The Port Angeles Symphony is announcing a brand-new slate of 13 concerts this week: its 2018-2019 season, with a mix of guest soloists from the local area and from across North America, Spain and Korea.
These guest artists will join a 70-piece orchestra, an ensemble with musicians from Port Angeles, Forks, Sequim, Port Ludlow and Port Townsend; a few members come over from Gig Harbor, Bremerton and Seattle.
Season ticket packages, which offer discounts of up to 25 percent off single-ticket prices, are now available. For a copy of the 2018-2019 season brochure, contact the Symphony office at 360-457-5579 or email your mailing address to PASymphony@olypen.com. Find more details at www.PortAngelesSymphony.org.
As is traditional, the Symphony’s 86th season starts with two Pops & Picnic concerts of music from stage and screen. These are casual affairs at the Vern Burton Community Center, 308 E. Fourth St., Port Angeles, on Sept. 28 and at the Sequim Boys & Girls Clubs, 400 W. Fir St., Sequim, on Sept. 29. Admission, which includes the night of live music plus dessert, beverages and popcorn to go with the picnic suppers concert-goers bring, is $20.
Conductor and music director Jonathan Pasternack looks forward to showcasing local artists at Pops & Picnic. Port Angeles-bred violist Lauren Waldron, winner of the Symphony’s 2018 Nico Snel Young Artist Competition and a student on a music scholarship at the College of Idaho, will perform “Kol Nidrei,” a Max Bruch piece she has chosen for the occasion. The Port Angeles High School and Sequim High School choirs, with directors Jolene Dalton Gailey and John Lorentzen, will all sing together. Aaron Copland’s “Zion’s Walls” and “America the Beautiful” are among their numbers.
Next up are the first Port Angeles Chamber Orchestra performances. With violist Tyrone Beatty of Port Angeles as the featured soloist and Corigliano’s “Voyage” and Haydn’s Farewell Symphony on the program, this concert comes to Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, 301 Lopez Ave., Port Angeles, on Oct. 12 and to a new venue, the Trinity United Methodist Church, 100 S. Blake Ave., Sequim, on Oct. 13.
The chamber orchestra was invited to Trinity United and found it, with its fine piano and organ, an ideal space, said Pasternack. The concerts will move to the new venue after several years at the Sequim Worship Center.
Pasternack, heading into his fourth season as music director, has invited performers who are well-known to Peninsula audiences and some who are new. On Nov. 3, the full orchestra will see Spanish-born pianist Josu de Solaun again. They may remember his spring 2016 performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto — and his two encores after that — which lifted the crowd repeatedly to its feet.
Linda Dowdell, herself a pianist and composer, was one who was dazzled.
De Solaun brought such passion to his playing, she said, that “he literally was the music.”
Pasternack noted other highlights of the coming season:
• Dec. 8, Charlotte Marckx, a teenage virtuosa violinist from Seattle, joins the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra and Chorus for the Holiday Concert;
• Jan. 18 and 19, Hunter Gordon, a nationally known bassoonist who grew up in Port Angeles, will appear with the chamber orchestra in concerts featuring Grieg, Reicha, Elgar and Tchaikovsky;
• Feb. 23, Alex Klein, whom Pasternack calls one of the foremost oboists in the world, and Korean conductor Meena Hwang are guest artists for the full symphony orchestra’s night of Mozart and Mahler;
• March 30, James Garlick, a globetrotting violinist originally from Port Angeles, returns for a concert of Dvorak, Mussorgsky and Ravel with the full orchestra;
• May 4, violist Richard O’Neill, who spent his youth in Sequim and now travels the world with his music, rejoins the Port Angeles Symphony and Chorus for a concert featuring Bruch’s Romance for Viola, Vaughan Williams’ Flos Campi and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2; this concert also brings the world premiere of local composer and Peninsula College music professor David Jones’ “A Lark in Gustav’s Garden;”
• May 17 and 18, Port Townsend pianist Lisa Lanza joins the Port Angeles Chamber Orchestra for concerts of Brahms, Poulenc and Donizetti.
The full Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra concerts Nov. 3, Dec. 8, Feb. 23, March 30 and May 4 are in the same venue as ever, the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, 304 E. Park Ave. They’re all on a Saturday evening, with that morning’s 10 a.m. rehearsal open to the public too.
Admission to these performances will be $18 for general admission and $25 to $35 for premium reserved seats; senior and student tickets are $15. At the 10 a.m. rehearsal, all seats are $7. As it has done for many years, the Port Angeles Symphony invites youngsters 16 and under, who come with a ticket-holding adult, to attend any concert for free.
