Tallahassee’s 200th Anniversary – A Symphonic Celebration
Our January double concert series with the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra and Maestro Darko Butorac will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the city. For this special occasion, the TSO commissioned Westwater Arts visual artist Nicholas Bardonnay to put together a new locally sourced visual concerto, titled “200 Years of Tallahassee—A Symphonic Celebration of our City.” The new Bicentennial piece will feature both historic imagery from Tallahassee’s storied past as well as modern-day images submitted by Tallahassee residents and project partners like Visit Tallahassee.
Everyone from the area is encouraged to participate—amateur, professional, and smartphone snapshooters alike—and all of the photographs will be coming from the community itself! To celebrate all-that-is-Tallahassee some of the visual themes covered will be community celebrations & festivals, recreational activities, the natural beauty of the city’s parks and surrounding Red Hills region, Tallahassee’s nightlife and sporting events, landmarks and architecture, local performing arts, and scenes showing volunteerism and acts of kindness among Tallahasseans. Nicholas will be curating all the submissions and choreographing the selected imagery to Duke Ellington’s emblematic Black, Brown and Beige.
Additionally, on the first half of the “Portraits of America” concert we’ll be delving further into the region’s (and our country’s) history with The Eternal Struggle. Set to Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, the historical visual accompaniment features hundreds black and white images portraying one of America’s most challenging time periods—the Civil War. The piece also pays tribute to the character and fortitude of Abraham Lincoln and finishes with a poignant vignette from the Civil Rights Movement. The piece was created by retired Westwater Arts founder, James Westwater using archival period photography. It has seen many performances from coast to coast and has been accompanied by narrators ranging from Tom Brokaw and Maya Angelou to community leaders of all stripes. The Lincoln narrator in Tallahassee is going to be Darryl Jones, a local Leon County School Board Member.
Also on the Bicentennial program is a new work by Jennifer Higdon, Cold Mountain Suite, and William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1.
(All photographs provided by Visit Tallahassee.)
