Monday, August 17th, we welcomed Maestro, Robert Franz of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra to discuss how the symphony has adapted over the past 4 months and what we can expect for the months ahead.
Robert Franz echoes the ethos of a Rotarian throughout his career, with a commitment to the highest artistic standards, to creating alliances and building bridges in each community he serves, and a dedication to being a strong force in music education.
This season Franz celebrates his 13th year as Associate Conductor of the Houston Symphony where he was recently honoured as the first member of the orchestra conducting staff with the Raphael Fliegel Award for Visionary Leadership. It was presented to him in recognition of his immense success in advancing the organization’s education and community engagement activities.
As Founder and Music Director of the Idaho Orchestra Institute, now in its fourth year, Franz takes young musicians on an exploration of major orchestral repertoire that explores the complete musician.
For the symphony it started Friday, March 13th, with a show scheduled for the following day. Aware that many of the audience would not be attending they made the decision to un-invite the audience to the show, pivot and prepare to live stream the entire event in less than 24 hours.
Utilizing the live stream production studio inside the Capitol theatre, they performed the first live stream show in Canada to an empty hall. The success of the event created a whole new direction called the WSO Live Recording that could be viewed in retirement homes and hospitals across the country and it opened a new opportunity for the group as well. In partnership with the library the WSO began to read children’s book aloud in a read-along format.
While other orchestra’s were frozen in time, Franz sat down to strategize their next move. Social distancing in a theater would mean doing concerts for 30 people at a time and that was just not a feasible option.
For the protection of the audience and the musicians they we're forced to close their doors to the public and reimagine the future of music. To do this they launched a new digital concert series.
You can register here for the only concert here: http://www.windsorsymphony.com/
The first will target students and teachers by creating content for either the classroom or to be sent home and will help with numeracy, literacy and of course inspire a love of music.
The second will target families and offer a family concert series every Saturday and offer more read alongs.
And the 3rd, will be a 12 episode digital concert series that will start Oct 3rd and run throughout the holidays. Designed in a similar format to Netflix, subcribers will be able to watch anytime and as often as they like.
The goal was to create a concert that could bring joy and be enjoyed anytime. They want to reimagine the possibility of music and all of the ways that we can make it fun!