By Milton Moore Publication: The DayPublished 01/25/2010 12:00 AM Updated 01/25/2010 06:19 AM
New London - At the start of Saturday's Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra concert, the fourth under new Music Director Toshi Shimada, the conductor asked the audience at the GardeArtsCenter for a mid-term grade.
In the audience's programs, Shimada said, there's a questionnaire, one that focused on audience response to his programming of music new to this audience. "I'm wondering what you're thinking," Shimada said.The crowd immediately replied with applause.
Shimada then proceeded to conduct a spirited and revelatory program of three works that spanned centuries and once again proved that he has lifted the orchestra to a new level. His conducting reveals the myriad voices in each work, a sonic transparency that never feels fussy, while retaining a keen sense of the overall shape and effect of long spans of composition.
In the evening's big sonic work, Stravinsky's 1947 Suite from "Petrouchka," it seemed that each principal in the orchestra was a star, as the mercurial orchestration spotlighted an obbligato for virtually every instrument amid its cross-cutting meters and rhythmic bustle. In the programmatic counterpoint to Stravinsky, Haydn's 1795 Symphony No. 104, the "London Symphony," Shimada led a pared-down, Classical-era sized ensemble in a beautifully phrased and paced performance that mined all the wit, tunefulness and pure pleasure Haydn offers.
Between these stylistic bookends, he used a smaller orchestra still - just 28 pieces - for Ibert's 1935 concerto for chamber orchestra and alto saxophone, the Concertino da Camera. The soloist in this very French, very Jazz Age work was ECSO Instrumental Composition Contest winner Stephen Charles Page Jr., who traversed its cascades of sixteenth notes and the sax's wide register, from its guttural basement to its upper oboe territory, with a playful ease. In the bluesy opening to the second movement, his honeyed tone and supple phrasing, with no apparent attack to any note, transformed the theater hall with a late-night jazz club spell.
The opening performance of the London Symphony, which Shimada called his "tribute to New London," basked in the charms of the Classical era, a period overlooked for nearly a decade by the former music director. The small orchestra - with just four cellos - was at its best, the string sections responding beautifully to Shimada's fine sense of phrasing. The andante slow movement was both delicate and rhythmically sharp - no small feat - and as the surprising modulations at its center dropped into an emotive minor, Shimada threw back his shoulders and spread his arms, as if swan diving into its depths.
The concluding Stravinsky suite, for all of its sizzle, is woven of thin cloth, with a handful of motifs that reappear again and again. It succeeds on its rhythmic energy and on the musicians' virtuosity as the score's spotlight moves from section to section - and Saturday, it was a success indeed.
Shimada kept the polyrhythms brewing, creating a sense of ostinato as its unifying character. He drew on all of its sonic power, especially the nearly sub-sonic rumblings from the large bass section, the contrabassoon and that most Russian basso profundo of instruments, the bass clarinet.
Virtually all of the principals had fine moments, often paired or in trios. Flutist Nancy Chaput, oboist Anne Megan, pianist Gary Chapman, bassoonist Tracy McGinnis, English hornist Olav van Hezewijk, trumpeter Julia Caruk, and concertmaster Stephan Tieszen all earned their bows.
The sound world was luxurious, from muted brass ensembles to bass clarinet and clarinet doubling to create a box organ effect. The one flaw was the use of an electronic keyboard for the celeste, which sounded far more like a synth than the sparkling chimes of the true instrument.
Congratulations to
our Principal Clarinetist, Kelli O'Connor
and Bass Player, Robert Weirnath
on the birth of their daughter!
We welcome
Teighan Olibhia Weirath
Born Tuesday, January 5, 2010,
6:06 p.m. by C-section
8 pounds 10 ounces
21 inches long
Her nickname is Tigi!
Chorus Concert Rescheduled
The Eastern Connecticut Symphony Chorus concert, planned for Saturday, December 19and postponed because of the blizzard of 2009, will now take place on Wednesday, January 13, at 7:30 PM, in the historic Harkness Chapel on the ConnecticutCollege campus in New London. Those who already purchased tickets to the originally scheduled concert please use the tickets already purchased and be aware of the difference in the time.The chorus will perform excerpts from Mendelssohn's "Elijah" in honor of the 200th celebration of his birth, along with seasonal favorites. The chorus directed by Mark Singleton, consists of 75 auditioned voices and is the only remaining symphony chorus in the state. An ensemble of 20 musicians from the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, along with Joan Cook playing the organ, will accompany the Chorus. Tickets can be purchased from any chorus member or at the door. Admission is $20 for adults; $18 for seniors and students. For more information, please visit www.ectsymphony.com and follow the chorus link or contact ECSC President, Sheri Pellerin, at .
Chorus Auditions
The Eastern Connecticut Symphony Chorus will begin their rehearsals for the spring semester on Wednesday, January 20, at 7:00 PM at the First Congregational Church in New London. All interested singers are invited to this open rehearsal with the hopes that they will decide to audition and join the group. Auditions for new members will take place on Wednesday, January 27, at 6:00 PM in the dining hall at the rear of the church. Singers should bring music for their audition, such as a hymn. Show tunes are not acceptable. If selected, singers may be invited to attend rehearsal immediately following at 7:00. The chorus, conducted by Mark Singleton, rehearses every Wednesday evening from 7:00 to 9:00. On April 10, the chorus will appear with the Eastern Connecticut Symphony at the GardeArtsCenter under the direction of Toshiyuki Shimada performing Poulenc's "Gloria." In May, the chorus will perform Mendelssohn's "Elijah" in collaboration with the Middletown Chorale. For further information, please visit www.ectsymphony.com and follow the chorus link, or contact chorus President, Sheri Pellerin, at .
New London - Saturday evening's concert by the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra was a tribute to thinking big.
Music director Toshi Shimada fronted a big orchestra bristling with percussionists, led three works that took very different approaches to create a sense of the monumental, and collaborated with the biggest name soloist the ECSO has presented in many a year.
The soloist was pianist Peter Serkin - he of musical royalty, the son of pianist Rudolf Serkin and grandson of violinist Adolf Busch - who lived up to his billing with a bravura performance of Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1. The tall, patrician Serkin, at the peak of his artistic powers at age 62, was commanding as he traversed the scope of this most Romantic of Brahms' major works, alternately explosively forceful and entrancingly introspective.
This is a concert piece that is fueled more by emotion and the quality of expression than by virtuosity, a concerto that was recast from piano sonatas and has far less a sense of soloist and accompaniment than most. Younger soloists could have learned much by watching Serkin and Shimada interact, as they kept close watch on each other and shared the pulse of the work's give-and-take.
In the big two-handed chords that propel the outer movements, Serkin fairly vibrated with energy, especially in the first movement, which Shimada took at a brisk pace and shook off any traces of gloom from its portentous orchestral opening. But most arresting was Serkin's treatment of the hushed, lyrical second theme, as he intensified the drama by hanging off the beat, creating the sense that he was drifting away in his own reverie, while never losing the thread of ensemble. That mood was redoubled in the slow movement, which opened with a lush sonority in the strings and bassoons before Serkin wove a poetic solo so intimate that audience members in the GardeArtsCenter must have felt as if they were eavesdropping.
The final movement, the most conventional of the three with its rondo form for pianistic variety, was all dashing excitement. Here, Serkin and Shimada were in constant interplay - on Serkin's return to the expansive second motif, Shimada beamed at him from the podium like a proud father. The mood of collaboration was confirmed when, after a sustained final ovation, Serkin walked around the orchestra to shake hands with the key front desk principals.
Sharing the spotlight in the two other big works on the program were the sonic yin and yang of flutist Nancy Chaput and timpanist Kuljit Rehncy.
The program opened with "blue cathedral," a 1999 tone poem by American composer Jennifer Higdon, the most-performed contemporary work in the U.S. these days. A tribute to the composer's brother, who died in youth, it is built on two singing voices - that of the composer, as voiced by flutist Chaput, and her brother, voiced by clarinet principal Kelli O'Connor.
The Copland-like work started with these two voices over softly sighing strings, and it built in layers of sound, reaching a vibrant sonority as the five percussionists (three playing the chimes together at one point) and timpanist Rehncy joined with a brass chorale. And the orchestral color drifted into new territory in the moving closing measures, as the clarinet seemingly ascended to the heavens over the soft rustle of 50 quiet Chinese bells in the hands of the string players and the eerie hum of glass harmonicas (wine glasses rubbed to vibrate) in the hands of the brass section.
Chaput had the starring role in the program's central piece, Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Weber, a 1943 work written while the German composer was the head of the music department at Yale, where Shimada now teaches.
Shimada was at his finest leading this four-movement work, keeping it light on its feet and, as is becoming his trademark here, transparent in the complex voicings of the intricate sectional interplay. Hindemith brews up a thick contrapuntal stew in much of it, but Shimada never bogged down.
Chaput shined brightly in the complex, long flute obbligato ending the slow movement, a fleet and long-breathed passage that lit up the hall. And Rehncy and the percussionists put on a great show of musicianship as they took a set of variations from the energetic and playful scherzo and made them sing.
It was an entertaining, at times thrilling, evening. Shimada continues to win audience trust in his first season here; both the contemporary work and the potential quagmire of Hindemith were vivid, fresh and well-received. And the appreciative audience gave a long ovation to one member of the ECSO who has yet to pick up an instrument.
Orchestra Executive Director Isabelle Singer was honored at intermission for her 25th anniversary of keeping the orchestra on stage and thriving. Now on her fourth music director here, Singer gets to take much of the credit for orchestra's success.
ECSO board president Paul McGlinchey put it succinctly as he gestured to the orchestra:
"What you see here on the stage, our new music director Toshi Shimada, all these talented musicians … the common thread is Isabelle Singer."
New London - It's easy to be fooled by Toshi Shimada's conducting. Watching Shimada lead the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra without a score in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5, conducting the 50-minute work with detailed, full-body control of the 80-piece ensemble, you could be lured into believing that the orchestra is just one vast instrument and Shimada is the virtuoso soloist.
Crafting the long sweep of musical drama, with its nuances of sonic and emotional shape-shifting, was Shimada's obvious triumph Saturday night at the GardeArtsCenter. But the orchestra's new music director seems to have the gift for enabling the musicians far more than controlling them.
In Saturday's concert, which also featured a thoroughly entertaining reading of Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 by ECSO Concertmaster Stephan Tieszen, Shimada continued to display what may be his trademark: his ability to reveal inner voices, to display the subtleties of a score without getting lost in the details, and to allow the musicians to play at their best.
In the symphony's opening moments, as clarinetists Kelli O'Connor and Chantal Hovendick paired for the somber “Fate” theme that underpins the entire work, Shimada carried them forward on gently swelling, beautifully phrased sectional playing in the violas and cellos. In the long, exposed solo that opens the lovely second movement, long-time ECSO French horn principal Dana Lord captivated the audience with a gorgeous tone, yet Shimada supported Lord's spotlight moment with seamless sonic bloom growing from the cellos through the violins. And not lost in the infectious waltzing strings of the third movement were the lovely solos by principal bassoonist Tracy McGinnis.
Under Shimada, the ECSO can be thrilling both in its sum and in its parts. In Tchaikovsky's almost bipolar score that leaps back and forth from fortissimos to pianissimos, Shimada found countless nuances of dynamics in between. The “Fate” theme, which returns again and again in different dramatic roles, seemed endlessly colored, with dynamic tapering within measures at times. This sonic control made the brassy blaze-ups all the more spine-tingling, even savage.
Shimada is also a visual guide for the audience. As the calm second movement love song grew in intensity from the horns and winds through the strings, the conductor was all but vibrating with the mounting tension. After the snarling “Fate” theme shattered the movement's reverie, Shimada bent at the waist and swayed both arms like a human metronome to start the string pizzicatos back in time. In the symphony's finale, as the “Fate” theme finally emerges as a heroic march, the conductor raised himself to full height and threw back his head with a look as triumphant as the theme.
The vast Romantic outpouring of the Tchaikovsky was nicely contrasted by Tieszen's performance of the Mozart concerto, playing on gut strings before Classical-era sized
25-piece orchestra.
Tieszen's solo was a labor of love, with many months of preparation as he not only edited the score using a facsimile copy of Mozart's original, he wrote his own cadenzas, those exposed solo show-stoppers, performed for the first time Saturday.
Playing, as did Mozart, on gut strings, Tieszen cast a sweet sound and an air of intimacy, even in this most playful concerto. In the first movement, he shaped the phrasing and the timbre subtly between phrases to create the sense of an internal dialogue. In the slow movement, he created a breathy swell in the long phrases, rising and falling like an operatic messa di voce. And his cadenzas were delights.
The musical ideas for his first movement cadenza were drawn from the orchestral introduction, first in stops, then with drones accompanying the figures before drifting into a lyrical mood. The slow movement cadenza, which Tieszen said he completed the day before the performance, was based on the see-sawing, back-and-forth figure at the heart of the movement's songlike theme, salted with tangy stops. And the third movement cadenza was based on the goofy theme of the Turkish march section, made even more extreme, and he employed a harmonic sleight-of-hand to lyrically slide out of it all.
The cadenzas were characteristic, perhaps more fitting the source music than many in common use, with a sense of freshness and adventure, and Tieszen salted the final movement with a number of ornaments of his own making.
The concerto suffered a bit from an imbalance at times between the orchestra and soloist, due to the inherent differences between modern strings and gut strings. And at the start of the Turkish march, as Shimada turned to look at the violinist with an impish smile, Tieszen knocked his score from the stand and had to pause the performance to reassemble its many sheets.
The program opened with Toru Takemitsu's 1982 “Star-Ilse,” a concise tone-painting inspired by the composer's communion with nature.
Saturday's concert was Shimada's third leading the ECSO (including his audtion last year), and he continued to reveal not just the beauty and vitality of the scores, but the talent of his musicians. The mood in the hall, and the orchestra itself, couldn't be brighter.
I had the privilege to attend the opening of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra for the season on Sept. 26. I could have closed my eyes and thought that the Chicago Symphony was in front of me. Their sound was in a word, awesome.
The new director Toshiyuki Shimada seemed to be a perfect fit for this talented orchestra. While leading he seemed to also highlight their talents. I have followed the evolution of this fine orchestra since before Paul Phillips. I thought that the symphony reached its zenith under Mr. Phillips, but they played on an even higher level here. It was hard for me to believe that this orchestra was local. What they do for the community cannot be overstated. The concert rose to a crescendo with “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Although the pianist was a virtuoso, the orchestra stayed with him perfectly, to provide an incredible experience.
To prepare for this weekend's performance of a Mozart violin concerto, Stephan Tieszen rehearses with his 1723 violin and sings into his 2009 Blackberry. Eras change, but Stephan and Wolfgang are in intense collaboration right now.
As concertmaster of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra in New London, Tieszen is usually the first among equals when the 80 musicians gather to perform. Saturday, Tieszen gets to leave his seat to stand front and center as the soloist in Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5.
He has soloed before with the orchestra, including a performance of the vast Beethoven Violin Concerto in 1998. But this time, it's different.
This time, Tieszen is writing his own cadenzas, the solo passages where the violinist can take the basic musical material of the movement and, in effect, riff on it like a jazzman. Back in the late 1700s, when musicians such as Mozart and Haydn wrote concertos, they generally left the riffing to the trusted performer, since they were so often the soloists.
As time passed, composers such as Beethoven and Mendelssohn left nothing to chance and wrote out cadenzas, giving the soloist the space to show off while retaining the musical line the composers intended.
Later in the 19th century, many accomplished soloists wrote excellent cadenzas for older works, and these eventually became published and engrained into 20th century performances. For much of the 20th century, even the best violinists, even Heifetz, played somebody else's cadenzas. But this is the 21st century, and Tieszen - like many other musicians - is going back to basics. He is getting into Mozart's head and writing his own cadenzas.
”Because we come to Mozart as adults,” he says, “we play it the wrong way. The violin concertos were written by a teenager, and the silly and flippant nature of the music often goes right by us.” Mozart's music is full of puns and gags, poking fun at another composer's music or a then-famous performer's style. If you don't know the cultural references, you don't get the gags. ”It would be like him watching 'The Simpsons,'” Tieszen says.
Tieszen makes a fine interpreter of Mozart because, like the composer, he has a highly attuned sense of the absurd, laughs easily and always stops for a good joke. Tieszen knows that a Mozart violin concerto is plenty engaging for those of us who don't have a Ph.D. in music, but his research deepens his own understanding of the musical ideas that are the grist for the cadenzas.
A concerto has three movements, and each has a cadenza, a place where the orchestra stops and the violinist gets to show off. The first and last movements are quick-paced, with a number of themes and variants for Tieszen to explore. But the middle movement is a leisurely, gorgeous operatic aria for the violin - this is the tough one.
Tieszen laughs as he holds up his Blackberry. “I think I got it,” he says. “I had an idea driving here on 95, so I sang it into my phone so I wouldn't forget.” It's safe to say that Tieszen is obsessed right now, consumed with preparation. He is poring over manuscripts, editing and annotating not just the solo violin part, but the score for every member of the orchestra. Published scores often contain errors (there's a lot of notes), and Mozart's original handwritten manuscript, called an “autograph score,” had disappeared in the fog of World War II only to re-emerge about 15 years ago.
Tieszen opens a facsimile of the autograph score, and the dilemma is clear. Imagine an impetuous 18-year-old, writing quickly with a scratchy quill pen by candlelight. The first issue is the dots and dashes on the manuscript. A dash drawn beneath a note means it should be played staccato; a dot means the note should be shortened followed by a rest. Peer at the hand-written pen stabs, and you wonder: Is that a dash or a dot?
When you combine this inexact penmanship with Mozart's personality that merged innovative genius with childlike playfulness, you can see that a lot of high points may have been flattened from his score by later generations. As Tieszen puts it: Is that ornament a joke, or is it an error? A pedantic editor would probably call it an error, and “fix” it.
Mozart never liked to repeat himself, but other composers usually repeated whole sections of their music quite literally. That same editor, seeing Mozart goofing around with a repeat, might simply ignore what was before his eyes and publish a literal repeat.
Tieszen's editing is a tricky business, requiring the skills of a musician and a historian, energized by an appreciation for he calls Mozart's “inspired silliness.”
”It usually takes me three months to prepare one of these, but actually, it's taken me 20 years,” he says. Tieszen speaks in detail of using the proper period bow and the proper combination of metal and gut strings on his violin. He speaks of the sources he's read that infer the sort of vibrato and phrasing used by the teenage Mozart when he performed.
Tieszen jumps from 21st-century pop culture references, characterizing one Mozartian of musical material as “a little kid with ADD racing around the house,” to Bach's technical underpinnings of harmonics that both he and Mozart studied. He points to a passage in one of his hand-written cadenzas and cheerfully says, “See, it's a retrograde inversion!”For audience members Saturday at the GardeArtsCenter, this extreme attention to detail will probably go unnoticed. The concerto will flow from orchestra and soloist with all of the beauty and playfulness and sense of inevitability that has kept Mozart beloved for centuries.
And that's the point: Never let 'em see you sweat.
Published on 9/28/2009 in Home »Features »FeaturesNew London-
Toshiyuki Shimada did not disappoint. The ovation was long and strong at the Garde Arts Center Saturday when he simply showed his face on stage, and the new music director of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, so winning in his tryout here a year ago, once again charmed the audience with his wit and delighted them with his music-making.
From the long lyrical spans of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony to the rapid-fire metric complexities of Bernstein's Overture to “Candide,” Shimada proved a perfect fit, revealing talents of the ECSO ensemble and principals seldom heard before. He led an intentionally tuneful, crowd-pleasing program that thoroughly pleased the near-sell-out crowd.
An assistant professor of conducting at Yale and music director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, Shimada began the evening with a brief statement of appreciation at his selection from a group of six finalists to replace Xiao-Lu Li, who led the ECSO for a decade. Shimada gestured to the audience as he said, “We are now starting, all together, our collaboration.” He had programmed what he called “a pop-sy concert … You will be saying, “I know this tune.’” He opened with Rossini's Overture to “William Tell,” a television staple from “Loony Tunes” to “The Lone Ranger,” to prove his point.
Sharing the spotlight with Shimada were many of the orchestra's principals: new cello principal, the 25-year-old Romanian-born Mihai Marica, whose obbligatos and very presence seem to have transformed a crucial section; oboist Anne Megan; trumpet principal Julia Caruk; and above all, clarinet principal Kelli O'Connor, who along with Clark had a ball wandering off the charts in Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue.”
From cellist Marica's opening of the Rossini overture and the unexpected pleasures of the singing operatic voice in the cello section, the orchestra played superbly for Shimada - and seemed to know it. There were smiles everywhere.
Shimada appears immune to performance pressure; he radiated a sense of ease and comfort fronting the 80-plus musicians. He is active in his cuing, attentive with the baton when called for and physically dynamic without seeming showy. He did flash some moments of showmanship, pantomiming a rider during the galloping rhythms of the hoe-down in Copland's “Rodeo.” After the applause, he said to the audience, “You have never seen a Japanese cowboy before, have you?” He had the audience howling with his demonstration of his Texas/Japanese accent, acquired during his five years with the Houston Symphony Orchestra.
During the lyrical and emotive Schubert, a few audience members clapped after the first movement, and Shimada turned to hush them. Afterward, he explained he felt clapping between movements breaks the flow of the composition, and at the end of the first movement of the four-movement Copland, when a smattering of applause rippled, he turned with a sly smile and waved four fingers. But, as in his tryout here, it was the response of the musicians that was most dramatic. Once again, Shimada gave this orchestra a new sound, more transparent to reveal all of the voices and more sectionally balanced. He is skillful in the shaping of dynamics, mastering the acoustic challenges of the hall, and has a keen sense of harmonic structure that reaches across many measures, even in episodic works like the Rossini and Copland.
In the Rossini, it was the nuances of the slow passages that were a revelation, no longer mere connective tissue. And in the Schubert, he carried the long singing melodies to the dark and bitter outbursts that punctuate the developments as if these long harmonic journeys were inevitable. The Bernstein overture, with its crazy 3/2 meters and tumble-down-the-stairs phrasings, was a cheerful romp, propelled by five percussionists, and Shimada was grinning broadly through much of it.
The scripted program ended with pianist Jeffrey Biegel soloing in “Rhapsody in Blue” - “the United Airlines theme,” as Shimada put it. Biegel gave the solos a surprising intimacy, a sense of a jazzman's musings late at night in a saloon, and the orchestra played with jazzy freedom in the solos.
By that point, Shimada had his audience so at ease that during the encore of “Stars and Stripes Forever” (a tip of the cap to Arthur Fiedler), the audience not only clapped in time, there were scattered pockets of sing-alongs of the grade school version: “Be kind to our fine feathered friends …”
Shimada seems a perfect fit for this orchestra and audience. On the podium, he appears both a peer of the musicians before him and a soloist playing this orchestra like a keyboard. And he is just plain likable, sort of equal parts Leonard Bernstein (with whom he studied) in his air of command, and Victor Borge, with his dry and ready humor.
The audience arrived early, many coming from a black-tie fundraiser across the street at the Thames Club, and stayed late, for sweets and champagne in the lobby. Thanks to Shimada's debut performance, the ECSO should expect many return customers.
ECSO'S NEW ORCHESTRA MEMBERS
We welcome the following people who recently auditioned to the Eastern Connecticut Orchestra:
A TOAST TO TOSHI! Below are some pictures from a party on September 10th welcoming our new Music Director and Conductor, Toshi Shimada.
ECSO Woodwind Trio includes Cheryl Banker pictured playing the bassoon, Anne
Megan, oboist, and Ruth Ann Heller, playing the clarinet.
Toshiyuki Shimada, guest of honor, with Isabelle Singer, ECSO Executive Director.
In the background, Van Brown and Eva Virsik, Toshi's wife.
Hostess Obby Tapley with Toshi.
From left to right: ECSO Board Member, Beth Tillman; Ed & Obby Tapley, hosts;
Toshi Shimada; Paul McGlinchey, ECSO President.
OUR NEW MUSIC DIRECTOR
The Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra in New London, CT., is thrilled to announce the appointment of Toshiyuki (Toshi) Shimada as its fifth music director in 63 years. Toshiyuki Shimada has been Music Director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra of Yale University since 2005. He is also Music Director Laureate of the Portland Symphony Orchestra, in Portland, Maine, where he served as Music Director from 1986 to 2006. Prior to his Portland engagement, he was Associate Conductor of the Houston Symphony Orchestrafor six years, beginning in 1981. Since 1998, he has also served as Principal Conductor of the Vienna Modern Masters record label in Austria. In addition, he is Music Director and Chief Creative Officer of the Trinity Music Partners, LLC, which holds the worldwide rights to the Vatican Library Music Collection, and he has been serving as Artistic Adviser of the Tulare County Symphony Orchestra in Californiasince 2007.
Toshi has a background which is rich with credentials. Maestro Shimada has had the good fortune to study with many distinguished conductors of the past and the present, including Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan, Herbert Blomstedt, Hans Swarovsky, and Michael Tilson Thomas. He was a finalist in the 1979 Herbert von Karajan conducting competition in Berlin, and a Fellow Conductor in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, in 1983. In addition, he was named Ariel Musician of the Year in 2003 by Ariel Records, and received the ASCAP award in1989. He has also consistently become an integral and beloved member of every community he joins, receiving the Portland Fire Department's Merit Award, the Maine Publicity Bureau Cultural Award, and the Italian Heritage Society Cultural Award, and having a number of days named in his honor: Toshiyuki Shimada Day in Houston, TX, Toshiyuki Shimada Week in Portland, Maine, and Toshiyuki Shimada Day in the State of Maine. In May 2006 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Fine Arts by the Maine College of Arts. At the YaleUniversity, he has been selected as the Fellow of the DavenportCollege and a member of the Elizabethan Club.
Maestro Shimada has been a frequent guest conductor with a number of European orchestras, including the Morovian Philharmonic Orchestra in the Czech Republic, Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Chamber Orchestra, the Slovak Philharmonic, NÖ Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna, L’Orchestre National de Lille in France, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at the Edinburgh Festival. He has also guest conducted the Houston Symphony, Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, San José Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops Orchestra, and many other US and Canadian orchestras. During May and June of 2008, the Yale Symphony Orchestra and Maestro Shimada made a highly successful Italian tour performing in Rome, Florence, Bologna and Milan.
He records with the Vienna Modern Masterslabel, and with the Moravian Philharmonic, and currently he has fifteen Compact Discs. He also records for the Capstone Records, the Querstand-VKJK (Germany) and the Albany Records. His recording of Gregory Hutter's Skyscrapers has just been released through the Naxos label.
Maestro Shimada lives in Connecticut, with his wife, concert pianist, Eva Virsik and their son Matias.
CHARLES CHU PRINTS The Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra is currently selling prints by noted brush artist, Charles Chu, in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the ECSO. A very limitededition of 50 signed and numbered prints priced at $200 each are available through the ECSO office, 289 State Street, New London. (Telephone 860-443-2876) Click here to see the poster.
Mozart & Me
