River City Brass Band
Founded in 1981 by the late Robert Bernat, the band's conductor and music director for its first 14 seasons, the River City Brass Band consisting of 26 members calls Pittsburgh home.
Milt Orkin, a baritone player, answered the questionaire.
What do you love about brass band music?
Most shining moment?
Most requested song?
Percentage of the year traveling?
Other than Danville, one of the most interesting places to perform and why?
Food?
Most receptive audience?
Funniest incident that almost stopped the show?
Little known fact:
Everything, the timbre, the resonance. The brilliance of the brass instruments. When you listen to an orchestra, any time brass comes in, it's always something important.
Any time we reach out and touch an audience, where you know the people are responding to the music, it's an amazing feeling. We played the Erie Bicentennial last year and there were 70,000 people out there. You could look out on this vast expanse and it was like being at Woodstock. It's not the size of the crowd. I've gotten a similar feeling in small auditoriums.
``Stars and Stripes Forever.''
Thirty to 40 performances on the road, but in Pittsburgh most of the time.
The group presents 85 concerts a year. Forty-five of those concerts are in a subscription series that takes in seven sites in western Pennsylvania. The popular series draws close to 4,000 season subscribers. We're the only full-time professional band in the country that does something like that.
We have played on the tennis courts at the National Tennis Center in Adelaide, Australia, the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, and even on flatbed trucks parading through the streets of Richmond for a Christmas program. We'd rather forget the flatbed experience but can't.
We love Iron City Beer. It's from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, however, is known for a lot of foods. One in particular is chipped ham, very thinly sliced ham, served on rolls with Heinz spicy brown mustard.
We get a receptive audience everywhere. It's so gratifying. Even with kids, the kids love the music as much as the adults do.
We played a concert where the lights went out for close to 30 seconds and we continued playing. We didn't miss a beat and it was pretty amazing. The audience roared and stood up and we got a standing ovation.
Some of the members have played together since they were kids. There are 10 or 12 members who have known each other since high school.
