By Tracy Zwick
On June 14th at Alice Tully Hall, musicians from the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic will perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 alongside a software engineer, an international banker, an eyewear entrepreneur, an employment lawyer, and the wife of Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor.
They’re all part of the Second Ending Ensemble (SEE), an orchestra built around the idea that artistic lives don’t always move at the same tempo.
Music was at the center of most of the ensemble members’ lives at one time. Then came law school, business, children, tech careers, marriages, mortgages, Tokyo trading floors, and other milestones and hurdles of adulthood. They’ve now chosen to return not just to playing music, but to performing it at the highest level, alongside some of the world’s finest players – professionals from the Met Opera, the NY Philharmonic, and Broadway pits, as well as top students from Juilliard and the New York Youth Symphony.
The ensemble’s conductor, Ian Carleton Schaefer, grew up playing trumpet in the youth symphony, before law school started his path to partnership at an international law firm. He remained connected to music, though, and to the symphony, ultimately becoming chairman of its board. In his forties, Schaefer began formal conducting studies at Juilliard. Wanting to work with top-notch, but not necessarily full-time musicians, he founded the SEE in 2022, becoming its conductor and music director for what, so far, has been an annual concert.
Schaefer worked with Katherine Fong, a violinist at the Met, to recruit other full-time pros, as well as gifted musicians who had made other professional pivots. Fong’s playing extends well beyond the confines of the Met, and included a Carnegie Hall event not long ago that brought together opera singers, musicians, and baseball figures, including former New York Yankee Bernie Williams. Through that concert, she met Katia Lindor – podcaster, mother, wife of Mets star shortstop Fransisco Lindor, and lifelong violinist.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Lindor was four when she started playing the violin. She considered a career in music after over a decade of practice and performance, but soon after COVID hit, the rhythm of her life shifted: She met her now-husband, she became a mother, and she put her violin aside.
That is, she put it aside until Buck Showalter, then the Mets’ coach, asked her to perform at a talent show at Mets spring training in 2022. Next, she was invited to play the national anthem at Citi Field on Hispanic Heritage Night. She’d had doubts about her ability to practice and play like she once did, but her husband told her to “get those thoughts out of your mind.” She accepted the invitation.
When Fong invited Lindor to join the Second Ending Ensemble, she quickly signed on. The two violinists soon met up backstage at the Met, where Fong introduced Lindor to a member of the Met’s woodwinds section, explaining that Lindor’s husband “was a baseball player.” The colleague smiled genially, explaining he had been to ballgames once or twice, “for the food.” Another musician misheard, and added that he had a bass player in the family, too.
Lindor understands the worlds of baseball and classical music don’t traditionally have much overlap.
“I know the main reason people know me is through my husband, and I say that with pride because he’s an absolutely incredible person,” Lindor said in a recent call with WSR. But Lindor hopes that “by extension,” she can introduce people to the world of classical music, “which truly shaped my life.”
“Collectively in society we don’t value classical musicians as much as athletes, and they deserve so much recognition and appreciation,” she said. Though June 14th is a work day for her husband, Lindor’s three young children will be in the audience, cheering for mom for a change.
Another SEE member, violinist Amanda Muchnick, grew up in the city, playing music “very seriously” beginning at age four, ultimately joining the youth symphony. She remembers crying after her final performance at Carnegie Hall with the group.
She never seriously considered a professional career though. Her father was an ophthalmologist, and Muchnick eventually decided to lead the family business, Felice Dee eyewear, named for Muchnick’s musical mother. Running the business is “all-consuming,” she explained in a phone interview with WSR, but it also gives the mother of two young girls flexibility. She needs it to be able to shuttle her older daughter to violin lessons, and to practice for her upcoming debut with SEE. This will be Muchnick’s first time playing alongside “superstars in their field,” and she’s nervous. “It’s just three days of rehearsals,” Muchnick explained, “which is normal for pros, but I’m not a pro!”
The Alice Tully concert will bring Muchnick together with Ami Connolly, a cellist she and Schaeffer knew from their days in the youth symphony, and with whom Muchnick attended New York’s Professional Children’s School. Connolly was born in Japan, raised in Connecticut, and educated in New York and New Jersey. Schaeffer remembered her as “an incredibly talented cellist,” and Connolly acknowledged having envisioned a professional career in music at one time. But after graduating from Princeton, she moved to Tokyo in 2007, to work for Goldman Sachs. She didn’t bring her cello along.
Connolly hadn’t picked up a cello in 17 years when she decided to give it a go again last year after leaving her job at Goldman. “I had a bucket list of things I wanted to do, but couldn’t while working,” she told WSR. At the top was “buy a cello.”
Connolly got married last September, and her husband, who works in hospitality, invited her to play in the lounge of a new hotel in a Japanese ski town. “So I started fiddling around,” she said. She launched a cello-themed Instagram account in January of this year. Schaefer noticed it and reached out.
“My family was like, ‘You must come back to NY for this!’” Connolly said, “this” being the Alice Tully concert. Before she accepted a job offer from Japanese bank Nomura, she gave them notice of her travel plans, telling them the June concert in NYC was “non-negotiable.”
Connolly returned to NYC last week; she’ll be using her childhood cello on the 14th and wanted to arrive early “to make sure it’s still intact!”
“My perspective on music has changed,” Connolly explained. “There’s less pressure to perform, and more desire to enjoy the music, and to share it.” She joined an amateur orchestra in Tokyo a few months ago. “There’s a pureness to it,” Connolly said. “The musicians are there because they love music and want to be surrounded by people who love music.” These concerts have “an emotional charge” Connolly explained, “that’s not there in some other performances.”
For violinist Joseph Morag, Second Ending Ensemble offered something different: continuity. Morag, 29, grew up on the UWS not far from Alice Tully Hall. He spent ten years in the youth symphony before a scholarship at Columbia University allowed him to continue studying music while pursuing an academic focus on physics.
“When I was born, my mom,” UWS optometrist Viola Kanevsy, “said I’d be a violinist,” Morag told WSR. Kanevsky’s mother was a pianist in the Soviet Union, “but when they came to this country, they wanted the kids to be doctors or lawyers. They’d close the piano lid on them.” In an only-on-the-UWS-coincidence, Fong is a patient of Dr. Kanevsky’s. Conversation turned from vision to violin, and soon Morag was playing with the SEE. After working full days as a software engineer with cyber-security firm CrowdStrike, Morag now spends hours practicing.
Morag plays in other groups too, but says when he arrived at his first SEE rehearsal it was different, and impressive. In many community orchestras, “You rarely see a group of pros, like with SEE, playing exactly the same, matching every note. That’s what gets you a great orchestral sound,” he said.
Being in SEE also brings Morag together with current musicians in the youth symphony. “It’s nice to talk to those kids now; it was such a big part of my life growing up,” he said. He’s enjoyed showing them “that while it’d be great to get into the Met, if that doesn’t happen, there’s this other way to still make music at a very high level.”
SEE’s June 14th performance will feature Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, “Titan,” and the world premiere of a new orchestral work, “The Play of Shine and Shade,” by composer Bobby Ge, a Princeton Ph.D. candidate whose piece was selected through the SEE’s first anonymous international competition
The Second Ending Ensemble will perform at Alice Tully Hall on June 14th at 3 p.m. Tickets are available – HERE.
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