Tuesday, February 11, 2014

ArtsBeat.Blogs.NYTimes.com: 'Sphinx Organization to Join With IMG Artists in Aiding Student Musicians'

Aaron Dworkin (b. 1970) 
is featured at AfriClassical.com 
as an outstanding 
Musician of African Descent

The New York Times


The Sphinx Organization, an organization based in Detroit that offers classical music training to minority students, announced a partnership with the management agency IMG Artists on Tuesday, in which Sphinx’s orchestras would perform at festivals and other events run by IMG, and IMG’s artists would collaborate with Sphinx. Aaron P. Dworkin, the violinist who founded Sphinx in 1996 and has built it into a national program that runs competitions and sends touring ensembles around the country, described the agreement as a relationship unlike the usual arrangement between managers and artists.

“In many ways,” Mr. Dworkin said in an interview on Monday evening, “it’s a broad, long-term partnership. It’s not a matter of ‘Here’s an artist, let’s get them bookings,’ but about looking at what we each do and seeing how we can jointly effect Sphinx’s mission of creating a greater diversity of musicians on the stage, and at the same time, creating a broader audience for classical music. Those are goals that we share, and there are things we can each bring to help further that goal.”

The first fruit of the arrangement will be a residency by the Sphinx Symphony Orchestra — an ensemble of the organization’s best student players — at the Napa Valley Festival del Sole, a summer festival that was started in 2006 by Richard Walker, a West Coast lawyer and arts manager, and Barrett Wissman, the chairman of IMG. Both the orchestra and the Sphinx Virtuosi, a smaller string ensemble, will perform at the festival, which runs from July 11 to 20. (The festival’s other programming has not yet been announced.)

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