The Guitar Orchestra of Eutin, from Lawrence's sister city in Germany, will spend five days in Lawrence and deliver several free concerts at venues throughout the area. This represents the first time the group has toured the United States.

The young German students who comprise the Guitar Orchestra of Eutin are on the road enjoying their first trip across the United States. Having just performed in Los Angeles, they are heading to Las Vegas for a concert and then making a brief excursion to marvel at the Grand Canyon.

Fortunately, there is no cultural canyon separating Eutin, Germany, and Lawrence, Kan. The pair are sister cities, and in honor of this relationship, the orchestra is using its inaugural American visit to spend five days in Lawrence.

“To have a tour like this is a very great experience for the whole group,” says Andreas van Zoest, director of the Guitar Orchestra. “None of the students have been to the United States before.”

His troupe consists of 19 students from the regional music school at Eutin (most between the ages of 13 and 18) and an adult ensemble of eight. The group’s U.S. tour is in celebration of the 750th birthday of Eutin (pronounced oy-teen). While in Lawrence – Eutin’s sister city since 1989 – the musicians will stay with host families from the area.

Performancewise, their program will include compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Fernando Sor, Edvard Grieg and Maria Linnemann. Some selections will be rendered by the full orchestra and others for solo or ensembles.

“When we prepare a program, we work one, two or three years on it,” van Zoest says. “It’s a good thing to make the youths learn music by playing Bach or Schubert.”

But van Zoest also is quick to embrace contemporary composers.

“We play much music of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. I like modern music. It’s important to play it,” he says.

An all-acoustic guitar lineup is fairly unusual for a large band, even in Europe. Having run the orchestra for 15 years, van Zoest is used to the musical challenges of wrangling so many guitars.

“The difficulty is to tune them up. We are very soft. With bigger halls it’s a little bit of a problem. We don’t use microphones because I like the natural sound. Unlike a violin, if we play a tone, it loses energy,” van Zoest says.

The orchestra’s visit is being coordinated through Kansas University’s Max Kade Center for German-American Studies, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Friends of Eutin.

“I was in Eutin this January and I met the conductor and some of the members. The students are enthusiastic, and I think they really know what they’re doing,” says Frank Baron, a KU professor of German who helped organize the tour.

Baron, who has been involved with the sister cities program since its inception, has made frequent teaching visits to Eutin. He says the cities are actually quite dissimilar.

“The size is a big difference. Eutin is a town of 17,000. It’s a small community. They have no university,” Baron says.

The adult ensemble of the Guitar Orchestra of Eutin was founded in 1997, and the student group has existed since 2002. They have previously mounted international tours of Norway and Ireland. Their trip to the U.S. is their most ambitious excursion, and it will also include performances in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.

While in Lawrence, the students will follow an itinerary that involves concerts at local schools and explorations of the city’s history and culture.

“I’ve had some (former) students who were in Lawrence before,” van Zoest says. “They were very excited and would like to come with us. All people who had been in Lawrence want to come back.”