During its performances June 8 and 11, the Musicians of Ma’alwyck will be joined in concert by two guest artists who grew up in Delmar, benefited from the region’s rich music scene and are now senior members of major orchestras.
Violinist Andrea Blanchard-Cone of the Buffalo Philharmonic and bassist Henry Peyrebrune of the Cleveland Orchestra will join violinist Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, the group’s visionary founder and director, and others in performing music by Anton Reicha, Erwin Schulhoff and Richard Strauss. The program will be performed at 7 p.m. Thursday. June 8, at the Strand Theatre in Hudson Falls and at 3 p.m. Sunday, June 11, at Blessed Sacrament Church in Albany.
The event will also be a reunion, since Schwartz has ties with each of the guest artists that go back decades. Cole was one of her best friends in high school and after Peyrebrune won a seat in the Albany Symphony while a senior in high school, she used to drive him home from rehearsals. “He didn’t yet have a night driver’s license!” Schwartz wrote in an email.
During separate recent phone conversations, Cone and Peyrebrune shared observations on what it’s like to be a full-time orchestra musician these days and how the Capital Region was a good place to get started.
When I spoke with Cone, she was recovering from a particularly busy run of concerts with the Buffalo Phil. She said it was a most intense period since COVID and as if to illustrate the fatigue, she had trouble remembering some of the repertoire because all it went by in such a flash. There were three successive programs and amid the standard repertoire some standouts were Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige” and David Schiff’s “Four Sisters” with jazz violinist Regina Carter (which will also be on the program at Albany Symphony’s June 10 concert at EMPAC).
“With three huge programs, there’s a lot of preparation and my…
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