Toledo Commission Salutes City’s Green Spaces
This past May, we collaborated with the Toledo Symphony Orchestra on their sold-out season finale pops concert. “Westwater Arts: Our National Parks” featured two complimentary pieces from our repertoire: National Park Suite, which premiered the previous summer with the National Symphony, and the action-packed Rodeo! set to Copland’s lively Rodeo suite.
The concert, conducted by Sara Jobin, also showcased Sacred Places, a newly commissioned community-sourced visual piece saluting northern Ohio’s protected natural areas and Toledo’s Metroparks system. For this project the TSO and Westwater Arts partnered with Toledo.com. We invited Toledo-area residents to submit their best photography of the most beautiful areas and favorite activities in their city’s cherished green spaces.
Following the February photo deadline, Nicholas handpicked a diverse selection from the submissions (over 1500!) to assemble into a new multimedia piece set to two movements from Evan Chambers’ Four Sacred Places. An Ohio native, Chambers is a professor of composition at the University of Michigan. He wrote Four Sacred Places in 2014 for a commission by the TSO to musically capture the spirit of several nature preserves around Toledo. For the new production, Nicholas worked with the One Leaf Falling and Great Black Swamp movements.
(Artist model viewpoint image submitted by Michael Kamann. Bridge image submitted by Art Weber. Leaf image submitted by Jamie Naragon.)
