So you’ve been a member of the IRIS Orchestra for 9 years. How did you also become Executive Director?
IRIS has been around for 13 years, but I was not involved when it first started. I didn’t know anything about it. It was created by Michael Stern, who I went to Curtis with, and the Executive Director of the performing arts center in Germantown, Tennessee, which is the big suburb east of Memphis. So it’s technically not in Memphis, although most of our donors and subscribers are from Memphis.
When I first went down to IRIS, I had been playing full-time in the Baltimore Symphony but was never given the job permanently. I kept doing well at the audition, but it was just never going to happen. My wife’s in the Philly Orchestra, so I left Baltimore and came back to Philly.
I ran into Michael Stern at a festival, and he said, “Oh, you’ve got to come down and hear my orchestra in Memphis. It’s really good.” And I said, “Why would I want to go to Memphis? What are you doing in Memphis? What’s going on in Memphis?” And he said, “No, really. Come once. You’ll really get it.” So I did, and after the first rehearsal, I said, “Call me anytime, and I will come.”
The idea was for the orchestra to be the anchor of this performing arts center, so the patrons would have something to rally around and come to the center multiple times, instead of just a bunch of touring one-off shows that come and go. So they created IRIS, and it’s a fantastic thing.
