In Saturday’s (10/1) St. Petersburg Times (Florida), John Fleming writes, “A wind quintet from the Florida Orchestra made a lot of new friends in a triumphant concert Friday night in Old Havana. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, I don’t do this very often,’ Brian Moorhead, the clarinet player in the group, said after the performance as he autographed playbills for the crowd surrounding him, a rare brush with celebrity for a classical musician from the United States. Presented in Oratorio San Felipe Neri, a 17th-century church that was later a bank and then converted into a theater, the quintet’s concert was the opening episode in a multiyear cultural exchange with Cuba that has raised the orchestra’s profile in the Tampa Bay area and now created a sparkling first impression in Cuba. … Moorhead and his colleagues—Clay Ellerbroek, flute; Katherine Young, oboe; Anthony Georgeson, bassoon; and Robert Rearden, French horn—did themselves proud. … The orchestra’s exchange with Cuba is intended to be as much an educational outreach to the island nation that has long-standing ties to Florida as it is an opportunity for performance. That was borne out Friday morning when the musicians gave master classes at the Amadeo Roldan Conservatory, a music school for high-school age students.”
AP Photo/Javier Galeano
Posted October 3, 2011
