Port Angeles orchestra to present ‘Inextinguishable’ Symphony

Published 1:30 am Thursday, March 19, 2026

PORT ANGELES — “Music is life,” composer Carl Nielsen wrote, “and, like it, is inextinguishable.”

The Port Angeles Symphony will act on that belief on Saturday in its first concert of the spring. The performance, featuring the orchestra of 74 musicians, will begin with Brahms, then move into a short piece by Schubert and, for the finale, Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony known as the “Inextinguishable.”

This is a modified program in the wake of scheduled soloist Hunter Gordon’s need to cancel because of illness. Just this past Monday, conductor and artistic director Jonathan Pasternack talked with Gordon, a Port Angeles-raised musician who is now principal bassoonist with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in New Orleans. Gordon had thought he could make it, but he needs to get well before he can travel across the country.

So Pasternack replaced the planned Rossini Concerto for Bassoon with Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” which he called an evocative contrast with the Nielsen symphony.

“This piece is an audience favorite — only two movements long — full of lyricism and drama. It’s like comfort food for the ear and the heart,” the conductor said.

Concert time is 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, 304 E. Park Ave.

Tickets are available at portangelessymphony.org, at Port Book and News and at the door. Pasternack invites concert-goers to come early for his short discussion of the evening’s program at 6:30 p.m.

Community members also are welcome at the symphony’s dress rehearsal at 10 a.m. Saturday. Tickets are on sale on the symphony website and at the door.

“Nielsen’s ‘Inextinguishable’ Symphony is such an exciting work,” Pasternack said. “It goes to many unexpected places musically, and it’s a real crowd pleaser.”

One of the piece’s novel elements is a kind of battle royale between two timpani players, with their four booming drums on either side of the stage. This orchestra’s timpanists are Sonya Shipley and Gary Dahl, a pair who pour their hearts into this music.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had quite this much fun playing the timpani as I do on this one,” Shipley said of the “Inextinguishable.” She began playing her instrument in junior high school and then took a long break for a career in administrative work at her local fire department.

Shipley, who lives in Chimacum, has been performing with the Port Angeles Symphony for five years now, and is still in love with it.

“I consider myself an enthusiastic amateur,” she said, adding that being part of an ensemble, contributing to the big orchestral sound, is a deliciously rewarding feeling.

Dahl, for his part, recently retired from several decades as a public school music teacher. He continues to serve as a conductor of the Bremerton WestSound Symphony and the Kitsap Opera along with playing timpani with the Port Angeles Symphony.

For the past seven years, he’s driven from his home in Silverdale to rehearsals and concerts on the Olympic Peninsula.

“The Port Angeles Symphony is worth it,” said Dahl, whose wife Tineke, a violinist, also is a member of the orchestra.

Both Dahl and Shipley call the “Inextinguishable” Symphony fun and exceptionally challenging.

Nielsen is a Danish composer, and “there’s something about his voice that he has in common with all of the great Scandinavian composers,” Dahl said.

Playing his music, “I’m seeing the grandeur of big mountainscapes and seascapes. It’s full of representations of nature: a bird chirping, a frog croaking — that’s what it sounds like to me.”

When it all comes together, Dahl added, the piece is about the life force that prevails in spite of the troubles of the world.

There is a moment, he added, after the timpani battle, when the music swells around him.

“It is absolutely ecstatic,” he said.

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Diane Urbani de la Paz is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Port Townsend.