Meet Cellist Mark Kuntz, the longest serving ESO Musician
Mark Kuntz, ESO Cellist, is the longest serving member of the Orchestra.
As we continue to celebrate the ESO’s 75th anniversary season, we recognize ESO Cellist Mark Kuntz. Mark is the longest serving member of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra and may very well hold the national record for longest continuous member of a single orchestra in the United States.
When you sit down to have a conversation with ESO Cellist Mark Kuntz, it immediately feels like you’ve reconnected with an old friend. In addition to his ESO longevity, Mark is a life-long Elgin resident and eagerly shares many stories of ESO and the community that has shaped it over the past 75 years.
Mark is the only ESO musician to have performed with all five of the ESO’s music directors. Barely a teenager in 1958, Mark joined the Elgin Civic Orchestra when the orchestra was comprised of music instructors, local musicians, community players and student musicians. “As a community orchestra, it was one of the finest you can find,” Mark said. “The ESO’s standards have always been high, and they have just gone up, up and up. I am very fortunate to have it in my backyard.”
He recalls performing at Elgin High School Auditorium, where a level below a giant metal scoop attached to an I-Beam in the ceiling moved coal to the boiler, shaking the stage at times. As a high school student, he shared the Orchestra stage with his music instructors Jean Hove and Marion Laffey, and other musicians who had been performing much longer than he.
Throughout his time with the ESO, Mark has always been willing to help. We recently came across one example of his efforts to go the extra mile when, in 1984, staff was unable to retrieve a harpsicord needed for a concert in Evanston from the locked Norris Center in St. Charles. With just an over an hour before concert time, Mark was able to borrow a harpsicord from a local church, a harpsicord he had donated, and then proceeded to sit backward in the front seat of a station wagon tuning the instrument during the hour-long drive to Evanston to ensure it was ready for the concert.
A lifelong Elgin resident, Mark studied, and later taught, at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. In his career, he’s performed with various orchestras in the Chicago area, including the Chicago Civic Orchestra, taught physics and geology at Elgin Community College, given private music lessons, and has shared his knowledge through lectures in the community. He is a founding member of the Elgin Rock Club. He likes to “keep my hands busy” by building harpsicords and working in his yard. In the summer months, you’ll most likely find him in his garden, where among the flowers, he has rhubarb plants that his grandmother planted more than 100 years ago.