Iris: An Orchestra in Full Bloom

Under the direction of maestro Michael Stern, Germantown’s Iris Orchestra looks forward to its next 20 years.

by

Editor's Note: Although all concerts have been canceled for April and May, Iris Orchestra hopes to resume its normal schedule as soon as possible and is presently selling season tickets for the remainder of the 2020 season and into 2021. Please call ahead to confirm upcoming events (901-751-7669).

With so many events celebrating the Bluff City’s bicentennial centered on the month of May 2019, from exhibits to parades and beyond, one might be forgiven for missing one especially artful tribute to the occasion that came as late as January of this year, and lasted less than 14 minutes.

It didn’t technically occur in Memphis at all, but at the Germantown Performing Arts Center, is a testament to both cities’ affinities. The fact that this work of music was chiefly inspired by a Mississippi blues singer made it somehow even more Memphian. The Mississippi Delta, they say, begins in the lobby of The Peabody, and that same fanciful geography could apply to our shared music as much as anything: Outside the Peabody’s back door, all alleys lead to Beale Street.

And thus this new work, inspired by Charlie Patton’s 1929 recording of “A Spoonful Blues,” resonated deeply with local history. First heard by an audience at the dawn of Memphis’ 201st year, “Spoonful,” by composer and pianist Conrad Tao, was commissioned and premiered by Iris Orchestra specifically in honor of the city’s bicentennial. The work was a remarkable use of orchestral textures in unorthodox ways, as waves of harmony faded in and out into silence, only to be punctuated by sudden timpani hits, whimsical stray notes, or Tao’s inventive pianistic excursions, at times creating a kind of abstracted barrelhouse version of the original Patton song.

That the city’s early history was so bound up with the spoonsful of cocaine and other sins mentioned in the song put Tao’s piece on the cutting edge of both musical and historical imagination, a truly world-class synthesis of influences. Indeed, this can be said of Iris Orchestra itself.

The enthusiasm and alacrity with which the Iris players threw themselves into the composition, not to mention the Haydn symphony and Brahms piano concerto that bookended it that night, spoke to a collective love of Memphis made all the more remarkable by the fact that almost none of the musicians live here. Rather, Tao’s music, as performed by Iris, presented a vision of Memphis as others see it.

“We have kept true to our mission, re-thinking how an orchestra could engage with the community with all the outreach engagement that we’ve done in the community. We just wanted to make the case for music and the arts, especially for young people, in Germantown and the Mid-South.” — Michael Stern

And that, in a sense, is what Iris has always been about. As the city was celebrating its 200th year, the orchestra was celebrating its 20th. Like Memphis, the orchestra’s achievement has been greater than simply thriving for a set number of years; it has been championing innovation throughout that time. For GPAC’s resident group was itself an innovation.

Michael Stern, son of iconic violinist Isaac Stern and Iris’ conductor, puts it this way: “Organizationally, there’s really no orchestra like it. We started as the only municipally funded orchestra in the United States. That was already groundbreaking. And I give huge credit to the Germantown Board of Aldermen and GPAC and Patrick Lawton, for having taken a chance on starting such a thing and maintaining it.”

It seemed like an improbable proposition when it all began. At the time, Stern explains, “I was not looking for anything. I was the music director of an orchestra in Germany, and just by happenstance, I was engaged as a guest conductor for this gala that the then-director of GPAC, Albert Pertalion, had organized, with Yo-Yo Ma as a soloist. I didn’t know anything about Tennessee, Memphis, Germantown, GPAC, nothing. And Albert then said he had the idea of having some kind of resident group in the building. And I said, ‘Yeah, sure, like that’s going to happen.’”

That it did indeed happen is all the more remarkable not only for its provenance and organization, but for how the group was assembled from a global roster of players.

Our membership is from all over the United States,” says Stern, “and some people who have been playing with us for 15 or 20 years are even living in Europe, and time their vacations so they’ll be free to come back and play with us. That kind of loyalty and dedication is pretty impressive, and it shows. Because there’s camaraderie among the players that’s unusual. You could say we fly them in from all over, but it’s not a pick-up group. It’s a central family, a pool of players, from which we continually draw, all of whom have established ties to Memphis.”

The players’ ties to Memphis are yet another innovation which sets Iris apart. For every concert weekend of the season, the musicians fly in from far and wide, but hotel rooms are neither provided nor expected. Instead, a collection of host families welcomes them into their homes. These families, as music lovers par excellence, thrive on the encounters, as do the musicians.

Carlos Rubio, who teaches violin at West Chester University outside Philadelphia and plays with the Dali Quartet there, has traveled to join ensembles elsewhere, but finds the Iris experience especially rewarding. “Usually, if you do an orchestra performance, it’s a little bit more like a business,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with that. You go, you rehearse, you play, thank you very much, and you get the check a week later. It can be an amazing experience, too, but ...”

His thoughts are immediately taken up by Julie Schap, who, with husband Keith, has played host to Iris musicans for years. “It’s much more personal,” she says. “When Carlos comes back to our place from an Iris rehearsal, he will tell us a little bit about what happened, and get us very excited about the upcoming concert: what the music is like, the composition, the programming. Then, immediately after the concert, he wants to know what we thought about it. And we talk so much about it the next day. The main thing is, we never want Iris to stop.”

Schap knows the value of such exchanges better than anyone, given the impact visiting musicians like Rubio have had on the life and career of her son. “When Iris first came in being, it was a real surprise. Even people that play in the Memphis Symphony didn’t know Iris was going to be launched in 2000,” she says. “That was the amazing thing. Sold out seasons year after year after year. And my son was about to be a sophomore in high school. The only way we could see Iris was to go to the dress rehearsals. And he now is a college professor in music. And so that mattered, hearing the Iris Orchestra.”

The host families inspire the musicians as well. Cellist Jesus Morales, a colleague of Rubio’s at West Chester, has also stayed with the Schaps when visiting for Iris. “Having a home completely changes your perspective,” he says. “Because it doesn’t feel as cold, where you just come in to a hotel room and go back and forth. We actually stay with a family. We meet new people, and I can’t wait to come back every time, because I just want to see them. And that makes the musical experience even more exciting.”

Beyond these very personal encounters, the Iris musicians give back to the community in more structured ways as well. As Stern puts it, “We have kept true to our mission, re-thinking how an orchestra could engage with the community. Certainly over the years, with all the outreach engagement that we’ve done in the community, the number of master classes, the level of soloists that we brought, and now of course our Iris Artist Fellows program, we just wanted to make the case for music and the arts, especially for young people, in Germantown and the Mid-South.”

Rubio notes that “the orchestra rehearses from Thursday through Saturday. But prior to that, there is a lot of education. We go to schools and nursing homes. We do a lot of other activities.”

All of the above, it would seem, makes for a dynamic among the players that is unique in the classical world. Stern emphasizes that “it’s a completely democratic experience. The person playing concertmaster in one concert might play in the back of the second violin in the next. The person playing second oboe on the first half will play first oboe on the second half, and so forth. So there’s no competitiveness. There’s just this feeling of coming together and making the best music possible.”

“One of the most striking aspects is Beethoven’s use of silence. His pauses are among the most pregnant voids in the universe; like the emptiness of space, filled with the power of magnetic tensions, set up in like manner by the mass of each heavenly body.” — Yehudi Menuhin

Marcia Kaufmann, the nonprofit’s executive director, notes that “unlike most orchestras, the audition process is overseen by the players, not by Michael. For the most part it’s an ensemble-led project. But it’s not just talent and the music that you hear onstage, it’s these connections and these projects that everybody’s involved in, and the cross pollination, and staying current with the music scene around the country. It makes a difference, I think.”

Iris cross-pollination — is evident in its boldly innovative programming, of which Stern is justifiably proud. “A lot of American composers have written for us really successfully,” he says. “It’s really gratifying to look back and see how many contemporary composers we’ve either commissioned or programmed. And, I have to say, our list of soloists is surpassed by nobody.” Conrad Tao, only recently hitting his quarter-century mark, combines the two, being both a virtuoso pianist (and violinist) and one of the convention defying composers featured by Iris.

He’s in good company. None other than the legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin has commented about another composer featured by Iris this year (whose youthful works have also gained acclaim), describing the artist as “an explorer in search of first causes.... One of the most striking aspects is his use of silence. His pauses are among the most pregnant voids in the universe; like the emptiness of space, they are filled with the power of magnetic tensions, set up in like manner by the mass of each heavenly body.”

Since those groundbreaking early works, the young man has come to be respected more and more widely. Perhaps you have heard of Ludwig van Beethoven. From 2019-2020, ensembles and soloists the world over have been saluting the anniversary of his birth, 250 years ago this year. It’s a span of centuries, yet they seem to melt away when it comes to the power and relevance of Beethoven. And Iris has joined the global celebrations wholeheartedly. One weekend of concerts last December, featuring the Zukerman Trio, was devoted exclusively to the composer’s works.

The weekend with Tao was no different, with the regular Sunday concert series of chamber music, Iris at the Brooks, bringing works by both Tao and Beethoven to Midtown. For Morales, who performed Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 1 in F major with Tao that day, the continuity from one youthful maverick to the next was of a piece with Iris’ commitment to innovation.

“Both Conrad and I are amazed at the fact that this piece is so early. 1796,” he says. “He was 26 years old. He was still quite young, about the same age as Conrad is now. And the other compositions coming out at that time were nowhere near or even similar to what Beethoven did. Right now we’re enjoying this piece, but if you heard three other pieces of that time period and then heard this, then you could really hear how this cello sonata is out of this world. Nothing that he did was expected. He broke every single rule. And to me, he still feels like he’s new.”

This was especially apparent when Tao continued the Brooks Museum of Art concert with a solo work of his own, “All I had forgotten or tried to,” a wide-ranging, dynamic piece that saw him reaching into the piano’s guts to pluck the strings at times, then segued without pause into Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, aka “The Tempest.”

As Tao noted in his comments to the audience, juxtaposing the old and new “has been a pet trick in my program for a while now. I love programming. I think that it’s like a kind of composition, where you get to stitch together a kind of structure, you get to imply connections without really having to force them. In this case, I think my piece is playing a lot with resonance and space, and the first movement of the ‘Tempest’ is really all about that. It’s constantly veering between these almost frenetic bursts of motion and these eerie moments of stillness. One real hope is that, by juxtaposing old and new works, we listen for the experimental spirit in Beethoven. Some of the sounds in the Beethoven piece, some of the pedal stuff in the first movement, might sound exotic and strange. But I promise you, it’s all in the score.”

It’s but a moment in the two decades worth of innovation that Iris represents, and then, before you know it, it is over, living on only in the hearts and minds of listeners. And yet the living, breathing organism we know as the Iris Orchestra, ever morphing while staying true to its vision, moves on. Acclaimed violinist Anne-Akiko Meyers will join the group in March, and in May the orchestra will feature violinist Nancy Zhou, who, like Tao, is still in her twenties. It’s all in keeping with Iris’ commitment to both the history and the youth of classical music.

The latter concert will also feature a new work, Jonathan Leshnoff’s “Score,” commissioned by Iris, for Iris, in honor of its own 20th anniversary. “We have a rather happy confluence of anniversaries,” says Stern, and there’s an even more personal aspect to it than one might suppose.

“I think especially in this day and age, more and more we need to be advocates for those things that we believe are important, and for arts and music there has never been a more urgent time when advocacy and activism on all levels is important.” — Michael Stern

“Aside from our anniversary, there’s also the anniversary of my father, Isaac Stern, who would have been 100,” he says. “He was a towering figure in American musical and cultural life. I like the idea of being a good son and honoring my dad, but it’s not about that. It goes beyond that. With his bully pulpit, he really put his money where his mouth was, and stood up for music and for the arts in a very impactful way. Aside from saving Carnegie Hall, which he’s very well known for, he helped convince the powers that be to form the National Endowment for the Arts. He advocated for music in public school systems all the time. He tirelessly worked for higher music education across the board, not just specialized professional education. He mentored some of the greatest young players of his time. And he was always advocating the idea of the primacy of art and music in our lives as Americans. I think that legacy is real and important and deserves to be remembered.

“What we are trying to do is salute, in our twentieth year, the various ways we have been meaningful to the community,” Stern continues. “I think especially in this day and age, more and more we need to be advocates for those things that we believe are important, and for arts and music there has never been a more urgent time when advocacy and activism on all levels is important.”

Such sentiments express perfectly the paradox of Iris, an ensemble of non-Memphians devoted to Memphis, an organism fed by roots reaching around the planet, connecting the local to the global in thousands of unforeseen networks, yet built on the simple charms of hospitality found in the hearths and homes of the Mid-South. That the inspiration has worked both ways, feeding the talents and minds of both local youth and world-class musicians alike, is an encouraging sign that acts of wonder and good faith, constantly reinvented, have a place in this world.