Czech & Iceland Pieces Headline Florida Follow-up Collaboration
We first worked with Maestro Christopher Confessore in 2015 with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, where he serves as Principal Pops Conductor. The program paid tribute to American history and the beauty of our national parks, and featured two of our visual concertos, the historical WWII Citizen Soldier and Grand Canyon Country.
The following year, Confessore invited us to collaborate on a concert with the Brevard Symphony Orchestra, where he has been Music Director for 25 years. Our conversation quickly turned to a multi-season collaboration as things came together for their “American Landscapes” concert in Melbourne, Florida, in October 2016, which featured our National Park Suite and Rodeo! pieces.
Fast forward to January 2020. Confessore and the BSO team developed a program aptly titled “Visual Concertos” that featured two contrasting visual concertos from our repertoire: Sagaland and Czech Journeys.
Closing out the first half was Sagaland, which showcases the sublime landscapes of Iceland. Iceland is already a wildly popular topic these days, but what made this concert special is the premiere of a new arrangement of our visual piece with one of the most transcendental classical works from the 20th Century, Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Other versions of Sagaland set to music by Hovhaness and Pärt have been performed in Indiana, Alaska, Oregon, and Louisiana.
For the Sagaland production, Westwater Arts Multimedia Artist Nicholas Bardonnay photographed all the material during 2 months of crisscrossing the volcanic, high-latitude island. Iceland is only about the size of Kentucky but it contains starkly contrasting landscapes—or as Nicholas likes to describe them as, “the greenest of green and the bleakest of bleak.” With huge waterfalls, fjords, black-sand beaches, glaciers, geothermal pools and spongy moss-filled lava fields, Iceland is a visual treat by any stretch of the imagination. A show of hands during his pre-concert talks has, rightfully so, revealed that Iceland is on many people’s bucket lists nowadays.
On the second half of the program we took the audience further into the heart of Europe with our Czech Journeys visual piece. In this case, Nicholas paired the imagery with two popular symphonic poems, The Moldau and From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields, from Czech composer Bedřich Smetana’s seminal work: Má vlast. Our visual accompaniments don’t usually take a literal approach to the music, but in the case of The Moldau, the audience most definitely enjoyed a virtual visit to many of the country’s beautiful waterways and riverside cityscapes found across the Czech Republic—including of course the music’s namesake, the Moldau River (Vltava in Czech), where it winds through cities like Prague, Mělník and Český Krumlov.
The original photographic production for this piece was commissioned by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Toronto Symphony. Nicholas and retired Westwater Arts founder James Westwater made two month-long trips to the Czech Republic in June and October 2012.
The Czech countryside is one of the loveliest in Central Europe and, fittingly, the visual pairing for From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields depicts the country’s farmland, forests, and bucolic landscapes in the early summer and fall seasons. The character of the land gives present-day Czech Republic its pastoral beauty, but it was also one of the reasons various empires sought to conquer those lands since medieval times. Its people have certainly known struggle; heavily fortified castles still dot the landscape amid present-day quiet towns in the Bohemia and Moravia regions.
Rounding out the BSO’s program were Sibelius’s Finlandia, Rossini’s William Tell Overture and a newly commissioned concert-opener, In Praise of Joe, by composer Scott McAllister to honor a beloved music teacher and conductor from Central Florida.
It’s been wonderful to grow so many creative partnerships with conductors like Maestro Confessore over the past 47 years, and we’re looking forward to future collaborations with Chris and his two orchestras down the road! Stay tuned too, because we also have 3 new multi-season collaborations starting next season!
