By WILLIAM HOLDER
Waltham Times Contributing Writer
When Michael Korn, music director of the Waltham Philharmonic Orchestra, selects pieces for the orchestra to perform, he looks for the familiar and the unfamiliar – music that will engage all members of the orchestra and provide enjoyment for the audience.
“I try to maintain a good balance in the repertoire we play between music that everybody knows and music that almost no one knows,” he said. Everyone in this community orchestra “is eager to play all the time. To me, this kind of enthusiasm is very rewarding.”
That enthusiasm will be on display Sunday, Dec. 8, at the Waltham Government Center when the orchestra, celebrating its 40th anniversary season, will perform Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 6. The Beethoven concerto will feature three area soloists, one in high school and the other two in their first year of college. Korn described them as “exceptionally fine musicians.”
Korn said he looks for interesting music, and Dvorak’s 6th Symphony is more rarely performed than the more famous No.7, and especially No.8 and No.9 “From the New World.” Dvorak’s first four symphonies were completely ignored for a long time, Korn said, adding that some believe Dvorak himself numbered his 6th Symphony as No.1 because he considered it to be his first “flawless” symphony.
‘Music the best we’re able to do it’
The Waltham Philharmonic Orchestra consists of 50 to 60 musicians, among them a few professionals and some music teachers, but mostly people who play music for fun rather than as a career.
“The goal,” Korn said, “is to be able to make music the best we’re able to do it.”
They have performed a few world premieres over the years, including “B-Ut-C-H-A, Lamento for Orchestra,” written by the Russian composer Roman Stolyar and named for the Ukrainian town where Russian soldiers massacred Ukrainian civilians early in the war. Stolyar, who made his antiwar views about Russia’s invasion known in a YouTube video, was forced to leave Russia.
At Korn’s request, Stolyar adapted his work for the Waltham orchestra, which performed it in 2022.
“It is very, very modern,” Korn said. “The orchestra at first was shocked by how the sound didn’t match the way it would in more conventional music. In the end they were quite into it.”
A lifetime of music
Korn began playing violin at 5 and later attended one of Russia’s leading music academies. He left what was then the Soviet Union in 1990, emigrating first to Israel and then in 1997 to the United States.
He has performed in many notable venues, including Symphony Hall in Boston, and once on top of a Soviet army vehicle in a small Siberian village, according to his online biography. In the United States, he has performed with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Boston Lyric Opera and the Boston Classical Orchestra.
He has been conducting for nearly 20 years after he turned away from the grueling schedule of a professional orchestra, which typically plays as many as 170 concerts per year. Like athletes, musicians risk having repetitive motion injuries if they continue at that pace for too long.
He is a winner of The American Prize, a national nonprofit competition in the performing arts, in the orchestral programming division. In addition to conducting the Waltham Philharmonic Orchestra, he is music director of the Sharon Community Chamber Orchestra. He has taught musicians from elementary school to adult.
Korn performs as a soloist and in chamber music ensembles throughout New England, and he is a sought-after teacher of violin, viola, chamber music and orchestral conducting.
“I truly love everything I do musically,” he said.
Future events include a March concert featuring Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto, with Waltham soloist Lillian Arnold Mages, and the U.S. premiere of Bohdana Frolyak’s Symphony No. 2. Frolyak is a Ukrainian composer currently living in Ukraine. In May the orchestra will present a gala program for the 40th anniversary concert, featuring music by Aaron Copland.
For more information and tickets, see www.wphil.org.
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