Author Archives: Colleen

Changing gears for 2012-2013

Performing at the Atlantic Music Festival in Waterville, ME. Photo courtesy of Abby Ang.

After a successful round of performances in the Atlantic Music Festival’s summer salon series, we returned to Connecticut in August to finish our demo recordings of our three 2012 commissions.

Less than a week later, Colleen and her husband moved to Bluefield, Virginia, in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.

Thus we begin our 2012-2013 season living 650 miles apart. The plan? Well, we are hard at work right now preparing our Kickstarter campaign to fund our first full-length recording. Our CD will feature some of our favorite commissions (five new pieces to date!) as well as a few pieces we have enjoyed performing together the past two years. We are looking forward to recording sessions starting in January 2013! We hope to release our album by May 2013.

In the meantime, we are busily booking concerts for May 2013, including venues in Virginia, DC, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Our Kickstarter campaign starts this Monday, October 22. Stay tuned for updates, or join our
email list for weekly updates as we prepare for our recording!

apple orange pair awarded Yale grant

If you have been coming to our concerts in New Haven the past few years, you have probably been among the many who have asked us, “Do you have a CD?”

We didn’t, at the time. But we will later this year! Our first CD, as well as composer commissions for the pieces it will feature, will be funded in part by the Yale School of Music‘s alumni fund.

The YSM’s alumniVenture awards were established in 2008 to support musical projects by alumni that “advance the cause of music” in communities and throughout the world. Grant awards are highly competitive each year, so we were particularly honored to be selected for an award based on our first proposal!

with composer Russell Nadel after the premiere of "Orchard Sunset," May 2011

Our project will culminate in a recording of new music for horn and harp in August. Perhaps more importantly, though, our project and its recording will be centered around commissions of new pieces for horn and harp. Since founding AOP in 2010, one of our priorities has been to add to the 21st century repertoire for our instruments while simultaneously shining a spotlight on some of the many talented, emerging composers with whom we are privileged to work. Commissions specifically funded by our alumniVenture grant are by composers Naftali Schindler of Israel, Sarah Beth May of San Antonio, TX, and Michael Weinstein Reiman of New York City.

Our May 26 concert program “Infamous Composers II” will feature two of these new pieces, and a third will be premiered this summer at the Atlantic Music Festival in Waterville, ME. Our recording will feature these three pieces by the following composers, in addition to our 2011 commission, “Orchard Sunset,” by Russell Nadel.

We can’t wait to share some of this wonderful new music with you! Stay tuned for information about our May 26 concert, our summer recording project, and ways that you can be involved in our activities.

Emily and Colleen in residence at Maine music festival, July 2012

Emily and Colleen have both been selected for artists’ fellowships this summer at the Atlantic Music Festival in Wateville, ME. This young music festival strongly focuses on chamber music and the performance of new pieces by composers in residence at the festival each summer. We are eagerly looking forward to our time there, as (obviously) both chamber music and new music are causes near and dear to our hearts as apple orange pair! (And while we are excited about giving performances of AOP commissions while there, we also anticipate playing wonderful chamber music with new colleagues. Think Debussy’s Danses, harp fans, or perhaps the Brahms Horn Trio…)

A fun concert last night

Thanks to everyone who came to our new music concert yesterday! We so enjoyed getting to share some of this “less traditional” music with you. As stated at the concert, it really is vitally important that performers of “classical” music perform music written recently rather than only pieces from the quickly-becoming-ancient past. We are thrilled as a chamber group to be an active agent in promoting new music in many different styles, commissioning and performing brand-new music for harp and horn.

More details to come on our website about future commissions by Apple Orange Pair. We’ll also have some audio and video up soon on our FB page from our concert last night.

In the meantime, enjoy this “action shot” of us from last night’s concert!

Change to February concert – now March 3!

Please take note that the concert formerly advertised for Feb. 11 and/or 18, 2012, will actually take place March 3. We hope to still see all our fans there, as well as some new faces.

We are also excited to be presenting more varied musical programs to multiple audiences and communities around Connecticut in the New Year. We are beginning 2012 with a special concert for residents at Fellowship Place in New Haven. We hope to also be sharing selections from our Fête française program, along with sneak peeks of our upcoming new music concert, in western CT sometime in January. Stay tuned for more updates!