About the Orchestra

Now beginning its thirty-seventh season, the JCC Symphony Orchestra (JCCSO) is the oldest continuously performing orchestra in Montgomery County, Maryland. Its first concert, on 12 December 1970, was conducted by James Perdue, a faculty member at Catholic University. Joel Berman, then Professor of Violin and Chamber Music at the University of Maryland, became the orchestra's conductor later that season and remained through the 1987-88 season, when the present Music Director, Joel Lazar, began his tenure.

The JCCSO is fortunate that a few of its charter members still play in the orchestra, and through the years the membership has comprised a fascinating mixture of musicians, including emeritus members of the National Symphony Orchestra. Some former members of the orchestra, who played as volunteers in the JCCSO when new to DC, are now among the area's busiest professionals. The orchestra also counts among its ranks music teachers and avocational players, the latter a remarkable group of people with extraordinarily diverse backgrounds and experience - "gifted amateurs," in the words of The Washington Post. We have also benefitted from the presence of a number of talented and poised student instrumentalists who have subsequently gone on to study at major conservatories and music schools, among these Curtis, Juilliard, Oberlin, Peabody, Northwestern University, the Shepherd School at Rice University, the University of Southern California, the North Carolina School for the Arts, and the New England Conservatory. Several have progressed to careers as members of major orchestras, freelance artists and recognized soloists.

The JCCSO has enjoyed a special relationship with Young Concert Artists since the late 1980's enabling the orchestra to offer as soloists many significant artists at an early stage in their careers. Among these are pianists David Golub, Sergei Edelmann and Adam Neiman, soprano Marvis Martin, baritone Christòpheren Nomura, violinists Chee-Yun, Scott Yoo, Timothy Fain and Nicolas Kendall, violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama, hornist Robert Routch, clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, the Claremont Trio and the Saint Lawrence String Quartet. Yo-Yo Ma played with the orchestra as an emerging artist under the auspices of the Concert Artists Guild. Similarly, David (Sara Davis) Buechner and the Marlboro Trio appeared with the assistance of the Yale and Peggy Gordon Trust.

Recently, several members of the National Symphony Orchestra have been soloists with the JCCSO - associate concertmaster Elisabeth Adkins, assistant concertmaster Ricardo Cyncynates, principal oboist Rudolph Vrbsky, solo timpanist emeritus Fred Begun, and the outstanding cellist, Steven Honigberg - as have national and international artists, e.g., British flautist, Judith Pearce, bass-baritone Max Wittges (now a member of the Bonn Opera), pianists Alon Goldstein and Kevin Sharpe, and cellist Amit Peled.

Distinguished members of the DC musical community who have appeared with us include sopranos Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Linda Mabbs, Detra Battle, Pamela Jordan, violinists Amy Beth Horman and Janice Martin, cellists Evelyn Elsing and Tobias Werner, pianists Yuliya Gorenman, Edward Newman and James Nalley, bassoonist Lynn Gaubatz, trumpeter Robert Suggs, as well as JCCSO concertmaster Yakov Shapiro, former principal violist Zsuzsanna Emödi and former principal cellist, John Kaboff.

The orchestra's programming and repertoire reflect Joel Lazar's broad-ranging comprehensive musical sympathies and his penchant for cyclic organization; over the years our audiences have heard all the symphonies of Tchaikovsky, all the Beethoven symphonies except the Ninth, most of his overtures and all of his concerti, all four Schumann symphonies, the last four symphonies of Dvorak and his three concerti, as well as three Brahms symphonies and both of his orchestral serenades.

The orchestra has also presented a fascinating collection of less well-known works, including Busoni's concert versions of Mozart's overtures to Don Giovanni and Die Entführung aus dem Serail, his own Lustpiel-Ouverture and Violin Concerto, all three concerti by Nielsen, Balakirev's Tamara, Elgar's In the South, Spohr's Quartet Concerto, Dohnanyi's Suite in F-sharp minor, the two symphonies of Kallinikov, the Violin Concerto and Ouverture Solennele of Glazunov, Rabaud's La procession nocturne, Liszt's Orpheus, and Manuel Ponce's Concierto del Sur.

Our local premieres include Nicholas Maw's Summer Dances, Randall Thompson's Second Symphony, Walter Piston's Variations on a Theme of E. B. Hill, Elie Siegmeister's Summer Night, Liszt's visionary symphonic poem, Héroïde funèbre, and the extraordinary First Symphonies of Saint-Saëns, Nielsen, Bruckner and Rachmaninoff.

Da Capo

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