Chamber Orchestra Grows Its Mission

At just a little before 8 p.m. in Worthington Hooker’s auditorium, 19th century composer Gaetano Donizetti was very much in the house, spreading his 1838 libretto for Elixir of Love liberally from the drums to the woodwinds right up to the string sections. Humble, poor Nemorino (Lucas van Lierop) was falling hard for wealthy Adina (Sorae Kim), every one of his advances rebuffed as he followed her through the village. The quacky Dr. Dulcamara (Paweł Konik) assured him he had the solution: a brew potent and occult enough to win the heart of any maiden, however difficult. Nemorino obliged, his bouncy, love-filled song filling the space as he won Adina over.

Far removed from a 19th-century stage, the three vocalists were conjuring Donizetti during a rehearsal for the New Haven Chamber Orchestra’s Winter Concert in East Rock this coming Saturday, which will end with segments of the opera and also feature work by Joseph Haydn. The concert is free, and starts at 2 p.m.

The NHCO has done opera before, bringing the house — and several pint-sized audience members especially — to its feet last year when it performed excerpts from Mozart’s Magic Flute also at Worthington Hooker. But this year, a feeling of distinct musical change and experiment is in the air, said board officer and organizational guru Jessica Sack, who also plays the violin in the orchestra and works full-time as an educator at the Yale University Art Gallery. That’s thanks largely to new support from the Mayor’s Community Arts Grant Program, which will allow the NHCO to expand its mission of barrier-free music making, and challenge its members anew.

“This grant has helped us in so many ways this year,” Sack said after Tuesday night’s rehearsal. ​”We so appreciate the support. As far as what this concert has meant to me, I’m so excited to see that more youth are joining our group. We are becoming an intergenerational orchestra that performs for an intergenerational audience.”

There are several initiatives that the grant is allowing. Foremost for Sack, the NHCO will be expanding and continuing programs it hasn’t always had the resources to, like a music and literacy project that gives away children’s books to families who come to concerts (Zin Zin Zin! A Violin is on tap for this concert), and a nascent artist-in-residence program providing new learning opportunities for both NHCO members and patrons. 

A sort of subcategory of that, Sack said, is the NHCO’s steadily growing youth involvement, which provides new chances for intergenerational mentorship.

Three years ago, the ensemble started inviting on students who have now all but completed high school. Now, faces like cellist Isabel Melchinger’s and Noel Mitchell’s feel natural and integral when the group sits down to practice.

There’s one more cool thing, Sack added. For concerts in the future, the NHCO will be putting funds from the grant towards renting music, so it is able to play more pieces than those exclusively in the public domain. Which opens the repertoire that the group is able to play, and opportunities for mentorship among members who may know the pieces and members who may not.

As the group took up its instruments and songbooks in rehearsal, that excitement was palpable. From the right of the stage, violist Marc Mann and Melchinger both laughed as Konik brandished a green Nalgene bottle and promised an elixir of eternal happiness. Someone deep in the strings giggled when Nemorino finally started getting attention from Adina, and the tempo picked up. Mitchell looked like he was having fun, drawing on Sack for support. Park swayed as he lifted his baton to try a measure again. None of them needed to worry which funds the next concert, next book, or next residency this was coming out of. They were just there to play.