by Daniel Hathaway
Fresh from winning the grand prize at the prestigious Banff Competition on the last day of August, the Poiesis Quartet (Sarah Ying Ma & Max Ball, violins, Jasper de Boor, viola, and Drew Dansby, cello) took a late October victory lap at the Oberlin Conservatory, returning to their place of birth as an ensemble to give master classes and solo with the Oberlin Orchestra.
Judging from the turnout in Finney Chapel on Friday, it might not have been a prizewinning idea to schedule a major orchestra concert on a college campus on Halloween, but there was nothing slim about the sound that the stage full of musicians produced. Brilliantly scored works by Carlos Simon, John Adams, Angélica Negrón, and Zhou Tian, were conducted with precision by Rafael Jiménez.
For sheer polish of performance, under the direction of Raphael Jiménez, the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra is an ensemble that can scarcely be faulted. On the crisp fall evening of September 25, the Orchestra kicked off its 2025-26 season at Finney Chapel in a familiar vein: the well-rounded performance of three pieces, monumental in sound and cinematic in narrative. The Orchestra was able to simultaneously create the sensation of enormous musical objects and patchworks of delicate moments.
From a brooding opening, through a turbulent depiction of reality, to a rousing journey for freedom that surely lodged itself into the audience’s collective memory for a long time to come, the orchestral and choral forces of Oberlin College and Conservatory traced a compelling emotional arc with their program at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium on January 20.
The path to finding an artistic voice might start in music school, but it doesn’t end when you graduate — or even if you become the professor. That process of self-discovery is what connects the five otherwise contrasting pieces on 
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The audience may have been more restrained than the appreciatively foot-stomping listeners who typically pack into Finney Chapel back home — but not by much. The crowd in New York’s Carnegie Hall gave two ensembles from Oberlin College and Conservatory a warm reception on January 19, with loud cheers and even some shoutouts to the players onstage. All well-deserved.