RPO Teams Up With Rochester Young Professionals For New Musical Opportunity
Rochester, NY – In the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra’s endeavor to bring its wide variety of musical experiences to younger audiences, the RPO rings in the new year by teaming up with the group Rochester Young Professionals (RYP) to offer a new, specially designed three-concert subscription series. Effective immediately, the RPO’s Young Professional Subscription Series will offer a choice of three concerts from a mix of five Pops and Philharmonics performances on Thursdays and Fridays at the Eastman Theatre from January through May at the dramatically discounted subscription rate of $45. Tickets may be purchased online at www.rpo.org/youngpros.
“The RPO is a tremendous community asset still to be fully discovered by many young professionals,” said Maria Thomas, RYP’s President. “By offering personal choices with a shortened time commitment, younger people will be able to experience a sampling of the diverse and exciting events that the RPO has to offer.” In celebration of the RPO-RYP collaboration, a kick-off cocktail event will take place on Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 5:30 pm at Max of Eastman Place prior to the first concert at 8:00 pm that evening. The featured soloist will be one of the RPO’s own young professionals, Principal Flute Rebecca Gilbert (The Charlotte Whitney Allen Chair) who will perform Nielsen’s Flute Concerto. Also on the program will be works by the great Russian composers Shostakovich and Mussorgsky.
In addition to the January 22 performance, the four other concerts offered in the series are:
• Friday, February 27, 2009; That’s Amore! (a celebration of all things Italian with singer Tonio DiPaolo and conductor Jeff Tyzik)
• Friday, March 13, 2009; Bright Lights, Big City: The Best of Broadway (Songs from the Great White Way with vocalists Doug LaBrecque and Christiane Noll, conducted by Jeff Tyzik)
• Thursday, April 30, 2009; Symphonie Fantastique (young guest conductor James Gaffigan leads the RPO in works by Berlioz, Satie, and Saint-Saëns, with the French guest pianist Pascal Rogé)
• Friday, May 29, 2009; A Night at the Cotton Club (Jeff Tyzik conducts a cool retrospective of the Cotton Club era of the 20’s and 30’s with prominent guest artists performing music by Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and others)
Rochester Young Professionals (RYP) is a community effort connecting young people with the Rochester community. This is accomplished through informal professional networking and entrepreneurial development; involving the community through volunteerism; and engaging the community in Rochester’s vast cultural, recreational and social activities, while revealing our community’s regional assets. RYP looks to be an informational source to those in the community, highlighting the variety of issues and opportunities in the area. Its overriding goal is to attract and retain talented, educated, ambitious young professionals in our community, working together with great organizations across Rochester. Fundamentally, RYP has been created to engage and cultivate Rochester through education, connection and involvement.
Celebrating its 86th season in 2008-09, the RPO inspires and enriches the community through the art of music, presenting nearly 200 performances each season to a combined audience of an estimated quarter of a million people, including more than 70,000 who experience the RPO’s broad range of educational and community programs. The Orchestra is passionately dedicated to outstanding musical performance at the highest artistic levels, and has a unique tradition of musical versatility, commitment to music education in the broadest sense and a deep and enduring engagement with the community. The RPO has been honored with the New York State Governor’s Arts Award and two recent ASCAP awards for adventurous programming. RPO performances are made possible in part with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency; the State of New York; Monroe County and the City of Rochester.
