In life and in career, the husband-and-wife team of Daniel Spalding and Gabriela Imreh understand the importance of human connection.

Spalding, formerly on the conducting staff of Romania’s Cluj-Napoca Philharmonic and the Houston Symphony Orchestra, is music director of the New Jersey Capital Philharmonic Orchestra, and Imreh, a concert pianist with an international career. The couple has been living out of boxes in Ewing, where they have made their home for the past 30 years. They are in the process of moving to Trenton, where Spalding conducts the NJCPO, in search of a greater sense of community.

The next concert of the NJCPO, to be held at the Trenton War Memorial on April 2, will be an intimate affair, with a slimmed down orchestra performing “in the round” in the structure’s elegant Art Deco George Washington Ballroom. The program will include works by Rossini, Mozart, Piazzolla, Bernstein and Copland.

The aim is greater immediacy and increased interaction with the audience. You can find out more about it, learn a little bit about the couple’s travails after they met in Romania, and glean some of Imreh’s insights into what it takes to perform American music, in my article in today’s Trenton Times.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2016/03/classical_music_gabriela_imreh.html