The Berklee Contemporary Symphony Orchestra is no ordinary college orchestra. The orchestra is composed of students from Spain, South Africa, England, Nicaragua, the Philippines, just to name a few. Some students are straight out of high school, some have already completed a degree in music and are coming to Berklee to study in a unique major such as film scoring, and some have transferred here from all over the world from other colleges. Not only are we diverse in our cultural backgrounds but in our musical backgrounds as well. Many students are accomplished classical musicians but are equally as talented in Jazz, Latin, Celtic and many other genres. Along with the performance majors, many students in the orchestra are pursuing degrees such as Music Business, Music Production and Engineering, Music Therapy and Composition. We come together to create a diverse group of musicians who just love to make music together!
The orchestra environment is filled with passion, excitement and fun. The orchestra is simply full of people who love to make music together, completely devoid of braggarts. We have an incredible conductor, Franscico Noya, who is a world-renowned conductor and is also the current conductor of the Rhode Island Philharmonic. His congenial and hilarious personality combined with his incredible expertise in music helps to make the orchestra produce incredible music.
Our spring 2012 concert is right around the corner. It will be held on Tuesday April 3rd at 8pm at Jordan Hall. We have an exciting and diverse program. First, we will be performing the world premier of “Fantasy on a River Theme” which was composed by the great bass player John Patitucci. It will also feature John Patitucci himself as the bass soloist on his piece. We are very excited that he is coming to play with us and that he will premiere this piece with Berklee! We will also be celebrating John Williams’s 80th birthday by playing movements from two of his most famous film scores; Star Wars and Schindlers List. Another exciting piece of repertoire that we will be playing, is the original piece written by the very talented Berklee faculty member Jonathan Holland entitled “Halcyon Sun”. We will also be premiering the piece “8 de Febrero”. This piece is composed by the winner of Berklee’s Composition Contest, Vicente Ortiz Gimeno, an extremely talented clarinet player and composer. Here at Berklee we do play some of the standard classical repertoire, believe it or not! We are playing Schubert’s beautiful Symphony No. 8 “Unfinished”. Last but not least, we are playing the first ever live performance of Aubrey Hodges’ Madden NFL theme from the video game!
We have a diverse and wonderful program for next Tuesday! Please try to come out to see my amazing peers play their hearts out at Jordan Hall on April 3rd at 8pm!