Celebrating 50 Seasons of Music at Reno Chamber Orchestra

Published October 11, 2024

Celebrating 50 Seasons of Music at Reno Chamber Orchestra

by Amy Heald (Guest Writer)

Filer image element — *Amy Heald: Executive Director of Reno Chamber Orchestra & Nevada Chamber Music Festival*

Fifty seasons ago, the Reno Chamber Orchestra (RCO) began from a string orchestra made up of off-duty casino orchestra members. Now, on Saturday, October 19 and Sunday October 20, 2024, the RCO opens its 50^th season of music-making. The concert pays homage to our history from our beginning to a look into our next 50 years.

My first encounter with the Reno Chamber Orchestra came twenty years ago as a student at the University of Nevada, Reno, when music education majors were required to attend a number of concerts per semester, taking advantage of all the musical offerings in our community. At first, I gravitated towards the Reno Chamber Orchestra for convenience since the concerts were, and still are, held at Nightingale Concert Hall in the Church Fine Arts (CFA) building at UNR. I was already spending 95% of my time in CFA, so walking twenty feet from my practice room to the concert hall was easy. But I quickly realized how comforting and relatable the RCO concerts felt versus attending a Reno Philharmonic concert which, while an incredible musical experience, felt so much bigger and more formal. Back then, I performed regularly on the Nightingale Stage and used the same rehearsal rooms the RCO musicians used for warmups. So, I attributed my comfort with the RCO to the fact that it performed on my “home turf.” But as time went on, I realized it wasn’t just the space; there was a genuine closeness and familial feel at RCO concerts between the musicians and the audience that was unique to this orchestra.

The tagline of the RCO is “The Intimate Orchestra” for good reason. Besides the closeness at intermission, Nightingale Concert Hall is much smaller than the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts. It only seats about 600 individuals and because of the design the audience is physically much closer to the performers. Also, because we are a chamber orchestra, the number of musicians on our stage does not exceed 36.

And then, there is our music. In 2021 Kelly Kuo was named just the third music director of the Reno Chamber Orchestra. Maestro Kuo’s programming has brought us more in line with our musical roots. We are playing more music that was written specifically for our smaller size orchestra. This includes music from the Baroque (think composers like Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi) and Classical eras (Mozart, Haydn). But Kuo also works very hard to find composers who may have been forgotten to time, like Louise Farrenc—a French composer who studied at the Conservatoire de Paris in the 1820s, but had to be taught composition privately as women were forbidden to enroll in traditional composition classes at this time. Or there is Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, who only wrote one symphony before he died in 1826 at age of 20.

Kelly Kuo is also a champion of the next generation of composers. The RCO is embarking on its first commissioning project in many years. We are working with composer Tanner Porter to create a new work to be premiered by the RCO in May 2025, building a new chapter in the RCO’s history.

All of this creates a different musical experience for audience members versus sitting in among an audience of 1,500 people at the Reno Philharmonic Pioneer Center performances. And that is what is so wonderful about living in Reno. One would not expect a city our size to have two professional orchestras on top of all the other incredible music, theater, dance and visual art that we do. The diverse amount of music being made in our city is something you normally would find in large cities like Seattle, New York, Chicago and I hope you are taking advantage of all of it!

Our season opening concert next weekend will feature three composers just in the first half of the concert, each of them comfortably familiar: Malcolm Arnold, Béla Bartók, and Richard Strauss. The second half then features two living composers: Carlos Simon, whose music has recently been performed by the Reno Philharmonic, and Danny Elfman. Yes, that Danny Elfman, of movie music fame. The same man who composed the music for the Michael Keaton Batman movies and the theme to The Simpsons also writes for chamber orchestra, and we are so excited to be only the third orchestra to perform his new Suite for Chamber Orchestra.

We return to Nightingale Stage just three weeks later with a concert of Debussy, Schubert, and Shostakovich. This concert also features a collaboration with the theater department of Truckee Meadows Community College performing scenes from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet between movements of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Hamlet suite.

Years after first encountering the Reno Chamber Orchestra, I found myself—during my interview for the position of Executive Director of the RCO—relating the story of how welcoming and familial I found those early experiences of the orchestra’s audience and performances. Our concertmaster Ruth Lenz quipped, “Well, part of it is we all have to use the same restroom at intermission.” Which is true! Nightingale Concert Hall does not have a traditional backstage like a bigger concert hall; so, at intermission we all stand in line together. From standing in line and mingling in hallways, to sitting bathed in the orchestra’s music, it is these shared moments of connection that make attending an RCO concert so special.

I hope you join us for our season opening concert Saturday, October 19 at 7:30pm or Sunday, October 20 at 2pm in Nightingale Concert Hall, University of Nevada, Reno.

Thank you to Amy Heald, writing as a guest for our reoccurring ART VIEWS contributor, Scott Faulkner