Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra

Twice as Nice: Catching up with Andreas Delfs

Published 2017-07-25

The middle of summer is an odd time to be thinking about festive carols, red and green, or holiday cheer, but Andreas Delfs is already looking forward to leading the Milwaukee Symphony’s annual Holiday Pops concert in December. Thinking back on his 12 years as music director of the MSO, Delfs remembers bringing his children to the traditional holiday concert every year, and what an important role it played in the city’s life. “Our classical audiences, if they went to one pops concert, it was the holiday weekend,” he said. And his wife and son have birthdays in early December, “so it’ll be wonderful to be in Milwaukee to celebrate that and see a lot of old friends.”

"Music makes us feel; technique helps us get there": Thoughts on music education and more with violist Nicole Sutterfield

Published 2017-07-12

Back when Nicole Sutterfield did a lot of presentations at schools, she liked to play a few short excerpts on her viola and ask the students for reactions. “They were almost all emotional,” she says. “Happy, sad, it sounds like a funeral, it sounds like bunnies. But it was never ‘You used a lot of slurs,’ or ‘You used all the strings,’ or ‘It was in C major.’” But then Sutterfield would play the excerpts again, with a new tempo or articulation or changing the mode from major to minor, and the reactions would be different. “The point of music is to make us feel something,” she says, “but it’s through technique that we get there.”

Welcome, Cheryl Frazes Hill

Published 2017-06-27

In a sense, Cheryl Frazes Hill feels like she’s coming home to the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus. Frazes Hill, the director of choral activities at Roosevelt University in Chicago and assistant director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, was announced as the next director of the MSO Chorus in April. “It’s almost like coming full circle,” she said, because when she was still in high school, she sang under Margaret Hawkins, the founder of the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus and a friend and protégé of Margaret Hillis, who founded the Chicago Symphony Chorus.

From Gershwin to 'La La Land': Composer Justin Hurwitz & the MSO

Published 2017-06-15

Growing up in Fox Point, Justin Hurwitz was a regular at Milwaukee Symphony concerts in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This weekend, the orchestra will perform his music as it plays the live soundtrack to the Oscar-winning movie La La Land at the Riverside Theater. Hurwitz grew up loving the Disney musicals of the 1990s such as The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, but he absorbed a lot in Uihlein Hall as well.

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