Ensemble Connect Will Travel Internationally in Their Second Year for Residencies, Performances, and Workshops

Ensemble Connect embarks on the second year of a two-year fellowship with opening concerts performing at Carnegie Hall and The Julliard School. Additionally, they’ll kick off their 2019-2020 season with residencies and performances at The Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Skidmore College, and in community venues and schools throughout New York City. 

Now in its 13th season, Ensemble Connect is a two-year fellowship program created for extraordinary young professional classical musicians in the United States. The primary goal of Ensemble Connect? To help prepare them for careers that combine musical excellence with teaching, community engagement, advocacy, entrepreneurship, and leadership.

The fellowship offers performance opportunities, along with intensive professional development, not to mention the opportunity to partner throughout the fellowship with an NYC public school. 

The 2019-2020 season marks the second year in Ensemble Connects current fellowship season. This year’s highlights of the season include premiere performances of new works by TJ Cole and George Lewis (commissioned by Carnegie Hall); Ensemble Connect Up Close – the second Weill Music Room concert series curated by the fellows; a new collaboration with Orli Shaham’s Bach Yard; and a performance with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as part of Carnegie Hall’s All Together: A Global Ode to Joy during the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. 

Ensemble Connect will also continue their residencies in over 20 New York City public schools—each musician will work alongside a partner instrumental music teacher, who will bring life and expert musicianship to band, keyboard, and string classrooms in all five boroughs.

Further, the ensemble will make its way to Paris for a week in May for a brief-but-challenging residency. Here, they’ll participate in workshops, give interactive performances at local, Parisian schools, and perform concerts, too. The end of the ensemble’s season will conclude with a biannual partner school festival performance at Manhattan School of Music’s Neidorff-Karpati Hall in May.

The second year of the fellowship marks an end of the 13th season, meaning the Ensemble Connect members will soon move on, following their musical paths down the professional route that the ensemble aimed to help them carve out. Currently, the ensemble is taking applications for the 14th season of Ensemble Connect, occurring in the 2020-2021 season.