Jorja Fleezanis has been concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra since September 1989, assuming that position after nine years with the San Francisco Symphony, eight of them as associate concertmaster. Her 2002-03 season included appearances with the Minnesota Orchestra in John Tavener's Ikon of Eros for Violin, Chorus and Orchestra with the Minnesota Orchestra. In February 2003, she performed the John Adams Violin Concerto under the baton of Giancarlo Guerrero with the Eugene Symphony.
During the 2001-02 season, Fleezanis appeared with the Minnesota Orchestra in Sofia Gubaidulina's Offertorium and the Western New York Chamber Orchestra in the Barber Violin Concerto. She also played numerous concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Twin Cities with the FOG Trio, which she founded in 1984 together with pianist Garrick Ohlsson and Michael Grebanier, principal cellist of the San Francisco Symphony. Other recent activities include concerts with the University of California-Davis Orchestra under conductor Kern Holoman, a week in residence at the San Francisco Conservatory as guest teacher and performer, a recital at Boston Conservatory, and a return to Seattle to participate in the American String Project in March.
Fleezanis is a member of the faculty of the University of Minnesota, where she teaches violin, conducts courses in orchestral and concertmaster training, and leads sectional rehearsals. She has been artist-in-residence at the University of California at Davis; leads master classes, seminars, and sectional rehearsals for the New World Symphony in Miami; and has been artist-teacher for ten summers at the Round Top (Texas) International Festival. She is an occasional host on Minnesota Public Radio's popular chamber music program Saint Paul Sunday.
Twentieth-century music is a special passion for Fleezanis. In January 1994, with Edo de Waart and the Minnesota Orchestra, she gave the world premiere of the Violin Concerto written for her by John Adams, which she repeated in the summer of 1995 at the Cabrillo Festival. Her premiere of Nicholas Maw's Sonata for Solo Violin, commissioned for her by Minnesota Public Radio, was broadcast on Saint Paul Sunday in January 1998, and in July 1999, she gave the British premiere of the work at the Chester Summer Festival. In 1998, at the Minnesota Orchestra's Viennese Sommerfest, she was one of the soloists in the American premiere of Britten's recently discovered Double Concerto for Violin and viola. In 1990, with support from the Schubert Club of St. Paul, Minnesota, she commissioned Brilliant Sky, Infinite Sky by Aaron Jay Kernis, performing it in Minneapolis, subsequently introducing it in New York at her debut recital there, and recording it for CRI. With Garrick Ohlsson as her partner she has recorded the Stefan Wolpe Violin Sonata for Koch International, and with Basil Reeve she has recorded James Bolle's Eight Pieces for Violin and Oboe for the Gasparo label. A recording of the ten Beethoven Violin Sonatas with the French fortepianist Cyril Huvé is in preparation for release on the Cyprés label.
Fleezanis has been soloist with, among others, the San Francisco Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Toledo Symphony, the New World Symphony, the Texas Festival Orchestra, the Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria and the Tulsa Philharmonic. She has been guest concertmaster with Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, and Edo de Waart and the Sydney (Australia) Symphony. She has taken part in many summer festivals including Bravo!Colorado and Music at Angel Fire, and has appeared as violinist and singer on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion.
Fleezanis began her violin studies with Ara Zerounian while attending public school in Detroit, where she was born. After further studies at the Interlochen Arts Academy, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, she joined the Chicago Symphony at age twenty-three. Intensely interested in chamber music, she left that position to form the Trio d'Accordo and to become concertmaster of the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra.
