PIANO MEN; ORTMEN DUO COMES TO FREEMAN

Last week Mory Ortman & Jordan Ortman returned to their alma mater to present a piano concert as a fundraiser for Freeman Academy’s Cultivate 120 campaign, and in the process raised the roof with top-shelf music inside an old gymnasium.

It may have sounded like something you would hear in Carnegie Hall, but Saturday night’s concert featuring Freeman Academy alumni Dr. Mory Ortman (class of 1989) and Jordan Ortman (class of 2009) took place in a different kind of hall, with the dated basketball hoops on either side of the performance space giving it away.

Kris Carlson, the brainchild of the fundraiser for the school from which she graduated, too, spoke about the two halls in her brief remarks that came at intermission of last weekend’s 75-minute concert.

“I’m sure you’re all well aware, after listening to the first half, that we’re listening to a Carnegie Hall-level performance in our town of 1,300 people, here in Pioneer Hall — almost the same thing,” she said. “And we’re incredibly grateful to Mory and to Jordan for giving up several days off of work, and paying their own transportation costs, to be here, to do this for their home community and for their alma mater.”

Mory and Jordan both returned to Freeman from their respective places of residence — New York City and Denver — the middle part of last week to finalize their preparation for the April 27 concert held as a fundraiser for Freeman Academy’s Cultivate 120 campaign, a year-long effort to raise $900,000 for the educational institution that opened in 1903 as South Dakota Mennonite College.

The uncle-nephew duo — Jordan’s dad, Mark, is a brother to Mory — have played together before, but this was their first time teaming up in their home community since beginning their professional careers in music:

Mory works as a music director and freelancer in the Big Apple, accompanying auditions and coaching main stage opera and Broadway performers, and serves on the coaching faculty at Montclair State University. He has been the principal accompanist for Manhattan Concert Productions for more than 20 years and has performed on notable stages like Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center.

Jordan is a pianist and vocal coach in the Mile High City, directing opera and musical theater productions at Metropolitan State University, and works as a piano instructor at the Colorado School of Mines. He has worked on Broadway tours, Opera Colorado, the Arvada Center, Boulder Opera and the Performance Now Theater Company, and in 2017-18 was the coach and pianist for the Artist in Residence Program at Opera Colorado.

Not bad for a couple of kids who cut their teeth at Freeman Academy.

Coming home

Mory and Jordan both told The Courier after Saturday night’s performance that coming home was sweet on a number of levels.

“It brought back a lot of memories,” said Mory. “I went downstairs and visited the old locker rooms, and walked on the stage where I performed in school plays and Schmeckfest, of course … I didn’t play much basketball in that space, but it was good to be back.”

“When your green room is adjacent to a locker room where we got hyped up for the next game, there is certainly some nostalgia,” said Jordan, who admits he also felt some pressure coming home for his first major performance since graduating from Freeman Academy 15 years ago. “There was some trepidation that went with it, but in the moment, there was a warmth in the room in seeing smiling faces of teachers and mentors and community members who have been supportive in the past, and were again on Saturday night.

“I felt comfortable and was glad to make music with my uncle and for my friends and family here in my home community.”

The two Ortmans are familiar with each other and how they play, performing together at the Quisisana Resort in Center Lovell, Maine each of the past three summers, and Mory said Saturday’s “home concert” was a “greatest hits” of those experiences.

“This was our 10th concert together and it’s been a joy,” said Mory, who reunited with his nephew in Freeman last Wednesday afternoon to begin practicing for Saturday night’s concert, which Jordan said was obviously critical to their endgame.

“There’s always getting used to the tempi of the other player,” he noted. “There’s definitely an added sense that you have to have of the other player that you can’t truly replicate on your own at home, but we discussed tempo over email and texting and calling, trying to come to an agreement on that sort of thing beforehand, and in the end, we agreed that we wanted this to be comfortable for us, too, as well as the audience.”

Saturday night’s performance featured works that ranged from dramatic to playful and included “Variations on Yankee Doodle” by Mario Braggiotti, which featured five iterations of the familiar tune in the style of five different composers, with the audience invited to write into their programs who they thought the author.

(It was later revealed the composers were Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy and Gershwin).

There were — according to the program notes — thick textures, large chords and sweeping melodies (“Romance from Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos” by Sergei Rachmaninoff), chromatic scales and arpeggios (“The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saens), a dance song played by the Grateful Dead and used in dance competitions (“Tico Tico” by Zequinha de Abreu) and a Disney medley featuring tunes from “Mary Poppins,” “Snow White” and “Beauty and the Beast.”

Was it all perfect? Not a chance.

“We both played wrong notes and occasionally I had some mental lapses, and you drop a couple beats here or there and it’s like, ‘OK, I need to get back in it,’” said Mory. “It’s a concentration thing; when you’re playing for that length of time and that difficult of music, there are things that are going to go wrong.”

But that’s how live performances go.

“I’m always pleased and relieved when people say that they didn’t hear anything wrong, because there’s always something in every single piece,” Jordan said. “But that’s the beauty of live performances. It’s always different, and that’s why we sit and listen to music, and make music together, live, because there’s an energy and a relationship that’s developed when you are performing for people in the same room.”

The Ortmen Piano Duo was made possible thanks to support from Matt Wellert and Poppler’s Music of Sioux Falls, who worked with Freeman Academy to make available a second grand piano to supplement the one owned by the school; “I don’t know how many of you have ever tried to rent a grand piano, but it’s not like renting a tux,” said Carlson.

The evening was also made possible by Marlo and Mavis Ortman and Mark and Lori Ortman, who helped defray some of the expenses of a night that concluded with a dessert reception.

There was no fixed admission to attend the concert, but rather a free-will donation to go toward the Cultivate 120 campaign. Those contributions are still being accepted and can be made by using the QR code included in the archived live-stream of the concert found on Freeman Academy’s YouTube channel.