The Orfeo Duo Vita notes

What a Neighborhood! 2009
What a Neighborhood! presents warm, intimate, exciting performances that celebrate Manhattanville, Morningside Heights, & the Manhattan Valley primarily through the music of living local composers. We founded the series in 2003 to encourage and inspire composers and draw neighbors together, helping to make manifest a strong community that includes all the diversity of our area.

In addition to the colorful Spring season described below, on Saturday May 9th we will lead a workshop for adult amateur musicians with extraordinary cellist and viola-da-gambist Lisa Terry (whose quartet Parthenia is in residence at Corpus Christi Church) in which we will delve together into a variety of chamber music by local composers. Please join us! Give us a call at 212-222-2101 to discuss it further!

The summer and Fall will be equally exciting, with the beginning of a long-term project to map our neighborhood in music, inspired by the Australian Aborigines' Songlines, and the premiere of a luminous new violin sonata by Matthew Barnson!

We would love to get to know you. Please say hello at one of the receptions, call us at 212-222-2101, or email us at orfeoduo@gmail.com. Let us know of any composers of any age who might not yet be listed on our map of over 200 neighborhood composers! Bring your friends and family! Meet your neighbors!

Love, Vita and Ishmael Wallace, the Orfeo Duo

What a Neighborhood! programs leave our audiences “flying out of the hall” “so inspired!”


Our CD “A Stroll Through Our Neighborhood” features music from the first five years of What a Neighborhood!
It is available for free at our concerts or order it for $5. You may call 212-222-2101 to order.
 

Saturday February 21st (2009) at 5 pm at the Roerich Museum (319 West 107th Street, near Riverside Drive) Free!

Music by Beethoven and his circle, with readings from their letters and memoirs. The Orfeo Duo will perform music by Beethoven's friends and students Archduke Rudolf and Ferdinand Ries as well as Beethoven's Eleven Bagatelles, Op. 119, and Sonata No. 10 in G for violin and piano, Op. 96. Brother and sister Ishmael Wallace, pianist, and Vita Wallace, violinist, have performed together as the Orfeo Duo since childhood. Reviewers have praised their "magnificent performances," saying "this kind of rapport is rare indeed."


Sunday March 22nd at 1:30 pm at St. Mary's Episcopal Church (521 West 126th Street, 1/2 block west of Amsterdam) $10 suggested donation
Love songs by composers from West Harlem, Morningside Heights, and the Manhattan Valley.
Hayden DeWitt and Cathy Venable, mezzo sopranos, Mark Ettinger, guitar, the St. Mary's Gospel Choir, and the Orfeo Duo will perform sweet, tender, and whimsical songs by Todd Tarantino, Joelle Wallach, Peter Homans, Ishmael Wallace, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Ross, Mark Ettinger, and Helene Henderson.
Cathy Venable
Helene Henderson
Cathy Venable, mezzo soprano
Helene Henderson

Sunday March 29th at 4 pm in the Broadway Presbyterian Church Parish Hall (601 West 114th Street, just west of Broadway, up a few steps) $10 suggested donation. Bilingual: English & Spanish
Music and drama by neighborhood composers.
Hayden DeWitt, mezzo soprano, the Orfeo Duo, Katie Schlaikjer, cellist, children from the Ascension Church Cultural Center, and others will perform music by the children, Emalyn Caliva, Rebecca Clarke, Elisabeth Le Guin, Alice Shields, and Marcos de Jesus. This concert includes the children's Skipping Songs and the heroic piano trio by Rebecca Clarke, a celebrated British composer and violist who settled in the neighborhood after her marriage, as well as a short opera based on an apocalyptic comic book!
Children at Ascension Church
Children from the Ascension Church Cultural Center,
with Vita (left) and their ballet teacher Maria Espona in the back row.

 
For more information, please call 212-222-2101 or email orfeoduo@gmail.com
More exciting events will unfold later on!


What a Neighborhood! 2009 is made possible by the generosity of friends and neighbors: artists, volunteers, supporters, arts and community organizations and businesses, the Manhattan Community Arts Fund/DCA, and the sponsorship of the 102-103 Streets Block Association and The Field. Made possible in part by public funds from the Fund for Creative Communities, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

The May 9 workshop is supported in part by Chamber Music America with support from the JPMorgan Chase Residency Re-Grant Program, a program of the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and the Chamber Music America Residency Endowment Fund. The Orfeo Duo is a member of Chamber Music America. This program has been made possible through the generosity of ACMP- The Chamber Music Network, and the Clinton B. Ford Fund of its ACMP Foundation, an organization that promotes chamber music activities for amateur musicians.

The Orfeo Duo
615 West 113 Street #46
New York NY 10025
Phone: 212-222-2101
Email:
orfeoduo@gmail.com

© The OrfeoDuo 2009