Third Concert in Cajun Country Highlights Two Natural Wonders
For three seasons now we’ve had the privilege of performing in Lafayette, Louisiana, with the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Mariusz Smolij. Each year we’ve been able to showcase a nice variety of pieces from our repertoire while offering the ASO a performance fee discount for the repeat engagements. Through preconcert talks, educational events and a local magazine article, we’ve also been able to deepen their audience’s familiarity and interest in our work.
Our past collaborations have seen visual-musical performances with music by Sibelius, Smetana, Barber and Copland. As a fitting finale for this three-season collaboration, we brought two of our most powerful pieces to Cajun Country—Grand Canyon Country and Sagaland, set to Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite and Hovhaness’s Mysterious Mountain—for the ASO’s season-opening “Symphonic Landscapes” concert.
For their “Science” season theme, the ASO is exploring connections between music and the sciences. This concert helped to transport audience members to Arizona’s natural masterpiece and Iceland’s dramatic volcanic landscapes, two of our planet’s most amazing geologic wonders. The previous season themes we collaborated on were “Water” and “Fire.”
Also on the September 2016 program were two new works for orchestra and percussion—by Chinese composer Changiun Xu, as well as a local composer, Danny Devillier—both performed by the ASO alongside the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Percussion Ensemble.
