Photos by Scott Preston
Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, John Morris Russell, conductor
Taylor High School Marching Band, Paul Glader, Director
Taylor High School Performing Arts Center, 56 Cooper Rd., Cleves, OH 45002
4:00 pm, Sunday, September 15, 2013
Tickets: $20 Adults $10 Students
To order tickets, please visit: http://www.seatyourself.biz/threeriversschools
Questions: Call (513) 467-3200; all ticket sales are online
The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, led by Conductor John Morris Russell, will perform a community concert at Taylor High School in Cleves, OH on Sunday, September 15 at 4 p.m. The concert will be the first performance to take place in the school’s brand new Performing Arts Center. Mr. Russell and the Orchestra will perform an accessible, family-friendly program with works by composers such as Bernstein, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Strauss and Copland. Highlighting the program will be Saint-Saens’ beloved Carnival of the Animals. The Orchestra will also perform a condensed arrangement of Waiting for Wings, a piece by Broadway composers Georgia Stitt and Jason Robert Brown commissioned and premiered by the Orchestra in April. The concert will open with a performance by the Taylor High School Marching Band.
Concert Tickets for Taylor High School
Tickets for this concert are $20 for adults and $10 for students, plus a $.50 service charge per ticket. Tickets are available for purchase online only at http://www.seatyourself.biz/threeriversschools. All ticket sales are online, but questions may be directed to (513) 467-3200. “I am absolutely overjoyed that we are able to partner with a world class organization,” said Tom Bailey, Head Principal for Three Rivers Schools. “The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra is known throughout the world for its musical excellence and to have them come to Three Rivers and Taylor High School to be the inaugural concert for our Performing Arts Center is really a dream come true for our students and community.”
Community Concerts
The Cincinnati Symphony and Pops Orchestra’s Community Concert is a community engagement and learning program offered as part of the Orchestra’s strong commitment to the community and to music education. These concerts are presentations of Sound Discoveries: Music for the Community and are made possible in part by The Corbett Educational Endowment established by The Corbett Foundation and Mrs. Patricia Corbett.
Each season, the Orchestra partners with a local school and performs a fundraising concert in support of its instrumental music programs. The CSO seeks community partner schools with a worthy fundraising project, suitable performance space and parent/support organizations who can help subsidize the basic concert costs through sponsorship. In preparation for the concert featuring the CSO and Pops, a variety of education activities throughout the district will include Orchestra musicians coaching instrumental music students.
John Morris Russell, conductor
2013-2014 will mark John Morris Russell’s third season as the conductor of the Cincinnati Pops, to which he has brought both creative artistry and boundless energy. Consistently winning international praise for his extraordinary music-making and visionary leadership, he was recently named Music Director of the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra, in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He completed his role as Music Director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra in Ontario, Canada at the end of the 11/12 season whereupon he was named that orchestra’s first Conductor Laureate.
With his position at the Pops, Mr. Russell leads performances at Cincinnati’s Music Hall and the Riverbend Music Center; additionally he conducts the orchestra in concerts throughout the Greater Cincinnati region as well as on tour—serving as a musical ambassador to help cultivate the reputation of the Cincinnati region as one of the world’s leading cultural centers. No stranger to Cincinnati audiences, for many seasons John Morris Russell served as Associate Conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He was recognized for his innovative programming and commitment to attracting new and diverse audiences to orchestral music, creating the Classical Roots: Spiritual Heights series, which brought the music of African-American composers and performers to thousands of listeners in area churches, and was also the co-creator of the Christmas spectacular, Home for the Holidays.
As a guest conductor, Mr. Russell has worked with many of North America’s most distinguished ensembles, leading Canadian orchestras that include Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, Kitchener-Waterloo and Orchestra London. In the US he has conducted the orchestras of Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Dallas, Louisville, Miami’s New World Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Colorado Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, New York Pops, New York City Ballet, New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, and the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Festival. Abroad he conducted at the famed Musikverein in Vienna in a concert that featured the Harlem Boychoir, the Vienna Choir Boys and the actor Gregory Peck. The performance continues to be televised throughout Europe, Japan and in the USA on PBS.
John Morris Russell is widely considered one of North America’s leaders in orchestral educational programming. From 1997 to 2009 he conducted the “LinkUP!” educational concert series at Carnegie Hall, the oldest and most celebrated series of its kind, created by Walter Damrosch in 1891 and made famous by Leonard Bernstein. The “Sound Discoveries” series Mr. Russell developed with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra remains a leading model for educational concerts.
John Morris Russell has also served as associate conductor of the Savannah Symphony Orchestra, director of the orchestral program at Vanderbilt University, and music director with the College Light Opera Company in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He received a Master of Music degree in conducting from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in music from Williams College in Massachusetts. He has also studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, and the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors in Hancock, Maine.
