Exit Interview: Jorja Fleezanis (Part 1 of 4)

It seems like a long time since our esteemed concertmaster announced, back in September, that she'd be leaving us at the end of this season after twenty years in the first chair. Jorja and her husband, musicologist and author Michael Steinberg (who appeared in a couple of our early Inside the Classics shows,) are headed to Indiana University, where Jorja will take up a new position teaching orchestral violin to the next generation of great young musicians.

Meanwhile, we've already held auditions for a new concertmaster, and whittled our options down to two deeply impressive finalists who our audiences will get to see in action for several weeks each next season before the final decision is made. But Jorja won't be easily forgotten by those of us in the orchestra, and the connection she's made over the years with the wider Twin Cities community has been a deep and powerful one. She's a unique figure, musically and personally, and she's always reminded me of that one really special, out-there teacher we all had in high school, the one who you wind up telling people about for the rest of your life.

As soon as Jorja made her big announcement, I knew that I wanted to sit down with her and spend some time talking about her life in music, and the legacy she'll leave behind here in Minneapolis. Last week, she invited me up to her riverfront condo and agreed to answer anything I asked of her. We talked for nearly an hour, and I'll be posting our conversation in four parts between now and Thursday. To start things off, I asked whether she'd had time to consider the gravity of this being her very last week as the leader of the Minnesota Orchestra...



If you'd prefer to download our conversation and listen to it on your iPod, just right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) here and save the file to your computer...

Postscript: For those who can't get enough Jorja, she'll be Kerri Miller's guest on MPR's Midmorning program on Tuesday. You can listen live on your local MPR News station Tuesday at 10am, or through the MPR live stream... After the program airs, MPR will post the archived audio on this page.