ORLANDO / MUSIC & COLLABORATION / INSPIRATION
Eric Jacobsen
Keep the
conversation open.
By Rob Urban
For the opening of its 2026–27 season, the Orlando Philharmonic’s published program placed three pianists, dance and music by Stravinsky, Ellington, Ravel and Gershwin in the same evening. Eric Jacobsen was listed as conductor for the September 19–20, 2026 performances.
The published program offers a useful introduction to his musical imagination. Familiar names are present, and their arrangement invites a different kind of listening. Jacobsen’s accompanying introduction described placing the movements of Petrushka among the concertos, with dancers escorting the soloists onstage. The listed pianists were Dan Tepfer, Mathis Picard and Thomas Enhco. Even the entrances became part of the idea.
A concert program is a set of decisions before it becomes an evening of sound. Someone chooses the works, considers their relationships and imagines how an audience might move among them. Jacobsen’s career is full of that kind of thinking.
He has been the Orlando Philharmonic’s music director since 2015. He is also a cellist and a co-founder of The Knights, the New York chamber orchestra he leads with his brother, violinist Colin Jacobsen. Across those settings, the recurring interest is what musicians can discover by bringing their experience into contact with someone else’s.
It started
with friends playing music.
The Knights began with friends gathering to read chamber music at the Jacobsen brothers’ home. The ensemble’s history places conversation and informal music-making at the beginning of an organization that incorporated in 2007 and went on to perform internationally.
It is a particularly appealing origin for an orchestra. Most of us have attended an evening with friends that got a little out of hand. Relatively few have had to explain afterward that it had become a touring ensemble.
The important part is the activity at the center: musicians playing together because they wanted to explore the music. As The Knights grew, that chamber-music relationship remained part of the group’s stated approach. Its roster includes performers who also compose, arrange, improvise and write songs.
That range changes what collaboration can mean. An orchestra member may contribute more than the accurate performance of a prepared part. The people in the room bring other musical languages and other ways of making decisions.
A gesture.
A bow stroke.
A breath.
Jacobsen’s Orlando biography connects this work with his earlier life as a cellist, his participation in Brooklyn Rider and his performances with Silkroad. The experiences place him inside ensembles as well as in front of them.
A conductor who has spent years playing with others understands the physical reality behind an entrance. A gesture has to become a bow stroke, a breath or an attack at the keyboard. The shared result depends on people translating their understanding into action at the same time.
That does not make every artistic decision easy. It makes the human exchange central to the job. The baton is visible, but the music comes from a room full of expertise.
A hundred years old.
Still starting something.
The centennial of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue could have supplied an occasion to perform a famous work and admire its longevity. The Knights used it to initiate a multi-year commissioning project.
Their Rhapsody initiative includes new work, performances, recordings and educational activity. Among its documented projects are Du Yun’s Ears of the Book, a concerto for pipa and orchestra featuring Wu Man, and Gabriel Kahane’s If love will not swing wide the gates, written for clarinet and orchestra with Anthony McGill.
These are specific artistic pairings. A composer, a soloist and an ensemble bring different capabilities to the work. The historical reference creates an opening for something that did not exist before.
The project also reached students at Usdan Summer Camp for the Arts. In the ensemble’s account of its 2023 residency, composition, creative writing and painting students contributed songs, poetry and visual work to a shared performance. A young writer’s contribution belonged beside a young musician’s. The invitation was broad enough for both.
There is a generous understanding of tradition in that approach. An old work can continue to matter because it prompts new questions. Admiration becomes productive when it leads someone to compose, perform or hear differently.
For an audience, the resulting program can offer several ways in. Some listeners arrive because they know Gershwin. Others follow a particular soloist or composer. The shared setting lets those interests meet without requiring everyone to have taken the same route to the concert hall.
Follow a performer.
Find a composer.
The Knights’ recording catalog gives another view of Jacobsen’s musical surroundings. The 2023 Zodiac Suite recording with pianist Aaron Diehl explores Mary Lou Williams’ work for piano and chamber orchestra. Shorthand, released in 2024, centers music by Anna Clyne with several soloists, including Yo-Yo Ma and Avi Avital.
The catalog also includes work with singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan and tenor Nicholas Phan. Its 2025 listings add Christina Courtin’s Situation Station, with her arrangements for the group, and Heirloom, a Gabriel Kahane concerto featuring pianist Jeffrey Kahane. The catalog keeps bringing the relationships behind the music into view.
I’m interested in what each collaboration asks the musicians to do. Supporting a singer’s phrase differs from shaping an instrumental passage; an arrangement can change the relationship between a solo voice and the group surrounding it.
The recordings make those different projects available beyond a particular concert date. They also give listeners a way to follow a thread. Someone drawn in by a pianist may discover a composer. A listener who begins with a song may become curious about the orchestral texture around it.
That is how musical curiosity often works in practice. It follows an attraction, then notices something nearby. Nobody needs to arrive already interested in the entire catalog.
An orchestra
and its city.
Orlando gives this work a continuing local setting. Jacobsen’s role involves an orchestra with its own musicians, audiences and institutional life, across season after season. A music director’s relationship with a city develops through repeated encounters.
The orchestra’s Resonate Festival offers one example of programming at that scale. Its announced November 2026 Beethoven focus brings symphonies, chamber works and a family concert into the same week, curated by Jacobsen. The format permits listeners to encounter a composer in different settings rather than through a single isolated program.
That range is useful. A symphony and a chamber work ask different things of performers and listeners. Placing them near one another can make familiar music newly legible. The November 7 family program pairs selections from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with Caroline Shaw’s The Mountain that Loved a Bird. A children’s story and one of the repertoire’s most familiar symphonies give the audience different starting points. Curiosity can begin with either.
Close enough
to ask.
The Philharmonic’s Notes in Your Neighborhood program also brings its musicians and guest artists into schools and community settings. Individual players and ensembles offer performances and opportunities to see instruments closely. That work belongs to the wider organization and the people carrying it out.
There is a difference between admiring a whole orchestra from a seat in the hall and being close enough to ask a player how the instrument works. Both encounters have value. The smaller one can make the larger one feel less remote, because a sound now belongs to a person a listener has met.
I admire Jacobsen’s willingness to make his musical life depend on what other people bring. The projects themselves are full of exchanges: brothers building an ensemble, composers writing for particular soloists, orchestral players bringing their experience to a shared interpretation.
A program can hold those contributions together while leaving their differences audible. An audience gets to hear the relationships as well as the individual works.
In Orlando, the effect is an ongoing invitation to listen beyond the most familiar part of the evening. Come for Gershwin and notice Ellington. Follow a favorite performer into a new work. Hear a musician in a classroom, then recognize the instrument in the hall.
About Eric Jacobsen’s work
Who is Eric Jacobsen?
Eric Jacobsen is a conductor and cellist who has served as music director of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra since 2015. He co-founded The Knights with his brother, violinist Colin Jacobsen.
What is The Knights’ Rhapsody project?
Rhapsody is a multi-year initiative inspired by the 2024 centennial of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It includes new commissions, performances, recordings and educational collaborations.
What is Orlando’s 2026 Resonate Festival?
The November 2026 Resonate Festival is a Beethoven-focused series curated by Eric Jacobsen at Steinmetz Hall. Its announced programs include symphonies, chamber music and a family concert pairing Beethoven selections with music by Caroline Shaw.
Sources: the Orlando Philharmonic’s biography and published programs, and The Knights’ history, Rhapsody project and recording catalog. Checked September 2026. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
I write about the choices that make people curious enough to stay. If you would like to read more or talk about the story behind your work, meet Rob.