PORT ANGELES — This Saturday will bring a romantic feast for mind and heart, Jonathan Pasternack said.
The Port Angeles Symphony’s artistic director is about to conduct the orchestra’s next concert, which will bring together a famous American concerto and a Port Angeles-born soloist who has gone on to an international career. He’s violinist James Garlick, who was a teenager when he first played in front of an orchestra in his hometown.
Garlick will rejoin the 65-piece Port Angeles Symphony for its 7:30 p.m. concert on Saturday. He’ll play Samuel Barber’s Concerto for Violin, a piece beloved for its drama and color.
Also part of the evening will be Aaron Copland’s atmospheric “Quiet City” and Antonin Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony — including the composer’s original second movement.
All of it will take place at the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, 304 E. Park Ave. Pasternack will give a brief preview talk at 6:30 p.m., so concert-goers are invited to come early.
The public also is welcome at the orchestra’s final dress rehearsal at 10 a.m. Tickets can be purchased at https://portangelessymphony.org, at Port Book and News or at the door. More information is available by calling 360-457-5579 or emailing pasymphony@olypen.com.
Garlick, for his part, is poised to rejoin the orchestra he says raised him, to play a piece of music he finds deeply inspiring.
“I adore the Barber concerto,” he said. “The music communicates a huge range of emotion … beauty, pain and something restorative.”
The first time Garlick heard the piece, he was about a year away from graduating from Port Angeles High School. He was a member of the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra while the guest soloist playing the Barber concerto was Maria Larionoff of the Seattle Symphony. The late Nico Snel was the conductor.
Garlick took top prizes in the symphony’s Young Artist Competition, now named after Snel, several times between middle school and high school. He went on to study both neuroscience and music at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, and then he earned a master’s at Juilliard in New York City.
He has played for audiences from Colombia to Cuba to South Africa and taught at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. With Sequim-bred violist Richard O’Neill, Garlick cofounded — and expanded — Music on the Strait, Port Angeles’ chamber music festival. Last summer, he moved back home to the Northwest from Minnesota.
When he plays the violin concerto on Saturday, Garlick will dedicate it to Minneapolis, the city where he and his family lived for 12 years.
When people come together for a concert, Garlick believes, they have a chance to receive the nourishment and solace that come from live music. Barber is one example of a composer, he added, who explored the psychological depths of music, in all of its beauty and its undercurrents.
While the Barber concerto is the centerpiece, the Port Angeles Symphony’s concert will open with “Quiet City,” a piece that will showcase English horn player Nancy Reis of Sequim and principal trumpet player John Landis, who comes from Bremerton.
And for “Quiet City,” Pasternack has invited a guest conductor. Allion Salvador, a student of Pasternack’s from 2011-13 at the University of Washington, will step up to the podium. Also a violinist, Salvador was the first-place winner of the 2021 Music International Grand Prix competition.
Now Salvador has completed his master’s in conducting from Central Washington University and lives in West Seattle, where he plays professionally in a variety of ensembles and is the conductor of the West Seattle Concert Orchestra.
As it happens, Salvador and Garlick know each other from performing chamber music together in the Seattle area. Salvador describes Garlick’s playing as “spectacular.”
He added that he looks forward to being part of this weekend’s concert in Port Angeles, where he feels a distinct vibe of community spirit.
Salvador added he has been in love with the symphony orchestra experience since he was very young. Today, he’s grateful for his role as conductor — and sees himself as one of the instruments in the organism that is the ensemble.
“It’s a pretty magical thing,” he said.
Then, as the concert finale, comes the lush, melodic Dvořák symphony. Pasternack, as guest conductor, led Dvořák’s Seventh in Timișoara, Romania, in 2017.
“That was with the version of the second movement that everyone’s played for the past 140 years,” Pasternack said. “But the work’s original second movement is gorgeous.
“It was celebrated at its premiere in London. And even though the composer decided to revise it considerably, I think the original stands on its own and deserves to be heard.”
With only two performances and one recording made in Germany, Pasternack said, Saturday’s performance will be the movement’s North America premiere.
“I love this music so much,” he added, “and I am thrilled to perform it with our orchestra.”
________
Diane Urbani de la Paz is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Port Townsend.
Copland’s “Quiet City,” one of the three pieces in Saturday night’s Port Angeles Symphony performance, will be led by guest conductor Allion Salvador. (Allion Salvador)
