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Sun Valley Summer Symphony to Premiere Winter Festival
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Saturday, August 25, 2018
 

STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTOS BY NILS RIBI/SUN VALLEY SUMMER SYMPHONY

Can we still call them the Sun Valley Summer Symphony?

Sun Valley Summer Symphony Music Director Alasdair Neale had to catch himself during Thursday’s finale of the 2018 summer season.

“I almost said, ‘See you next summer, but we’ll be seeing you this winter,” he told several thousand people who turned out for the  8 p.m. concert that combined orchestra and video for an imaginative retelling of Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe.”

The symphony’s new executive director, Derek L. Dean, had already set the stage earlier in the evening when he told the audience the Sun Valley Summer Symphony will introduce its first-ever Winter Festival during the week of Feb. 19, 2019.

The festival will include three concerts and several education and community events Feb. 19 through 24  at the Argyros Performing Arts Center, which is currently under construction across from the Limelight Hotel.

(Sorry, no, lawn picnicking folks! But the seats are rumored to be very comfortable.)

Obviously, the entire symphony orchestra won’t be performing, or you’d have to sit in their laps, Dean told the audience. But small groups featuring the symphony’s musicians will perform. And, in keeping with the mission of the symphony, all events will be free, thanks to Michael and Carole Marks, who have underwritten it.

“By expanding our programming in the winter at The Argyros, we hope to engage an additional group of residents and tourists and add another vibrant thread to our community’s extraordinary cultural fabric,” said Symphony Board President Susan Monson.

The Winter Festival will offer audiences a more intimate experience in a nightclub-like setting, featuring multiple sets of music and creative presentations of new and familiar music in new and innovative ways.

“This will be classical music performed in ways we expect our audiences have never experienced,” said Neale.

Current plans are for concerts on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings Feb. 21 through 23, with each lasting about two hours including intermissions. The programs will feature musicians from the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, as well as guest artists.

“Alasdair has wanted to find a way to make more music for some time and, as the Argyros started to come together, we started having conversations with them,” Dean said. “At this point, I’m not even prepared to announce which musicians will be performing. In summer musicians are usually on vacation from their home symphonies but that’s not the case in winter so we will have to see who we can get.”

The week will also offer symphony musicians and guest artists the opportunity to work with students in the Sun Valley Summer Symphony’s School of Music, both on site at the Argyros and at public schools in the valley. The year-round School of Music serves students ages 9 through 18 in Wood River Schools.

There will be educational programs for adults, as well.

“This week is the result of Music Director Alasdair Neale’s longstanding desire to expand our musical offerings beyond the summer. The Argyros, with its world-class acoustical systems, offers the perfect opportunity for us to present a Winter Festival,” Dean said.

The announcement only capped a season which showcased the increasing number of ways in which the symphony is striving to keep itself fresh and innovative.

Symphony musicians did that in a number of ways:

  • They invited the audience to make music right alongside the symphony, playing digital bird calls made by six ancient Chinese instruments on their cell phones to Tan Dun’s “Passacaglia: The Secret of Wind and Birds.”
  • On Sunday the Sun Valley Summer Symphony became one of the first symphony orchestras to perform the score to the original “Star Wars” as the two-hour blockbuster movie played on screens in the Pavilion and on the lawn.

    Jedi Maestro Alasdair got into the act, donning a Darth Vader outfit before he traded his light saber for a baton. And even brass musicians picked up light sabers to spar in the background during scenes when music was not required.

    It was no small feat as the score was 385 pages long and and the orchestra probably had 15 minutes where it wasn’t playing out of the two-hour-plus screening. The brass section in particular played beyond way beyond what they’re normally asked to do in one evening.

    “We were absolutely thrilled with the positive response to ‘Star Wars,’ ” said Dean. “People might not know how incredibly difficult it is for an orchestra to perform that score live. It wasn’t even written to be performed live. When the London Symphony recorded it, it probably had a half-dozen or a dozen recording sessions.”

  • On Thursday night the symphony concluded with yet another innovative twist as Neale turned to Hollywood projection designer David Murakami to offer a video depiction of “Daphnis et Chloe.”

Murakami filmed people reenacting the story of the goatherd and shepherdess who is kidnapped by pirates and rescued by Pan and three nymphs. Then he used custom-built computer technology to give those images a impressionistic touch inspired by the 19th-century French impressionist painters.

Orange and blue glows on the Pavilion wall supplemented the images on the video wall suspended above the orchestra, while red-orange flames evoking the idea of spirits danced on the side screens. And lighting director David Robertson created billowy blue clouds on the underside of the Pavilion canopy.

The performance put the symphony’s photographer Nils Ribi to the test. He prepped for several days, attending rehearsals and consulting with Robertson during his lighting meetings to capture the special effects through photographs.

He ended up mounting a second camera with an ultra-wide lens and a wireless shutter release remote to the railing above the sound booth. And, when he noticed interesting effects while taking photos around the Pavilion with his other camera, he simply clicked his wifeless button to trigger the mounted camera.

As far as he knows, he missed just one shot—an unscheduled photo op of a paraglider circling above in the skies in the glow of a full moon tinged with yellow.

“I stepped outside the Pavilion just after he landed,” Ribi said. “Oh well, can’t be everywhere!”

Derek Dean said his standout recollections of this year’s symphony season had to include Tchaikovsky’s “Fourth,” especially since orchestra members had just one rehearsal five hours before they were to perform after not having played with one another for a year.

He also was blown away by the performance of Russian composer Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 10 in E Minor.”

“It’s such a difficult, such a nuanced symphony,” he said. “Most orchestras would take three to four rehearsals before performing it. We had just one and a half.”

Derek is already looking ahead o the 2019 Sun Valley Summer Summer Symphony season

“All I can say is: We have some very exciting guests artists, who I can’t announce yet because we’re still signing contracts. But it’s going to be fantastic.”

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