At
the age of 13 she made her solo debut playing concertos on both
horn and piano with the Orange Free State Symphony Orchestra
and the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra. She won several concerto
competitions to play with other orchestras, including the CAPAB
Symphony Orchestra in Cape Town and the South African Broadcasting
Corporation Symphony Orchestra where she appeared twice on National
Television playing concertos on French horn. She also recorded
several live television and radio chamber music works, including
the Brahms Horn Trio, Mozart Horn Quintet, Beethoven sextet and
many more.
From
1978 to 1982, Ilze was a member of the South African Youth Orchestra
and toured Israel, France and Switzerland in
1978 with
the orchestra. In February 1984 she won a fulltime assistant
principal horn position with the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra
(CTSO), Cape Town, South Africa and toured Taiwan and Hong
Kong with that organization in November of 1988.
Ilze
was a Music Performance Major at the University of the Orange
Free State in South Africa,
and furthered her studies with John
Covert at the Ithaca College School of Music during a leave
of absence from the CTSO. In 1987, while a student at Ithaca
College,
she earned the privilege of performing the Franz Strauss Horn
Concerto with the Ithaca College Symphony Orchestra as a winner
of that institution’s concerto competition. In
1989 Ilze married American trombonist and Public School Band
Director,
Steve Button and settled in Oneonta, New York. During
summers between 1990 and 2002, Ilze served on the faculty of
the Hartwick College Summer Music Festival and Institute in
Oneonta, NY. Her duties there included French Horn Instructor,
Horn Ensembles
coach, member of the Faculty Woodwind Quintet, and she performed
with Members of the Canadian Brass and New York Philharmonic
for several summers while in residence at the Music Festival.
Since
moving to the United States, she has held positions with the
Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, Utica Symphony Orchestra, Catskill
Symphony Orchestra and various other regional professional
musical organizations. Ilze substituted regularly with the
Glimmerglass
Opera Orchestra for over a decade, participated in the Skaneateles
Chamber Music Festival, and Binghamton
Philharmonic Orchestra.
In
1995 she moved to Syracuse, NY with her husband and two children
and started her own private horn studio. She has been as a Visiting Lecturer at Cornell University since August 2008, and performs with Symphoria in Syracuse. |
