“Barbara Soroca, CEO and president of the Stamford Symphony Orchestra, and her soon-to-be-successor, Russell Jones, have been [planning] the orchestra’s 2018-19 season” with an emphasis on American music, writes Christina Hennessy in Saturday’s (12/16) Connecticut Post (Bridgeport). “In January, Soroca will retire from her post of nearly 40 years…. The [new] Soroca Fund for American Music … has already raised about $150,000…. Works of classical music’s stalwarts, such as Mozart and Bach, are in public domain and don’t require performance fees…. ‘It’s cheaper to play Beethoven than Bernstein,’ says Jesse Rosen, president and CEO of the New York City-based League of American Orchestras…. For the past 40 years … Rosen says there has been a push to remedy the situation. In 1977, for instance, the American Composers Orchestra was born…. [Other approaches include] consortiums of orchestras that commission a composer, as well as crowd-sourced initiatives to develop new works. The league also supports composer residencies with orchestras around the country and new works by women composers.” Says Stamford Symphony board chairman Alan McIntyre, “We have heard from the audiences that they would love to hear more American music and we will have the opportunity to do that now.”
Posted December 18, 2017
Pictured: Stamford Symphony Orchestra’s cello section
