Nordic Landscapes with the Fort Wayne Phil
This past January we returned to Fort Wayne, IN, for a visually arresting masterworks concert with Music Director Andrew Constantine and the Fort Wayne Philharmonic. The concert, Nordic Landscapes, combined two of our most beautiful and atmospheric performance pieces, Sagaland and Pacifica, with equally evocative musical works, Pärt’s Fratres and Liadov’s The Enchanted Lake.
Sagaland portrays the epic, high-latitude landscapes of Iceland that were sculpted by immense volcanic and glacial activity long before the Vikings set foot on the island over 1,000 years ago. The diverse island is still being molded and contains the greenest of green and the bleakest of bleak—no surprise that it seems to be on everyone’s bucket list.
“It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen,” says Nicholas Bardonnay, who photographed the piece over the course of two months camping across much of Iceland. “Everywhere I turned there was something stunningly beautiful…icebergs covering a black-sand beach, waterfalls running down steep fjords, and huge bubbling geothermal valleys…to name a few. The challenge of this project was deciding which imagery not to use!”
The second visual piece on the program, Pacifica, is set in the lush, ancient forests along the coastal Pacific Northwest. With a landscape reminiscent of Scandinavia and a heritage rooted in fishing and forestry, the Pacific Northwest has also attracted scores of Scandinavian immigrants to its emerald shores: by the 1890’s, a quarter of Seattle’s immigrant population was from Scandinavian countries.
In keeping with Liadov’s hauntingly beautiful work, Nicholas shot the visuals for Pacifica during the moody winter months when dense fog cloaks the land and storms collide with the rocky coastline. During the production, Nicholas also had an opportunity to shoot from a helicopter above the Olympic Peninsula. Going from this unique bird’s-eye perspective all the way down to close-up shots from the damp forest floor, the piece conveys an intimate, multi-layered portrait of the region.
Continuing with the Nordic theme, the concert program also featured Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5.
