Orit Orbach

New York-born and in Israel since 1970, Orit Orbach took up the clarinet at seven and studied with Richard Lesser, Harold Wright and Robert Marcellus, at the New England Conservatory and afterwards at Northwestern, taking competition prizes in both the concerto and the chamber categories along the way. She has held solo and principal positions with the Israel Symphony Orchestra, the Tel Aviv Chamber Orchestra and the Haifa Symphony, and has appeared as soloist with the Israel Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, the Jerusalem Symphony, the Beer Sheva Sinfonietta, the Chicago Philharmonic, the New England Philharmonia and the Boston Philharmonic. She gave the world premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki's Clarinet Concerto in 1995 with the festival symphony orchestra in Colorado and was the first to play Robert Starer's Kli Zemer, with the Jerusalem Symphony, recording it on disc; in 1997 she sat on the jury of the first Penderecki International Competition of Contemporary Chamber Music, and Aharon Harlap's Clarinet Concerto, the work that won its composer the ACUM Prize that same year, is dedicated to her. She has played at Marlboro and Tanglewood, taught and performed at the Israeli Music from the Red Sea festival in 1992-93, and worked with Shlomo Mintz, Yuri Bashmet, Samuel Ashkenasi, Raphael Wallfisch, Atar Arad, Michael Tree and David Soyer. The other half of her playing life lies in Jewish music - klezmer, Ladino and Middle Eastern repertoire, taken up with the ensemble The Eve's Women and in her own programmes for clarinet and bass clarinet, and in August 1999 she recorded Andre Hajdu's Jewish Rhapsody in Plovdiv for Music Minus One, playing it there with the Plovdiv Chamber Orchestra. Orbach appeared as a clarinet soloist at the Thracia Summer Music Festival in Plovdiv in 1999. She has also been soloist with the Sofia Philharmonic, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the San Francisco Sinfonietta and the orchestra at Hagen, and has played at the Neustadt chamber festival, in Canberra, and at Jewish music festivals in Warsaw and San Francisco. Daniel Barenboim and Murray Perahia are among the musicians she has worked with, and she has judged the competition of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. She directs three wind ensembles and gives clarinet masterclasses together with seminars on klezmer and on improvisation.