Eighteen years ago (actually it’s a couple weeks more than that now, since our season has shrunk by several weeks) I joined the Oregon Symphony for my first season with a major symphony orchestra. I had already been a member of the Maryland Symphony, but that was an orchestra that played just a handful of concerts each year, instead of the dozens that the Oregon Symphony would put away each season. I won my audition in May of 1995, just in time to get back to Baltimore to accept my Graduate Performance Diploma from Peabody a few days later. I played my second summer at the Tanglewood Festival, which necessitated arriving after the season had begun (I missed out on the waterfront concert that year), and in fact had had my first stint of preparing bowings for the viola section while still in Lenox, since I was hired as Assistant principal, but bumped up to Acting principal when Randall Vemer abruptly resigned at the end of the previous season.
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