New Haven Independent

Thirty-five years ago, an ad-hoc group of student and faculty musicians from Yale University assembled to perform a collection of works by Charles Ives. Fourteen pieces received their premieres during what James Sinclair recently called a “watershed concert.” What was at the time a celebration of the composer’s music during the centenary year of his birth became something more. That performance, in March 1974, and a second program of Ives’ music performed by the same ad-hoc ensemble in October of that year, marked the inception, for all intents and purposes, of Orchestra New England, known at the time as the Yale Theater Orchestra.

In August 1974 (between the aforementioned concerts), on property owned by the composer’s family in West Redding, an expanded Paul Winter Consort, along with members of the nascent orchestra, presented the Charles Ives Show, an event (Paul) Winter said was designed to be a sort of “musical town meeting.”

Three and a half decades on, Sinclair and Orchestra New England are celebrating the ensemble’s beginnings, and are doing so alongside the Grammy Award-winning Paul Winter Consort in a full-circle April 25 concert event that will also celebrate Earth Day, which will have been officially observed three days earlier. Sinclair said the program would include Ives’ Country Band March, which he and the ad-hoc group of musicians from Yale premiered in 1974, as well as the composer’s The Housatonic at Stockbridge from Three Places in New England, which was performed as part of the Charles Ives Show in August of that year. The program will also include an excerpt from Winter’s work-in-progress, Flyways.

Sinclair, it should be said, is executive editor of The Charles Ives Society, and originally came to New Haven to work with the late John Kirkpatrick, who was the curator of the Charles Ives Archive at Yale.

Orchestra New England’s history is the story of a group of musicians who simply wanted to play together and for Sinclair, the group’s founder, music director and conductor. The goal, looking forward in 1975, Sinclair said, was to perform repertoire that would feature the ensemble’s individual instrumentalists — “to do innovative programming and really show off the players.” And while the group’s size and budget have precluded the programming of works by such composes as Mahler, Bruckner and Rachmaninoff, the orchestra’s repertoire has not been limited to works written before and during the classical period. By this season’s end, Orchestra New England will have performed music from the baroque to the contemporary — from Vivaldi, Haydn and Beethoven to new works by the ensemble’s principal bass player, Joseph Russo, and Southern Connecticut State University Associate Professor Mark Kuss.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

In 1975, under the name Chamber Orchestra of New England, the fledgling group performed a series of concerts at Sprague Hall, one of which featured American soprano Phyllis Curtin, who was then chair of the Yale School of Music’s voice department.

Anne Mauro and her husband, Jean, attended that performance because they knew Curtin. They got involved with the orchestra a few years later. For nearly 30 years, Anne Mauro sat on the group’s Board of Directors, a group her husband was president of and chaired.

“I had no idea what a board member did,” (Anne) Mauro said, laughing. What a board member did, it turned out, was everything from selling subscriptions and raising money to baking cookies and decorating the United Church on the Green for the orchestra’s annual Colonial Concert. Mauro also helped organize special events and started an auxiliary group that she said once numbered about 150 volunteers.

“It’s been really one of the best learning experiences I’ve had in my life,” Mauro said, though it wasn’t always smooth sailing for Orchestra New England. Mauro remembers crying at a board meeting during which she had to make a motion that led to the ensemble filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1989.

Sinclair said Orchestra New England, which was formed during a recession, has fared well during other economically trying times including the early 1980s, which Sinclair described as “our growth years.” And in the late 1980s and early 1990s — Chapter 11 reorganization years — the orchestra made three recordings: one of Ives’ music, one of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ musical Magdalena and one of the revived Cole Porter show Fifty Million Americans. The musical diversity of these three recordings strongly reflects the group’s original mission.

“You should be part of your neighborhood,” Sinclair said about the importance of having the flexibility to perform all sorts of music, including “a lot of literature that’s much less heard.”

The orchestra has been hired for numerous productions of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet, a work that certainly will never be in danger of being classified as “much less heard.”

Still, “It doesn’t feel like a commercial venture,” said violinist Raphael Ryger, who said he began playing with Orchestra New England as a substitute in 1982, became a regular member the following year, and has served as its concertmaster since 1988.

Ryger said the ensemble has maintained a feeling of freshness, one that, “with a different music director … could be gone.”

For Ryger, a software developer pursuing his Ph.D., playing with Orchestra New England is a labor of love.

“I only take what’s really special,” Ryger said with regard to freelance work, “and Orchestra New England is very special.” That includes those who work behind the scenes.

Even during trying financial times, “we’ve had board members, decade after decade, contributing,” Ryger said. “This is real dedication.” Ryger also pointed to volunteers’ dedication, “without which this just wouldn’t work at all.” Throughout the organization, he said, “the dedication is infectious.”

On April 25, all those who are and have been involved during the orchestra’s 35-year history will celebrate that spirit, a spirit that, in large part, begins with Sinclair.

“They play for Jim,” Orchestra New England Director Heidi McAnnally-Linz said of the musicians. “It’s a lot about the community with him and the friendship with him.

“You can see how excited he gets, and you know that’s going to translate into great music,” she said.

“A lot of it clearly derives from Jim,” Ryger said, “because he set the tone.”

Winter, who first met Sinclair in 1974 through meetings with Kirkpatrick and Ken Singleton — who, while studying tuba at Yale, was instrumental in the organization of the Ives programs that year — said he and Sinclair “had a great time working together” 35 years ago. “It was really a simpatico collaboration, so we’re long overdue to get together again.

“(Sinclair) is completely imbued by the spirit and the essence of music,” Winter said. “And that’s what he lives for. It’s very contagious and it’s selfless.”

For details about the April 25 Orchestra New England concert event with the Paul Winter Consort, including a pre-concert reception at Kroon Hall at the Yale School of Forestry& Environmental Studies and the 8 pm performance at Woolsey Hall, visit this website, call the Shubert Box Office at 888-736-2663 or visit here.

This story was originally published in The Arts Paper, a publication of the Arts
Council of Greater New Haven.