MMO - Door Community Auditorium

The Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra took its second trip to Door County and the penninsula of Northern Wisconsin for a concert. The Orchestra has only good memories from our 2001 concert and we were really looking forward to this visit.

The hall in Fish Creek and the folks who run the concert series there are wonderful. Pete Evans, Patti Podgers and other staff members at the Door Community Auditorium have been incredibly supportive of our efforts. We do our best to offer their community a musical style that they're not going to experience elsewhere and we always give them the best program that we can.

Sincere thanks to Dale Kehoss for the photographs used on this page.

Fish Creek, Wisconsin

In this photo, Ryan Hanley is playing an improvised solo on the orchestra's arrangement of the Westphalia Waltz. When not teaching Political Science as a tenured professor at Marquette University, or being a performing member of the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra, Ryan plays music around the state with a Bluegrass band known to many simply as "Cream City."

Frank Ullenberg joins Rick Kieffer at the microphone to harmonize on the MMO's always popular version of Tommy Allen's "Stop, Look, and Listen." Vocals and sound effects keep this 1915 railroad novelty tune fresh and edgy, nearly a century after it was written.

Paul Ruppa and Rick croon in June about the Shine on a Harvest Moon. Some of the Orchestra members get caught up in the humor of the harmonies.

In late Spring, the Italian mandolin virtuoso and friend of the MMO, Carlo Aonzo offered us an arrangement for solo mandolin and mandolin orchestra. The piece is titled, "Da un Balcone ungherese ("On a Hungarian Balcony")." This tune provided Linda Binder with an opportunity to conduct the orchestra with precision through some complicated passages and let our soloist, Mischa Litvin show the audience his immense skill and technique on the mandolin.

In a detail from the previous picture Mischa is seen playing a Vega Lansing Special mandolin from 1913. He emigrated to Milwaukee with his family from Minsk, Belarus in the year 2000, just in time to see the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra's Centennial concert. He asked to join the Orchestra at that concert and has been a key member of the group ever since.

With his virtuoso skills on domra, mandolin and balalaika, he has been an incredible asset to the Milwaukee music scene and the MMO. When not playing with the Orchestra, Mikhail (Mischa) Litvin teaches at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and performs across America and overseas with bayan virtuoso Stas Venglevsky or touring Russian Orchestras.