In Thursday’s (10/3) Boston Globe (subscription required), Robert Knox interviews Steven Karidoyanes, who began his 20th season this Saturday as music director of the Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra, located 40 miles south of Boston. “This orchestra can play circles around the orchestra I inherited,” Karidoyanes says. “This orchestra wants to sound great. They hate it when I’m not picky.” Knox writes that Karidoyanes’s tenure is “not only the longest of any music director during the orchestra’s 98-year history, but arguably the best. The orchestra has added concerts to its season during this time, developed educational programs and small-group ensembles to perform for business and community events, and maintained a sound financial base. ‘The orchestra would not be where it is today without Steven—his vision and professionalism and creativity,’ said Deborah Cox, the managing director, who has worked with him for six years.” Saturday’s concert program—John Williams’s Liberty Fanfare, Demetrius Spaneas’s Three Dialogues, Shostakovich’s Festive Overture, Gershwin’s An American in Paris, and Respighi’s Pines of Rome—“typifies some of the Plymouth Philharmonic’s emphases under Karidoyanes’s baton: Three of the pieces were written by Americans (one of them new music); the two others are by 20th-century composers.”
Posted October 7, 2013
