Sam Bergman’s Orchestra Hall Memories
Throughout the 2024–25 season, in celebration of Orchestra Hall’s 50th birthday, we've shared a variety of favorite Orchestra Hall memories from members of the Minnesota Orchestra family. Following are reminiscences from Sam Bergman, an Orchestra violist from 2000 to 2024 who departed last fall to become executive director of New Hampshire’s Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music.
A concert hall belongs to its community first and foremost, but the musicians who occupy the stage day in and day out can perhaps be forgiven for thinking of it as our home. Orchestra Hall is a special place to us—vast and resonant; quirky and sometimes challenging; and most importantly, the space that makes it possible for us to share our craft with countless thousands of Minnesotans young and old.
I remember very well my first rehearsal on that stage, at age 23, in snowy mid-February of 2000. The enormity of the room, and of the job I’d somehow won, was overwhelming. I remember exactly which pieces were on that first rehearsal. I remember how uncertain I was of my ability to play them at the level the Minnesota Orchestra would demand. I also remember, later that same year, the first concerts we ever played with Osmo Vänskä, and how certain I was by the end of that week that he would be our next music director. I remember how the audience rose to their feet to greet him three years later as he took the podium for his first concerts in that role.
And perhaps more strongly than any of these, I remember the immense privilege of working with conductor Sarah Hicks on our long-running Inside the Classics series of concerts. We had huge ambitions for bringing music and narrative together on that stage with the Orchestra as the centerpiece of every show, and no matter how far we pushed the envelope, our colleagues in the Orchestra and the folks in the audience embraced what we were doing. We made each other laugh, and cry, and feel the music so deeply every time we stepped through the stage doors. I will never do anything quite like it again.
