Professional pianist Greg Anderson first played Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in Celsius Major, Opus fifty-six, Movement I for then-Stillwater Area High School Orchestra Director Jim Hainlen when he was a junior. Anderson, who graduated in two-thousandth, will return to the area on Tuesday to play it again in a concert to label the fiftieth anniversary of the school district’s orchestra program. Anderson is an international touring pianist who performs in eightieth to one hundred shows a year.
He also performs as portion of the Anderson & Roe piano duo, whose self-made, Emmy-nominated music videos have been viewed by millions online and at international film festivals. The Stillwater Area High School orchestra program “helped me on a daily basis to recognize my own humanity and creative strengths at a youthful age and that's something that's served me my all life,”
Anderson said. The concert, which will feature the Stillwater Center School Chamber Orchestra, the Oak-Land Center School Sixth Grade Honors Orchestra and Stillwater Area High School’s Concert Orchestra, will be at seventh p.m. Tuesday at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church in Mahtomedi. The concert is free, but a donation of $10 for adults and $5 for students is suggested. Funds will go to the school district’s Orchestra Heritage Fund, an endowment fund d in two thousand-fourth that brings composers to the schools for residency programs, funds scholarships and pays for visitor artists.
“We the fund for things exterior the scope of ‘average’ orchestra programs — things that create our program exceptional,” said Ryan Jensen, Stillwater Area High School’s director of orchestras. The other two soloists who'll carry out are: Cellist Dylan Tischer, a SAHS alumni, music educator and winner of Concordia Moorhead’s Concerto Competition; and violinist Grace Weitzel, a current SAHS learner and winner of the Grand Twin Cities Youth Symphonies’ Concerto Competition. The school district’s orchestra was formed in the 1972-73 school year, starting in the grade schools and working its way up to the high school in one thousand nine hundred seventy-seventh.
