Special Yellowstone Commission Wraps Up 2021/22 in Wichita Falls
Closing out our 2021/22 season was a multifaceted collaboration with the Wichita Falls Symphony Orchestra in Texas. Led by Maestro Fouad Fakhouri, the WFSO programmed three visual pieces for their “Music in Pictures” concert.
The concert program was designed to showcase the many “Americas” in our very large country in both music and images. The concert opened with Bernstein’s festive Overture to Candide and William Grant Still’s thought-provoking, blues-inspired Afro-American Symphony.
Changing up the pace, and the cultural influences, was Moncayo’s Huapango. That work is often considered the informal national anthem of Mexico, and by extension, was meant to pay tribute to the substantial Mexican-American population in Wichita Falls and Texas as a whole. Fittingly, Huapango was paired with our visual accompaniment Mágico, which our artist Nicholas Bardonnay photographed over the course of a year in Mexico. The combination of the visuals and the music create a colorful, heartfelt montage of the people, places, festivals, and everyday details that make Mexico such a diverse and magical country.
The concert program then explored a topic that almost any American can relate to: our national parks, and more specifically, Yellowstone National Park. What made this addition to the concert even more special is that the WFSO commissioned Nicholas Bardonnay to create a new visual piece for the occasion. As happens sometimes for our community pieces, the imagery for the new Yellowstone piece came from a local source, in this case, a longtime resident of Wichita Falls and supporter of the orchestra, Frank Yeager. Frank has been a passionate wildlife photographer for decades and one could say that the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem has been his passion project.
Nicholas received over 14,000 images from Frank’s extensive archives and after several months of curating the images, he choreographed the final selections to Dvořák’s sublime Largo movement from his New World Symphony. The synthesis of music with image was perfectly matched and really showcased the breadth of Yeager’s devotion to that unique landscape and its animal inhabitants through the seasons.
Following the new Yellowstone piece, things got a little rowdy for the concert-closer with Rodeo!, set to Copland’s synonymous four-movement work. That piece portrays the excitement of a lively small-town rodeo from in the chutes and behind the scenes. It’s an instant audience favorite that also speaks to the big open skies and centuries of ranching heritage that are so intrinsic to the American experience and the rugged spirit of the American West.
To quote one WFSO board member, the dynamic concert programming created an atmosphere that felt like “a once-in-a-lifetime event” that evening in Wichita Falls.
(Yellowstone wildlife imagery and top fall scene provided by Frank Yeager)
