Chris Olka, Principal Tuba of the Seattle Symphony and Opera Orchestra, has switched to the Cincinnati Symphony, it was announced tonight.
He is also Principal Tuba with Seiji Ozawa’s Saito Kinen Festival Orchestra and a teacher at the University of Washington.
The Wilhelm Furtwängler Society has shared with us…
The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra have uploaded one…
In our report on Wednesday’s performance of the…
Two very rare videos from our archives. Watch…
Session expired
Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page.
He is a very fine tuba player. This is a loss for Seattle. Fortunately, there are at least a hundred other tuba players qualified to take the Seattle seat. Congratulations Cincinnati.
Guess he’ll have to rejoin or join the AFM Local 1
Any professional musician who has listened to auditions will tell you that there are not 100 qualified candidates for any seat (from a skill level) Seattle will be lucky to hear one player who plays as well as Chris Olka.
There are literally over 100 qualified tuba players for the SSO job. Chris Olka competed against over 180 at the Concinnati audition. I was one of them. If they have an open-call audition, I bet they’ll have 150+ show up. If drive from NY to audition for Seattle.
I was there too at the cincinatti audition. Well over a hundred showed up. They sounded like Chester Schlitz. They were all basically amazing. Better get a trust fund or come from rich parents.