Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra

Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra music director Andrew Koehler will lead a program called "Wanderlust" at 4 pm Sunday, Nov 7 at Chenery Auditorium, in which each half begins with an American work and ends in another country. 

Flutist Emma Temple, winner of the 2020 KJSO Concerto Competition, will also perform her competition piece with the group. They talk to Cara Lieurance about the concert, and plans for the orchestra to tour Spain and Portugal in 2022. It's the KJSO's first tour since visiting South Africa in 2018.

Andrew Koehler, music director of the Kalamazoo Junior Symphony, Kalamazoo Philharmonia, and WMU Symphony, touched on how each group is faring during the pandemic in a conversation with Cara Lieurance.

Before the COVID-19 crisis began, longtime Western Michigan University Symphony Orchestra music director Bruce Uchimura asked Andrew Koehler, a prominent regional conductor and a professor of music at Kalamazoo College, to conduct the symphony for the 2020/21 season. In an interview with Cara Lieurance, Koehler says he was thrilled at the chance to work with an ensemble of dedicated young players on canonical repertoire.  Now, with the pandemic threatening to disrupt school openings, Koehler is navigating restricted paths for music-making at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo College, and as director of the Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra. He discusses some of the solutions, and the repertoire that will be remembered by the players as music that got them through the pandemic.

The Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra will continue its season at 4 pm on Sunday, Feb 9 at Chenery Auditorium  with a program called "Defining Romanticism." It brings together music of three great composers of the 19th century: Richard Wagner, Camille St.-Saëns, and Robert Schumann. In a conversation with Cara Lieurance, conductor Andrew Koehler explains some of the ways each composer defined Romanticism, and they listen to excerpts of Wagner's Prelude to Die Meistersinger, St.-Saëns' Violin Concerto No. 3, and Schumann's Symphony No. 3, "Rhenish." 

Violinist Sory Park, the bronze medalist of the 2019 Stulberg International String Competition, will return as soloist. She is a student of Soovin Kim at the New English Conservatory of Music in Boston, MA.

At 4 pm on Sunday, Nov 10 at Chenery Auditorium, the Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra will open its season with four works which conductor Andrew Koehler sums up as 'Shifting Landscapes.' They are Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture (Fingal's Cave), which depicts a remote place in Scotland; The Accursed Huntsman, Cesar Franck's mythic tone poem; an extremely rare piece by Z. Noskowski inspired by a mountain lake in Poland, and Poems of the Sea by Ernst Bloch.