Cellist Olsen, a Colonie High graduate, is a regular with Chicago Symphony

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Twenty-seven-year-old local cellist Kenneth Olsen, who will debut with the Albany Symphony Orchestra under conductor David Alan Miller on Friday, has the kind of success story that arts supporters like to tell.

Olsen grew up in Loudonville and graduated with Colonie High School's Class of 1999. From eighth grade to his junior year in high school, he played cello with the Empire State Youth Orchestra before spending a year with the pre-college orchestra at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He also won the annual Stefan Competition sponsored by the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra, which netted him a cash award and a recital at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.

Olsen then graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music. He had put in one year towards his master’s degree at the Juilliard School when his story gets interesting.

Turn of events

“I was spending the summer in 2004 at a training program at the Ravinia Music Festival [outside Chicago] and had decided I would take auditions and travel around,” Olsen said.

While there, he heard about an opening in the cello section with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

“I didn’t play my best [but] I was the only one they advanced to the finals,” he said.

The orchestra didn’t hire anyone, but Olsen was put on the substitute list and that August he played a few concerts with the orchestra. The experience turned Olsen around. Instead of heading back to New York City to finish his schooling, he became something of a nomad, he said. At first, he moved to Cleveland, but within one week of moving into an apartment in a high-rise with 24-hour doorman service, his place was burglarized. Fortunately, he’d been out at a rehearsal with his cello.

“I decided I didn’t want to live in Cleveland,” Olsen said.

The next few months, he lived out of a suitcase as he stayed with family and friends in Boston and New York City, trying to focus. He was rescued when Chicago called and wanted him to play for the entire month of December. It was to sit on the last chair of the cello section, but Olsen didn’t care, he said. That January, the orchestra had another audition, but this was for the assistant principal position.

Olsen took the audition and was one of two cellists to make the finals, beating out possibly 100 other cellists, he said.

“I played better and Daniel Barenboim [the music director then] hired me on the spot,” he said. “Afterward, we were in his dressing room and he asked me if I had a job to go to. I told him no. So he said, ‘See you at rehearsal tomorrow morning.’ ”

His first rehearsal in his new job actually began two days later on Feb. 6, 2005.

“It was insane and in the second week I had to play principal because the principal cellist was playing a solo with the orchestra,” Olsen said. “I had a huge cello cadenza written by [composer-in-residence] Augusta Read Thomas that was very hard. It was a trial by fire but everyone was so supportive.”

In 2006, Barenboim gave Olsen tenure. He can stay forever and Olsen loves his job and the city, but a principal cellist’s job would still be the ideal, he said.

In the meantime, his schedule has little free time, including the ASO concert and a world premiere of David Mallamud’s “Nijinsky’s Last Dance.”

Vaslav Nijinsky was the premier dancer of Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, a ballet company established in 1909 that performed mostly in Paris and Monte Carlo. The influence of its groundbreaking collaborations with such composers as Stravinsky and Prokoviev, set designers Picasso, Matisse and Bakst and choreographers Michel Fokine, Leonide Massine and Bronislava Nijinska is still felt today.

The company’s dancers came from the czar’s Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg and after the Russian Revolution were a community of exiles. Nijinsky, who was especially known for his leaps in which he’d seem to pose in the air, succumbed to mental illness early on and died in 1950 at age 60.

The ASO’s Friday program features some of the music that the company danced to and premiered: Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka” (1911) and Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun” (1912) — both works in which Nijinsky was the star. He also choreographed the Debussy. Ravel’s “La Valse” (1920) was intended as a Diaghilev ballet but after he rejected it, Ravel had an orchestra give the premiere. Many years later, George Balanchine choreographed it for his New York City Ballet.

Hostile receptions

Today’s audiences know those works mostly as great orchestral pieces. But when they premiered with the ballet, people were sometimes aghast. Critics complained that Stravinsky’s music was brittle and caustic. When the company traveled to Vienna in 1913, the Vienna Philharmonic initially refused to play the score, calling it “dirty music.”

Debussy had less trouble with adverse reactions to his score, but a scandal erupted over Nijinsky’s dancing. Dancers called his movements and acting thrilling and superb, but newspapers deemed it shameless and bestial. The reception was so hostile that the ballet dropped out of the repertory and was thought lost until 1980, when a dance notation specialist reconstructed the ballet from Nijinsky’s own notebooks.

Mallamud drew on those influences in Nijinsky’s life: his Russian-ness, the Impressionist composers he danced to, his mental disease. Olsen said the work’s three movements were filled with dances and very beautiful.

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