out there for the large symphony orchestra. Nor are we going to be presenting a lot of “pops” concerts and music, although we will dabble on occasion. This isn’t meant as any sort of a criticism or judgment of one kind of music versus another. The RCO simply offers a particular sort of experience – an “intimate” one, involving a smaller orchestra and the repertoire appropriate to it, a relatively small venue, and a closeness between the audience and the musicians. But it’s an experience that we well know from the testimonials of RCO concertgoers is engaging, moving, and exhilarating. The remarkable talents of Maestro Kuchar and our incredible musicians have created musical experiences that RCO fans have no qualms about comparing to ones they’ve had in major musical centers like New York and London.
This is why we talk so much about the “RCO Experience” – it’s exactly the kind of experience described above that we want more and more people to have for themselves. The “RCO Experience,” too, can extend well beyond the music itself: to our special events, our website, our personal and written communications with our patrons, and so on. We’re always looking for ways to enhance this experience, and are always glad to hear from you with constructive suggestions as to how we can do what we do better.
Some of you may be familiar with the name Henry Fogel. For the last four years he has been President of the American Symphony Orchestra League – he recently retired from the position, but will be continuing to provide valuable services to the League – after serving on its Board of Trustees for over a decade. He has also been the very successful Director of the Chicago Symphony, the National Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic. His resume goes well beyond that, and you can read more here. I got to know of him not through any of these activities, but through his writing about music and recordings for Fanfare Magazine, one of my most trusted music information sources for the last twenty-plus years. Fogel’s own record collection is voluminous, and his writings on music always insightful.
In the most recent entry in his blog, Mr. Fogel takes on a subject that is near to our hearts here in the RCO office, the impact, the relevance – the “meaning,” if you prefer to use that term – of great music. Here’s a link to this provocative blog entry, at the end of which he provides some suggestions for further reading. I’m going to be checking these books out myself – along with the most recent effort by that most wonderful author/neurologist, Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain – and perhaps will have further to report in the future.
We at the RCO consider issues like these every day. We know that, as a chamber orchestra, we are not going to be playing a lot of the big, exciting repertoire that’s out there for the large symphony orchestra. Nor are we going to be presenting a lot of “pops” concerts and music, although we will dabble on occasion. This isn’t meant as any sort of a criticism or judgment of one kind of music versus another. The RCO simply offers a particular sort of experience – an “intimate” one, involving a smaller orchestra and the repertoire appropriate to it, a relatively small venue, and a closeness between the audience and the musicians. But it’s an experience that we well know from the testimonials of RCO concertgoers is engaging, moving, and exhilarating. The remarkable talents of Maestro Kuchar and our incredible musicians have created musical experiences that RCO fans have no qualms about comparing to ones they’ve had in major musical centers like New York and London.
This is why we talk so much about the “RCO Experience” – it’s exactly the kind of experience described above that we want more and more people to have for themselves. The “RCO Experience,” too, can extend well beyond the music itself: to our special events, our website, our personal and written communications with our patrons, and so on. We’re always looking for ways to enhance this experience, and are always glad to hear from you with constructive suggestions as to how we can do what we do better.
posted by Chris Morrison at 11:45 AM
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