Over two years ago, we reported that the beloved Iris Orchestra, facing an uncertain future, had transformed itself. Local fans of classical music will recall the orchestra’s unique brief since 2000: to bring a roster of virtuosos from around the world to Memphis for a few select concerts every year, and thus have them mingle with local host families and otherwise engage the community. And while their more than two decades of such concerts and engagement had been brilliant, after Covid it seemed that model was financially unsustainable.
But, it turned out, the players’ passion for the music and for Memphis prevailed, as the Iris Orchestra became the Iris Collective. Founder and conductor Michael Stern said at the time, “The musicians themselves grouped together, committed to the idea that they simply would not let Iris go away. It was absolutely musician-driven. And Iris will continue on. It’s going to have a different feel. I will be less involved, and it will be an amalgam of ensembles, chamber music, orchestra concerts, and new ways of imagining community engagement.”
It was not a far leap for a group that had, from the beginning, committed itself to being “an ensemble for the 21st century — flexible, nonhierarchical, and passionate about the highest standards of performance.” Yet, as an even less hierarchical collective, Iris was now charting a new course. How has the group fared since the dramatic restructuring?
Judging by the upcoming performance at the Germantown Performing Arts Center on Saturday, November 2nd, featuring the rising star violinist and former Memphian Randall Goosby, with Michael Stern back to conduct the orchestra, Iris is thriving more than ever. Indeed, it’s appropriate that the program is titled Transformations, for it is proof positive that the ensemble’s metamorphosis has been complete. Those violet Iris petals have become wings, a butterfly shed of its chrysalis and ready to fly higher.
Iris artist fellows Gabriela Fogo and Roberta dos Santos (Photo: Courtesy Iris Collective)
As executive director Rebecca Arendt says of the concert, “It’s a beautiful example of how we’ve evolved. Orchestral concerts were such a huge part of Iris Orchestra, obviously, but they’re not a focal point in Iris Collective. We love to do them. We’re really excited about the show coming up, but what we’re really excited about is to use it as an opportunity to showcase the importance of music education in our community. The week leading up to it, Randall Goosby will be here all week, working with the students that we work with every day. He’ll be in the classrooms with us. He’ll be working after school with them, and then a number of them will be joining us on the stage for one of our pieces.”
That piece will be Adoration, by a composer who’s only been getting her due in this century, Florence Price. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, she moved to Chicago due to Jim Crow and became a part of the Chicago Black Renaissance, and, though celebrated at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, her work “fail[ed] to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration,” as Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2018.
Yet as more ensembles have made a course correction to embrace composers of color, that has changed, and Price’s work has gained a higher profile. “Adoration is really beautiful,” says Arendt. “Randall plays it often. And there are a lot of iterations of it, so a number of our students have actually played it as an orchestral piece, just within their own programming that they do in schools. So to be able to come together to play it with professional musicians, with Randall as a soloist, with Michael Stern conducting, gives them a beautiful taste of what it’s like to be a professional musician with something that’s familiar to them already.”
It certainly won’t be lost on those students that Goosby, the star soloist of the evening, was one of their own only 10 years ago. “He went to Arlington High School,” notes Arendt. “I don’t believe he ever studied with an Iris teacher, but a number of our Iris musicians have worked with the same teachers that he’s worked with. Still, he is a product of Memphis. He performed all around the city while he was in high school.”
Goosby also echoes the kind of community engagement on which the Iris Collective thrives. He’s deeply involved with several nonprofits, such as Project: Music Heals Us, Concerts in Motion, and the U.K.-based Music Masters organization, which provides teaching, grants, and performance opportunities to young musicians. He’ll be carrying on such work in the week leading up to the concert as he makes special appearances in Iris’ educational programs, complementing the ongoing music instruction efforts of Iris artist fellows Gabriela Fogo and Roberta dos Santos.
The centerpiece of the November 2nd performance by Goosby, Stern, and the Iris Collective will surely be Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, a foundational work in that instrument’s repertoire, opening with a striking solo violin passage that was unconventional for its time. But the players will also perform Emotive Transformations, a 2018 piece by James Lee III, and the folk-infused masterpiece Variaciones Concertante by Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, which features a virtuosic movement for violin, Variazione in modo di Moto perpetuo. Yet Goosby’s star turn in this piece will be complemented with passages that highlight other musicians as well.
That, says Arendt, perfectly captures the Iris ethos. “It’s a piece that exemplifies what we think Iris Collective is all about because each variation highlights a different instrument within the orchestra. The collective wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for our musicians, so I love the fact that the concert ends by celebrating them. For us, the collective is really about many voices coming together for a single purpose, and that’s to make Memphis a great place to live and a great place to connect.”
Young Concert Artist Steven Banks photographed at Steinway Hall, 1/9/2020. Photo by Chris Lee
Though many feared the final show of the 2021-22 concert season spelled the end of Iris Orchestra, with conductor Michael Stern preparing to step down, the ensemble was rescued by the sheer pluck of its players. Though most of them hail from other cities and only convene in Memphis for Iris concert weekends, their love of the Bluff City was such that they were loath to see Iris vanish. And thus was the Iris Collective born, as the group became a more cooperative enterprise helmed by the players.
As Stern said at the time, “The musicians themselves grouped together, committed to the idea that they simply would not let Iris go away. It was absolutely musician-driven. And Iris will continue on. It’s going to have a different feel. I will be less involved, and it will be an amalgam of ensembles, chamber music, orchestra concerts, and new ways of imagining community engagement.”
This season, then, has put those words into practice. With three imaginative concerts already under its belt, the Iris Collective has proven that it lost no momentum when it took on a new name and new organizational principles. With The Soldier’s Tale last November, Andrew Grams stepped in as guest conductor; February’s Intersections paired the collective with Randall Goosby on violin and Zhu Wang on piano; and just last month, Iris and the Dalí Quartet were joined by Cuban-born Memphis percussionist Nelson Rodriguez in a concert fusing classical and Latin music.
This weekend will mark the season finale with two separate shows. The first of two concerts featuring rising star and saxophone virtuoso Steven Banks takes place on Saturday, April 29 at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC), and will feature Michael Stern’s only return to conduct this season. Titled The American Experience, the program includes that old chestnut, Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, along with Darius Milhaud’s jazz-influenced La Création du Monde, and Souvenirs by the great Samuel Barber.
That same evening, Iris will also be one of the few orchestras premiering jazz pianist Billy Childs’ newly commissioned saxophone concerto, written specifically for Banks and inspired by poets Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Amiri Baraka.
Then on Sunday, April 30, Iris musicians will join Banks for an intimate chamber concert entitled Fantasy & Reflections at the Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center, inspired by Britten’s quirky Phantasy Quartet in F minor and Banks’ own work, Cries, Sighs, and Dreams.
Mary Javian, Iris Collective’s strategic advisor and a longtime performer with the group, notes that “Steven is a rapidly rising star who any Memphis music lover should get a chance to hear while they can. Steven also plays several horns with virtuosity: soprano, alto, tenor and baritone. Most saxophonists are just not able to do what he does on all four instruments, and in both classical and jazz genres.”
The American Experienceconcert takes place Saturday, April 29, 7:30 p.m. at GPAC; Tickets $45-$70 Program: Aaron Copland Appalachian Spring; Billy Childs saxophone concerto for Steven Banks; Darius Milhaud La création du monde; Samuel Barber Souvenirs.
Fantasy & Reflections is onSunday, April 30, 3 p.m. at the Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center. Tickets $30 in advance/$35 at door Program: Mozart Oboe Quartet in F Major; Britten Phantasy Quartet in F minor; Banks Cries, Sighs, and Dreams.
Awadagin Pratt (Photo: Courtesy of Iris Orchestra)
The Iris Orchestra’s closing concert of the 2021-2022 season, on April 23rd and 24th, was nearly its swan song. For a moment, it appeared that the much-loved collection of virtuosos from around the world, who gather in Memphis for a few select concerts every year, was unsustainable. The notion was deeply troubling for founder and conductor Michael Stern, but he wanted to do the moment justice. “We expressly chose Beethoven’s 5th Symphony because we thought for a moment that we’d be suspending operations, and that this would have been our last concert ever,” says Stern. “I wanted to bring full closure. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony closed our very first concert ever, in 2000. So I thought, if this is going to be our last concert, let it also feature the piece that closed our first concert. But with joy I can say that Iris is not going away!”
As it turns out, Iris will stick around, albeit in new form. After the upcoming concerts, Iris Orchestra will be known as the Iris Collective. “The musicians themselves grouped together, committed to the idea that they simply would not let Iris go away. It was absolutely musician driven. And Iris will continue on. It’s going to have a different feel. I will be less involved, and it will be an amalgam of ensembles, chamber music, orchestra concerts, and new ways of imagining community engagement,” Stern says.
The fortuitous change will be foreshadowed by Iris’ chamber music concert on April 24th. “It’s entirely Iris musicians playing Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat Major, and it’s a fantastic group. It gives a little taste of what the Iris Collective is going to be about.”
Reinvention is par for the course for an organization that’s been dedicated to reimagining music from the beginning, founded to be “an ensemble for the 21st century — flexible, non-hierarchical, and passionate about the highest standards of performance.” And, as Stern sees it, this season’s last program embodies all of Iris’ ideals at once. “We have a wonderful piece from the 20th century, not one but two new pieces by essential American composers, and then an iconic work from the canon. That, in a nutshell, is what Iris is about.”
Stern is especially enthusiastic about the new works. “When we started Iris 22 years ago,” says Stern, “the express intention was, in part, to nurture and promote the music of our time, especially American composers. So this is quite a lovely thing, to have a co-commissioning relationship with two pieces in the program.
“Jonathan Leshnoff has been a great partner and friend to us since we commissioned him to write his first symphony, which was a companion piece to Beethoven’s 9th. This new piece was written to commemorate our 20th anniversary in 2020, which is why he called the piece Score. It’s not only a reference to sheet music, it also means 20 years. Since the premiere got delayed by two years because of Covid, this is a long overdue and very welcome performance.
“And Jessie Montgomery is one of the most compelling voices of the last two or three years, for good reason,” Stern continues. “I’ve done quite a few of Jessie’s works now. This piece especially, Rounds for Piano and String Orchestra, is playful and dancing and really lovely. Awadagin Pratt is making his solo piano debut with us on Jessie’s piece, which she wrote specifically for him. He is a force. A wonderful pianist, a wonderful musician.”
That forward-thinking spirit is also apparent in the classics Iris will present on April 23rd, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, Op. 25, the “Classical.” Stern describes the latter piece as “turning a Haydn symphony on its ear. Through the prism of the early 20th century, Prokofiev writes this really tongue-in-cheek and wonderfully energetic music, doing something new. Beethoven, in his time, was also doing something new. He often said he was writing music for the future. Prokofiev was writing at the dawn of the 20th century, and Beethoven was writing at the dawn of the 19th century. And both were trying to find a new way of speaking in the world.”
Iris Orchestra, featuring Awadagin Pratt, piano, presents Where Past & Future Gather, Saturday, April 23rd, 7:30 p.m. at GPAC; and Iris at the Brooks: Beethoven, Sunday, April 24th, 3 p.m. at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
The Iris Orchestra will come to an end after the 2021-2022 season.
A press release issued Monday said that in the past 18 months, the orchestra had “confronted significant financial and operational challenges.” It also said the organization was facing “the inevitable and formidable task of transitioning in the near future to new artistic and executive leadership, while also grappling with the additional burdens and restrictions of Covid-19 in an altered philanthropic environment.”
The final concerts will be the weekend of April 23-24, 2022. That program will include Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — the work Iris played during its inaugural concert 22 years ago.
The 2021-2022 season will continue as planned, including all GPAC and Brooks Museum concerts, and all scheduled community engagements.
Iris Orchestra began in September 2000 as an experiment, founded by Michael Stern and Albert Pertalion in partnership with the City of Germantown. The organization transitioned from a municipally funded orchestra to an independent organization funded primarily by private contributions and institutional grants.
It was noted for its unusual structure that brought in orchestra members from around the country and abroad for a handful of performances every year, mainly at the Germantown Performing Arts Center. The roster of guest artists has included some of the world’s top performers.
Under Stern’s leadership, the orchestra made several recordings, performed new as well as old reliable works, and commissioned works by American composers. It also was involved in community arts education, including establishment of the Iris Artists Fellowship Program.
Yo-Yo Ma was the first soloist in the group’s inaugural concert and he appeared with Iris again 10 years later. Other luminaries who performed with Irish include Yefim Bronfman, Garrick Ohlsson, Emanuel Ax, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, and Pinchas Zukerman.
Commissioned composers include Anna Clyne, Chris Brubeck, Jonathan Leshnoff, Ned Rorem, Huang Ruo, and Edgar Meyer.
Cellist Gabriel Hightower and violinist Pedro Maia (Photo courtesy Iris Orchestra)
When violinist Pedro Maia and cellist Gabriel Hightower take the stage at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts tomorrow evening, they’ll finally be able to exhale. Named as the 2021-22 Iris Artist Fellows months ago, they’ve since faced an uncertain year ahead as the pandemic altered performance and educational expectations again and again. But now their work is at last coming to its fruition.
Performing as the Iris Artist Fellows Ensemble, Maia and Hightower will reveal how they’ve perfected playing as a duo, with a diverse set spanning the French avant-garde, Brazilian dance and traditional classical. All pieces were curated especially for the intimate listening space of The Green Room.
The Iris Artist Fellowship Program, now in its sixth year, is a 10-month full-time residency position that mixes professional training with instruction, in-the-field experience, and networking opportunities. The program is designed to assist rising Black, African American, or Latino musicians who are about to embark on their professional careers in classical music.
“We designed the fellowship to help bridge a gap in the classical music world,” Iris Orchestra Artistic Director Michael Stern said. “We are looking for not only skilled classical musicians but also those musicians who have a real passion for music as a tool to impact society. Our fellows participate in community engagement programs that impact the Greater Memphis community, particularly those that promote education, mentorship, and social equity.”
Each of the program’s eight alumni has gone on to pursue a full-time career in the classical music industry. “We’re pleased to be a part of the journey for these talented and dedicated musicians,” said Rebecca Arendt, director of the Iris Artist Fellowship. “We’ve learned a lot and that knowledge has helped to refine and evolve the program, and we’re thrilled we’ve been able to continue it — even during the pandemic year — thanks to our supporters and our partner, Memphis Music Initiative.”
Maia and Hightower have embraced the teaching and performing fellowship with gusto. In addition to performing with Iris Orchestra in October, they performed as a duo at a pop-up concert in the Memphis Medical District, a music time event for Memphis Oral School for the Deaf, and a Halloween family concert at the Morton Museum in Collierville. The fellows also work in the Shelby County Schools as teaching artists with the Memphis Music Initiative (MMI).
“In Memphis, we enjoy a rich musical history and heritage; we’re known for it around the world,” said Mike Mosby, fellows coach for MMI. “But there’s not a lot of emphasis on the string or orchestra instruments in the schools. Our partnership with the Iris Artist Fellows has allowed our Black and brown students to work with and to learn from skilled musicians who look like them. Working with Pedro and Gabriel on my team is a privilege, and we’re grateful for the rich experience they provide to these kids.”
The Iris Artist Chamber Concert featuring the Iris Artist Fellows Ensemble takes place Thursday, November 11th, at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. General admission, $10; students, $5. Doors, 7 p.m.
Iris Orchestra, that unique hybrid organization headquartered at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC), yet made up of stellar classical players from across the country and the world, continues apace as one of the most relevant and innovative classical organizations of our time. With the pandemic curtailing any live performances, Iris, helmed by conductor Michael Stern, carries on its multi-dimensional work in other media.
Courtesy Iris Orchestra
Michael Stern
As we saw last fall, the facilities at GPAC, coupled with the recording know-how of engineer Jamey Lamar, who captures all of their performances, the orchestra has adapted to a COVID-afflicted world by presenting freshly-recorded performances online in lieu of their regular concert season. Tomorrow and Sunday, their February performances will go live online, featuring performances recorded last weekend, even as Memphis suffered its first wave of February ice and snow.
Beyond that, this month has also witnessed the release of an album boasting the world premiere of a concerto by composer Bruce Adolphe, recorded at GPAC when it was performed by Iris in 2015. Earlier this week, I spoke with Stern about both the album and the online concerts. By the end of our conversation, I was more convinced than ever of our good fortune in hosting this committed group of players.
Memphis Flyer:How did Iris Orchestra come to be involved in this premiere of Bruce Adlophe’s work,I Will Not Remain Silent?
Michael Stern: This is all a happy confluence of events. Sharon Roffman, the featured soloist, is an incredible force. Her mother’s very involved in education and the violin. Sharon had known Bruce Adolphe since she was a kid. He had this idea to write this piece about Joachim Prinz, who was of course so closely aligned with Martin Luther King, Jr., and as it turns out, Prinz married Sharon’s parents. Allen Cohen
Sharon Roffman
But above and beyond that, they were both interested in this project which was, first and foremost, a piece of wonderful new music. Secondly, a way to raise awareness about Rabbi Joachim Prinz and Martin Luther King, and to have that connection in terms of civil rights and social justice. But the other thing is, Sharon is passionately committed to education and engagement, especially with young people. Not only were we able to organize the premiere, by rehearsing and recording and performing it, but she, largely, along with Iris Orchestra, organized this community-wide education and engagement project embedded in the curriculum that she distributed to schools and churches and synagogues. We did something at the Jewish Community Center, as I recall, as well as the Civil Rights Museum and Houston High School. We had a writing project associated with it. We had an art project associated with it. And for kids across all lines to learn about the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, and to learn about 1930’s in Germany and Joachim Prinz and Nazism, was a wonderful experience. So, all the way around it was a really rewarding moment.
The piece itself is so wonderful. I’ve done it with her since our premiere, and it holds up great. It’s just a really terrific composition, which really speaks to the fundamental subject matter and its importance.
I’ve see the curriculum. It’s really impressive. And it seems the piece itself addresses the subject matter thematically, with orchestral hits battling, so to speak, with this solitary, soaring voice of Sharon’s violin. It’s a striking contrast, and captures the power of a solitary voice speaking truth to power.
I agree. I will say that he’s got a program to it. The first movement is Joachim Prinz in Europe, and the second movement is Joachim Prinz in America. But it doesn’t sound manipulative at all. It doesn’t sound arch. It sounds very authentic and sincere and organic, and the entire piece, just from a musical point of view, works really well.
The second movement really does evoke a new time, a new atmosphere.
It also just underlines the idea that challenge, struggle and eventually overcoming and coming to a place of peace and triumph really transcends color, it transcends religion, it transcends geography. It just is what it is in terms of the human experience and the human condition. I appreciated Bruce’s intent from the beginning. The way he wrote the piece. Sharon was unbelievably devoted to the project, and in it 150 percent. It was inspiring to work on.
So the educational outreach happened around the time of the premiere and the recording in 2015?
Yes, but don’t say the word outreach. It sounds like that’s a one way thing. I prefer the word engagement. My mindset in doing something like this is not to deliver information, it’s to engage young people in this conversation. And I think Sharon especially, and all of us, tried to do that and I think we did do that. And one thing Bruce did, which was fantastic, was, he created a chamber version of the piece. So when we did go around, notably to the high school, we were able to talk about the story and to play some of the concerto without requiring the full orchestra to come. Instead, we could use a chamber ensemble and it made it much more mobile. And then of course, the fact that it was picked up by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music is meaningful, because the music stands as an American concerto, but beyond that, it also has these extra-musical, historical echoes which fit that series absolutely perfectly. I’m proud that our contribution to that series came out so well.
What we did for those concerts was just a string orchestra. Not the largest, not the smallest, somewhere in the middle. But nothing we played was an adaptation of anything. We played the pieces the way they were meant to be played.
I would say that COVID interrupted everybody’s plans for a lot of reasons. We can’t be too close to one another on stage, so that puts a cap on the number of players you can have onstage or in the hall at one time. Everybody has to be masked. There are all sorts of precautions and protocols. Beyond that, you can’t have wind players on the stage. The conventional wisdom is that wind players expel more droplets and more of a risk in terms of transmission, than strings or harp or piano would be. So we made the decision that we would just play whatever music we could play. And right now that’s music for strings only. But we present these programs without any sense of compromise. Would we like to get 40-60 more players onstage? Sure. Just not right now. We have to take safety first.
We had the cancellation of our soloist in the February slot. He couldn’t travel because of COVID concerns. He’s healthy, but just due to an abundance of caution he cancelled. Similarly our guest soloist and conductor, Jeffrey Kahane, who was going to play and conduct the March concert, also cancelled. And then we were faced with what do we do? We had already changed those programs, to piece for string orchestra only, now we had to change them again to accommodate those cancellations. And we just made the decision on the fly that we would overload the week and put more performance capture in the can, so we would have performances for February and March without imposing a second trip for all the musicians or for me or the engineers, because we didn’t know, and frankly still don’t know, even though vaccines are rolling out slowly, we still don’t know what the numbers are going to look like in early February and March. So we thought, let’s get as much music recorded as possible, and we’ll broadcast that for our February and March offerings, and keep our fingers crossed for May.
What we did was we took some really great music for strings alone. For February, we have this wonderful piece, a young, extraordinarily talented American composer, Jessie Montgomery, whose music is not only terrific, but also informed by her sense of activism and social justice, and is one of the brightest lights in American music right now. She wrote a piece called ‘Banner,’ which celebrates the 150th Anniversary of the writing of the Star Spangled Banner. But in her piece, built into this celebration, is also the awareness that the Star Spangled Banner should, but doesn’t actually, speak for everybody in this country. And to make those voices, who might be marginalized by the Banner or who have not been as included, historically, she wrote a piece which really reflected on the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star Spangled Banner in a really beautiful way. And we go through that piece… For the February presentation, I was able to sit down with Jessie and we had a conversation about the piece. And that’s a really incredible addition to the program.
On New Album and in Virtual Concerts, Iris Orchestra is Undaunted (2)
We also did this incredibly beautiful, heartrendingly beautiful piece by Puccini, called the Chrysanthemums, which he wrote as a memorial to a great friend of his who passed away. And then we finish with one of the great pieces in the string repertoire, the Dvořák String Serenade. And then in March, we have two other masterpieces, in terms of string repertoire. Mozart’s F major Divertimento for Strings, K138, and the great Tchaikovsky String Serenade. So in these two programs, we’ve got Dvořák and Tchaikovsky and Puccini and Montgomery, and the interview with Jessie. I think it’s a really great overview of some terrific music, and it lets us keep our contact with our public without needing to stop the music because of COVID. So that made us all very happy.
It’s a wonderfully diverse collection. Contrasting the cutting edge, Jessie Montgomery, with Mozart…
Well, we try! We try. Many of us hadn’t seen each other for almost a year. The October recording was a very small group of musicians. It was a chamber ensemble. So it was wonderful to be together.
Were there any special arrangements with the host families?
We spared the host families. We could not, and we would not, put that imposition on them. This is not the time to invite other people to your house, even cherished friends. So we put everybody up in a hotel.
Jessie didn’t perform with Iris, but Jessie Montgomery is a force of nature. She’s a wonderful violinist. She was composing a lot of music while she was still an active member of a regular string quartet, and she’s doing her doctorate at Princeton University. She is a very busy, very talented, very accomplished woman.
We’ve had this tradition of having chamber concerts at Brooks Museum. Of course we could not do that, but we didn’t want to deprive our audience of anything, so three of our musicians stayed an extra day. Jamey stayed the extra day, and they got that filmed and it was a great success.
I think there are some silver linings to COVID. Not many. It’s been a terrible time. And hopefully now, with a new feeling in the country, we can maybe start to address some of the divisiveness and some of the rancor. But I do think you need to try to see some good in everything. COVID has taken its toll, and yet in the process of going through it, the fact that we were isolated, but also technically involved with the regular routine of everything, meant that people could actually consider what was happening.
And then you had the issues that were in front of all of us, and rightly so, with long overdue conversations, and I think people considering the real meaning, whether it’s Black Lives Matter or the environmental issues before us, or the terrible political divisiveness, we were able to process that with a little less knee jerk reaction and a little more thoughtfulness. And I do think, and I’m very encouraged by the fact that the reaction to those things did not simply become a flash point for a few weeks and then fade. I think the awareness that we are going to do better, and the awareness that the world is a little closer to real justice, is here to stay. And I think that is a really healthy thing. I can’t help but think that maybe that in and of itself is worth celebrating, and that’s a good thing.
Watch Bruce Adophe discuss “I Will Not Remain Silent” below.
On New Album and in Virtual Concerts, Iris Orchestra is Undaunted
The Iris Orchestra is a unique creation in the world of classical music. Anchored firmly at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC), it is actually comprised of players from out of town, for the most part. Traveling from schools and orchestras around the country, or in some cases the world, the members of Iris stay with host families in the Bluff City whenever they are playing. Even the conductor, Michael Stern, son of the legendary Isaac Stern, lives in Connecticut and works primarily with the Kansas City Symphony.
That makes it doubly impressive that the organization is soldiering on through the COVID-19 era with a new 2020-21 season, set to begin Sunday, October 11th. That doesn’t mean subscribers can hear a live concert, but neither does it mean that the players didn’t come here to perform. Instead, Iris hit upon a hybrid approach: The musicians convened for a special performance at GPAC on Saturday, October 3rd, which was captured on video for a streaming event this weekend.
Iris Orchestra
Iris Orchestra rises to meet pandemic challenges.
Even better, the recorded performance will premiere at an outdoor event at The Grove (GPAC’s new outdoor venue) at 2 p.m. Sunday. Those who would like a taste of the conviviality of a live concert can enjoy a bit of that in the open air, seeing the show on the large screen of The Grove’s stage. And, having witnessed the group’s concert as it was filmed last week, I can attest to the passion and beauty evoked with every note played. Beyond that, the intermission will feature content that live concerts never include: interviews with the musicians involved, in a short video created beforehand.
Those musicians are skewed to Iris’ nearby members, due to the vicissitudes of the pandemic. As executive director Marcia Kaufmann puts it, “We made an effort to get as many people from within driving distance as possible. We had three people fly in, and everybody else drove, from mostly either St. Louis or Nashville. Michael Stern had planned to come, but he lives in Connecticut, which has a 14-day quarantine for people coming from Tennessee.” The conductor, therefore, had to bow out of this performance.
That the players were able to realize a world-class performance without him is a testament to the high level of musicianship embodied in Iris. Watching them assemble on the large stage, fully masked and mostly standing, separated by several feet, I was stunned at the coordination of their playing. Perhaps because some of them have played together in Iris for many years, there was an almost telepathic connection between the players.
But the pandemic didn’t affect only how the players gathered on stage; it directly impacted the instrumentation selected. As Kaufmann notes, “The format for today is all string players. We thought, ‘Let’s wait and see what they find out about aerosols and wind players before we schedule winds.’ So we started with all strings players. And the first piece, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, is all strings. The personnel for that helped Michael Stern think through the rest of the program. After the Bach is William Grant Still’s Danzas de Panamá. It was originally a string quartet, but has been enlarged to a chamber ensemble.
Iris Orchestra
“After that, we’ll have a George Walker piece, Lyric for Strings. It’s a lovely one-movement piece, a little melancholy, and very thoughtful. Both Walker and Stills are African-American composers from the early 20th century, and it shows you the different ways composers looked at music at that time. And then they finish with Max Bruch’s Octet for Strings. Bruch, of course, knows the violin very well, and this piece is a massive showcase for the first violin player. And it’s also quite a workout for everybody in the ensemble. It’s pure fireworks, a big celebratory piece.”
Kaufmann encourages music aficionados to sign up for a season’s subscription to watch the concert, at irisorchestra.org. After the next Iris virtual concert, on December 5th, consisting of archived performances of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, there may be live performances with social distancing next year.
In an era of shoestring budgets for municipal orchestras, too often at the mercy of the national economy’s roller coaster, seeing a local orchestra built on novel principles succeed for twenty years is remarkable. And that’s exactly what will be championed as the twentieth season of the Iris Orchestra begins tomorrow.
Iris features musicians who assemble for each concert from some of the country’s best orchestras, universities, and chamber groups, to perform as the resident orchestra of Germantown Performance Arts Center and, more recently, in chamber concerts at the Brooks Museum. Conductor Michael Stern, son of the legendary violinist Isaac Stern, is the music director of Iris, and also conducts the Grammy Award-winning Kansas City Symphony. I spoke to him recently about the significance of Iris turning 20, and what makes this orchestra special.
Memphis Flyer: Iris’ 20th season looks impressive, with programming that echoes the worldwide celebrations of Beethoven happening this year and next.
Michael Stern: We have a rather happy confluence of anniversaries. It’s the 20th anniversary of Iris, and that’s pretty amazing to me. And we’re celebrating 250 years of Beethoven. Nobody needs to rescue him from obscurity, but he is arguably one of the titanic figures in music. And the entire known musical universe is celebrating him in 2020. Aside from our anniversary, there’s also the anniversary of my father, Isaac Stern, who would have been 100.
courtesy Iris Orchestra
Iris Orchestra
And what we were trying to do is salute, in our twentieth year, the various ways we have been meaningful to the community. Remembering the great music — that is where Beethoven comes in. And we made him the theme of our chamber series at the Brooks. And we’re also celebrating Memphis. We’re remembering the elements of Iris that made forming this orchestra special to us right from the beginning, and that we’ve been able to continue to do all these seasons. The Beethoven thing is very appropriate, and we’ve decided to ask all of our soloists to curate a chamber concert that included at least one Beethoven work. Which is why you see him on the program every Sunday.
We asked the Trio with Pinchas Zukerman, Amanda Forsythe & Angela Cheng to play the Beethoven Triple. We also asked Garrick Ohlsson to play Beethoven in the first concert, and the layer of meaning with Garrick goes even further, because we were looking back to our very first season. And all three pieces on that program were played then. Garrick was the second soloist that we ever had. The piece that he played was Beathoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2. And we haven’t done it since. So we are looking back 20 years to recreate Garrick’s performance that launched our existence.
Given the struggle of traditional orchestras to survive recently, has this been an “against all odds” kind of project?
“Against all odds” sounds a little desperate and improbable. I think we worked hard. I think there were challenges. There were some years in the middle where the economy crashed and everybody had to retrench. But we survived, maintaining the level of excellence that we have always striven for. And keeping true to our mission, re-thinking how an orchestra could be and how we could re-engage with the community. Certainly over the years, with all the outreach engagement that we’ve done in the community, the number of master classes, the level of soloists that we brought, and now of course our Iris Artist Fellows program, we just wanted to make the case for music and the arts, especially for young people, in Germantown and the Mid South.
In a nutshell, how would you say Iris is unique in its mission?
Organizationally there’s really no orchestra like it. We started as the only municipally funded orchestra in the United States. That was already groundbreaking. And I give huge credit to the Board of Aldermen and GPAC and Patrick Lawton, for having taken a chance on starting such a thing and maintaining it. When we evolved into our own 501(c)(3), we continued that idea, by serving the community in a unique way.
We are tied to this place, but our membership is from all over the United States. And some people who have been playing with us for 15 or 20 years, and are now professionally living in Europe, will time their vacations so that they’ll be free to come back and play with us. That kind of loyalty and dedication is pretty impressive, and it shows.
Phillip Van Zandt
Iris Orchestra
Also, it’s a completely democratic experience. The person playing concertmaster in one concert might play in the back of the second violin in the next. The person playing second oboe on the first half will play first oboe on the second half, and so forth. So there’s no competitiveness. There’s just this feeling of coming together and making the best music possible — very quickly. We gather on Thursday and Saturday we give the first concert.
So there’s a camaraderie among the players that’s unusual. Yes, we fly them in from all over, but it’s not a pick up group. It’s a central family, a pool of players, from which we continually draw, all of whom have established ties to the community.
How specifically are Iris’ players tied to the community?
The idea that the musicians should not just stay at a hotel, but be embedded in the community with their host families, was part of Iris from the beginning. It was not done as a cost saving measure, but rather as a way of immediately embedding the orchestra into the daily fabric of the community. And what’s been amazing is that a lot of musicians have been “adopted” by their host families to the point where they’ll go to weddings and graduations and, sadly, funerals, and happy life events of all kinds, so they really have become part of the family. And that’s a really lovely thing. And one of the reasons we’re still here after twenty years.
Do you feel that Iris’ programming makes it unique?
Over the years we’ve played literally everything, from pre-Baroque music to pieces that we’ve commissioned. We’ve commissioned a lot of pieces, and we’ve recorded pieces. A lot of American composers have written for us really successfully. Adam Schoenberg and Jonathan Leshnoff, for example. We’ve played Ellen Zwilich and Phillip Glass. It’s really gratifying to look back and see how many contemporary composers we’ve either commissioned or programmed. And, I have to say, our list of soloists is surpassed by nobody. I would put the list of soloists that we’ve invited over the years over any performing arts organization anywhere.
Conrad Tao is one of the hottest names on the scene right now. He’s writing a piece for us, ‘cos he’s got great composing chops, and he’s playing the Brahms First Piano Concerto. Nancy Zhou is a nod to my father’s centenary. There’s an international violin competition in Shanghai, China, and she is the latest winner. She’s coming to play with us. Anne-Akiko Meyers is playing a fairly new work by Adam Schoenberg and we’ve had a fifteen year relationship with Adam. So it’s really very nice to have a season which looks forward and looks back, celebrating the milestones of the last two decades and looking forward to the next two decades.
Isaac Stern
How does your father’s legacy inform Iris?
I think he was one of the most important musical figures of his time. He was among the greatest violinists of the 20th Century. And he was a towering figure in American musical and cultural life. I like the idea of being a good son and honoring my dad, but it’s not about that. It goes beyond that. I think especially in this day and age, more and more we need to be advocates for those things that we believe we are important, and for arts and music there has never been a more urgent time when advocacy and activism on all levels is important. Certainly for education.
And he, with his bully pulpit, really put his money where his mouth was, and stood up for music and for the arts in a very effective way. Aside from saving Carnegie Hall, which he’s very well known for, he sat in the Oval Office and helped convince the powers that be, or that were, to form the National Endowment for the Arts. He advocated for music in public school systems all the time. He tirelessly worked for higher music education across the board, not just specialized professional education. He mentored some of the greatest young players of his time. And he was always advocating the idea of the primacy of art and music in our lives as Americans. I think that legacy is real and important and deserves to be remembered.
So, Iris carries on that tradition of advocacy. We celebrate the other arts institutions in town. So we’re not competitive with others. On the contrary, I think, more and more, Memphis is exhibiting a really robust and vibrant cultural and musical scene, and that we’ve had the privilege to be a part of it for 20 years is pretty special.
Iris Season Launch: “Jupiter & Ohlsson” at the Germantown Performing Arts Center, Saturday, Oct. 12. Garrick Ohlsson, piano, performs Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2; the orchestra will also perform Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony and Giacomo Puccini’s “Chrysanthemums.”
IRIS at the Brooks: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Sunday, Oct. 13. Garrick Ohlsson, piano, joins IRIS Orchestra musicians for an afternoon of intimate chamber music featuring music by Beethoven.
Courtesy Iris Orchestra 
Allen Cohen 
Iris Orchestra 
Iris Orchestra 
Michael Allen 
courtesy Iris Orchestra 
Phillip Van Zandt 