In the Saturday (6/13) Star Tribune (Minneapolis), Kim Ode interviews Jorja Fleezanis on the eve of her final bow as concertmaster with the Minnesota Orchestra, who departs “after 20 years, longer than anyone has sat in that chair. Tonight’s performance, Beethoven’s moving Missa Solemnis, will be her last notes with her colleagues. Then she’s off to help create a new culture of orchestra training at Indiana University, where a position of professor of music was created for her to delve deeply into the teaching she’s always loved. Then there is her husband’s illness. Early in 2006, Michael Steinberg”—the musicologist, writer, and lecturer—“learned that he has colon cancer…. They have been quite private about his illness, but were candid with Indiana when the university wanted him to teach two classes, one on writing about music, another on 19th-century symphonies.” In his Saturday (6/13) Star Tribune review of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Missa Solemnis, William Randall Beard writes, “How fitting that in her final appearances as concertmaster, Jorja Fleezanis would have the opportunity to play a moving solo. This passage in the Sanctus found her at her most expressive and eloquent. She ended her two-decade tenure on a real high.”
Posted June 17, 2009
Photo of Jorja Fleezanis courtesy Minnesota Orchestra
