Building A New Upper Valley Orchestra

Conductor John Masko is on a mission.

The Upper Valley is lacking a year-round professional orchestra. John Masko aims to change that.

Masko recently moved to the Upper Valley and observed:

Since moving to Lebanon, I’ve been meeting classical music-lovers nonstop. I’ve met both long-term residents and recent arrivals, both casual concertgoers and connoisseurs, who attend every musical event in the area, and are still looking for more. Many regularly travel the three-hour roundtrip to Nashua or Burlington to hear Symphony New Hampshire or the Vermont Symphony. Many have told me that while they love the high-quality musical offerings available in the Upper Valley already, they find those offerings too infrequent (particularly during the winter months) and too lacking in larger-ensemble offerings to support a vibrant Upper Valley region with a year-round population of over 200,000.

Masko is a conductor of the Brockton Symphony Orchestra in Brockton, Massachusetts and a regular assistant conductor with major orchestras including the San Francisco Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra. After laying some groundwork here in the Upper Valley, he believes that it is time to put together a volunteer working board to bring the orchestra to fruition. He needs your help.

Whom is he looking for? Anyone who can help to provide “a nucleus of support”—people with experience in fundraising, in getting a non-profit up and running, folks with big vision and/or the desire to do some grunt work, publicists, and those who are “simply passionate about supporting an orchestra.” He is looking to put together an administrative structure for an orchestra of fifty or so professional musicians that would result is a September-to-May season of five to six concerts.

If you are one of those people—in John’s words—“who wants to be involved in building Northern New England’s next great musical organization,” please get in touch by emailing him at uppervalleyphilharmonicsociety@gmail.com

Other fun facts to know about John:

As a response to the COVID lockdown, he helped to found and music-directed the National Virtual Medical Orchestra, an online ensemble of medical professionals from around the country that was featured, among other venues, on Live with Carnegie Hall and PBS NewsHour. (Here’s a link to a worth-your-while interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro on NPR). Medical orchestras are not so new and apparently doctors and nurses abound who also happen to be talented musicians. Lest you think it was just a matter of positioning a bunch of performers in front of their cameras on Zoom, John explains what a painstaking task it was in his conversation with Lulu.

According to his website, he makes a mean gumbo. More specifically, “he fancies himself as maker of the best gumbo north of the Mason Dixon Line.” I grilled him on this to the extent of my own, admittedly weaker, gumbo knowledge. It appears he’s got the goods, aided by the fact that he has family in (of course) New Orleans.

(Photos by permission and courtesy of John Masko. His website is here.)

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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.