Great Lakes Chamber Orchestra announces 2023 season-opening concert
PETOSKEY — The Great Lakes Chamber Orchestra (GLCO) has announced Terra Nostra as the 2023 season-opening main stage concert, to be held at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 29 at the Great Lakes Center for the Arts in Bay Harbor.
Terra Nostra is a celebration of the earth and the Great Lakes, featuring the GLCO chorus led by director André Strydom and the orchestra led by Maestro Libor Ondras. The concert begins with an homage to indigenous/American Indian culture through music by Chickasaw classical composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, with Spirit Chief Names the Animal People, the Okanogan Indian story of how Coyote retained his name, given by the Great Spirit Chief.
The concert’s centerpiece is Terra Nostra, a multimedia symphony by Christophe Chagnard about celebrating and protecting the planet. It features an award-winning documentary film by Charlie Spears and uses musical quotes, including Mozart’s Haffner Symphony, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, to travel through space and time.
The concert finale is the Great Lakes Cantata, composed by GLCO’s own composer-in-residence Gwyneth Walker and featuring the GLCO chorus. The piece is a musical journey in five movements, each representing one of the distinctive Great Lakes and moving from east (Lake Ontario) to west (Lake Superior), stopping to explore the unique character of each lake en route. Texts by American and Canadian poets, including Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and William Wilfred Campbell, have been selected as lyrics for this cantata. GLCO gave the world premiere to the cantata’s overture in 2018.
The concert includes an optional pre-concert talk at 6 p.m. by Libor Ondras, as well as a post-concert reception. Terra Nostra will also be presented at Lake Superior State University on Earth Day, April 22, marking the orchestra’s first guest appearance in the Upper Peninsula. Tickets are available through LSSU.
Tickets from $35-$65 are available at glcorchestra.org. The concert is free for veterans, active service members, and students 18 and under by calling the GLCO office at 231-487-0010.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Great Lakes Chamber Orchestra announces 2023 season-opening concert
