Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra marks 40th season with July concerts
Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra will open its 40th season with three July concerts in Duluth and Superior, including two world premieres and a student side-by-side performance.
Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra will mark its 40th season with three July concerts in Duluth and Superior, bringing two world premieres and two Minnesota premieres to stages on both sides of the harbor. It was founded in 1987 because area musicians and music lovers wanted summer classical music to continue beyond the regular concert calendar.
The 2026 season is set for Thursdays, July 2, July 9 and July 16. The first concert will be at Thorpe Langley Auditorium on the University of Wisconsin-Superior campus, and the July 9 and July 16 performances will be at the Marshall Performing Arts Center on the University of Minnesota Duluth campus, all at 7 p.m. The program mixes familiar repertoire with new work, including Mark Buller’s Letters from the Wilderness and a newly orchestrated version of Melissa Dunphy’s Chinoiserie, along with Minnesota premieres by Ruth Gipps and Gala Flagello. The season is meant to “honor our tradition and also embrace the challenges of the future.”
The July 9 concert will be a side-by-side performance with LSCO Quartet Project students in Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and the July 16 finale will feature the winners of the concerto competition in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17. The Quartet Project dates to 1997 and brings 20 to 30 student musicians into two weeks of intensive coaching before they perform alongside the professionals.
Music director Ho-Yin Kwok will return for a third season. Kwok, a Hong Kong-born conductor and three-time winner of The American Prize, is the director of orchestras at Ithaca College and previously led the Duluth Superior Youth Symphony. Kwok called LSCO “one of the most special orchestras” he has conducted because of its compact three-week, three-concert format, its adventurous repertoire and the Quartet Project.
The orchestra has won four ASCAP awards for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, and it received Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy grants in 2014 and 2015 for performances of works by women composers and a pledge to keep doing so. In 2017, LSCO commissioned Kalileh from Iranian composer Hooshyar Khayam, the first commission from an Iranian composer by an American orchestra since 1979, and it drew attention from BBC World Service.
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