Category — youth orchestras

As part of our partnership with different communities each year, our education department includes what is called the instrument petting zoo.  No, it’s not a bunch of instruments in a fenced in area, with children walking around them petting them with timid hands.  

What it is in actuality is a chance for kids to get their hands on an instrument and be taught or guided in how to make some sort of elementary sound on it.  The theory is, if they get a small taste of creating new sounds on an instrument they’ve never seen or heard, they’ll want more, and might even want to take up an instrument in school or at home.

Here’s a YouTube movie I found of a youngster named Soren getting his first taste of the violin, with OSO violist Stephen Price giving him a hand with fingering the notes:

Here’s another video of OSO music director Carlos Kalmar giving the Portland Metropolitan Youth Symphony a workout in Beethoven’s Egmont Overture.

Conductor David Hattner has been appointed as the fifth conductor and music director of the Portland Youth Phiharmonic, known as America’s first established youth orchestra, founded in 1924.

Hattner’s first musical career was as a professional clarinetist, and his positions have included the Princeton Symphony, Cascade Music Festival Orchestra, New Jersey Opera Theater and the Key West Symphony Orchestra.

As a conductor, Hattner has worked with many professional ensembles, including the Brooklyn Symphony and Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra.

You can find a complete press release here, which includes additional biographical information.

The Gathering Note reports that composer Aaron Jay Kernis will be in residence with the Seattle Symphony for two weeks in an upcoming season (not yet specified).

This enthusiasm was on full display Sunday. In a surprise for the audience and I am sure a surprise for the orchestra, Aaron Jay Kernis, whose Too Hot Toccata [written in 1996] started the program, took the podium to conduct his own work. Kernis reveled to the audience that he was in town hammering out the specifics of a two week residency with the Seattle Symphony and sat in on the Sunday’s rehearsal. According to Radcliffe, while the band went through the piece, Kernis gradually began inserting himself until Radcliffe suggested he conduct the piece. Kernis did just that.

He was in Seattle this past weekend conducting his own piece Too Hot Toccata with the Seattle Youth Symphony.

The Oregon Symphony will perform the Toccata on its 2008-2009 classical series.