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Milwaukee Is Home to One of the World’s Oldest Mandolin Orchestras
You’d be forgiven for hearing “mandolin orchestra” and thinking of Italy, not Milwaukee. But our city has one of the oldest ensembles in the world. Formed in 1900, the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra was part of a turn-of-the-century craze in America for mandolins, a smaller type of lute with steel strings.
“To really master it takes a lot of time, but you can learn some basics and sound pretty good fairly early,” says board president Fred Pike. Even though the fad died out in the 1930s, Milwaukee’s 30-person amateur orchestra has been kept alive by devoted members and ambitious music directors.
Most recent of those is René Izquierdo, a classical guitar professor at UW-Milwaukee who, as director, has boosted the group’s international presence. They’ve performed in Austria and Japan, and last April brought a German orchestra here to play with them.
You can hear them here twice a year, May and December usually, playing a mix of classical music, rags and popular tunes from the 1920s.
The Pfister Houses the Largest Hotel Collection of Victorian Art
Throughout The Pfister Hotel is a historical art gallery hiding in plain sight. The 80-plus works, mostly paintings, are claimed to be the largest hotel collection of Victorian art, but that wasn’t the goal for hotel co-founder Charles Pfister.
“You could say this collection is just what he liked,” says archivist Leslie Heinrichs. And what he liked were Venetian landscapes and monks drinking beer, to name a few subjects. Pfister started the collection before the hotel’s opening in 1893, and little is known about its artists or even when the works were painted.
It’s full of surprises, like a painting of a basket of cats. You can find the artwork in the hallways, the grand lobby, the second-floor mezzanine and the seventh-floor ballrooms – all free for public viewing or a tour with the Pfister’s artist-in-residence.
