Olympia Symphony schedules two concerts, including one in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall

Although live performances with audiences are on hold due to the pandemic, the Olympia Symphony Orchestra now has not one but two concerts on its calendar.

In December, the orchestra will play a holiday concert in The Washington Center for the Performing Arts as well as premiere a new composition in Seattle’s iconic Benaroya Hall.

There will be no audience present — meaning the Olympia musicians will be performing in Seattle in front of 2,500 empty seats — but that hasn’t dampened the excitement for either the musicians or the composers of the premiere piece: 50 Tumwater fourth- and fifth-graders who’ve been studying music with orchestra members and composition with a pair of Emerald City Music teaching artists.

The young composers — music students at Peter G. Schmidt and Tumwater Hill Elementary schools — have been working with Brad Balliett and Claire Bryant, both members of New York City’s prestigious Decoda Ensemble, to compose a theme and variations on Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty.”

Symphony executive director Jennifer Hermann shared the news with the students on Friday.

“The kids were just blown away,” Hermann told The Olympian. “Right now in our lives, so many things are being taken away or diminished or pulled back. We’re having to make do with things other than how we would normally want them.

“It’s been a while since we’ve been able to be pleasantly surprised by a situation,” she said. “We’ve just been unpleasantly surprised for so long.”

Sixteen of the orchestra’s musicians, directed by Cameron May of Student Orchestras of Greater Olympia, will record the 10-minute piece on Dec. 12. It will make its livestream debut at 7 p.m. Dec. 13 as part of a virtual concert by Emerald City, the Olympia- and Seattle-based chamber series.

The student work will be showcased again as part of the orchestra’s holiday concert, a virtual sequel to the one that happened just before Christmas last year.

Like that concert, this one will focus on sing-alongs, which will again be led by Jill Barnes, executive director of the Washington Center, and Nadine Bozeman, artistic director of the Olympia Youth Chorus.

Twenty-one musicians will record the concert in early December in the center, and the result — embellished with on-screen lyrics — will be streamed free at 7 p.m. Dec. 22.

“We can fit 21 on the Washington Center stage,” Hermann said of social distancing. “We usually have 65. They will be all spaced out. There will be 6 feet of space between string players and 10 feet of space between woodwinds and brass.”

A much larger group would fit on the large stage at Benaroya’s S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, she said, but the student piece is being written for 16 musicians. And she wanted to keep the holiday sing-along in Olympia, even though there can’t be a live audience.

“I would never consider doing our holiday concert anywhere but in our home venue,” Hermann said. “It’s important for us to perform at the Washington Center in our community for our community.”

Plans for both events came together in the past week, after Hermann called Seattle Symphony Orchestra CEO and president Krishna Thiagarajan to find out more about the online concerts the Seattle orchestra began offering in September.

It turns out that musicians are essential workers, allowed to meet in groups larger than 10 to perform through streaming or other technology.

“I had the holiday concert on my wish list,” she said, “but I had told all of my musicians that we might not be able to do it.”

It was during that conversation that, in what Hermann called “the spirit of collaboration,” Thiagarajan offered to work with the Olympia Symphony on a performance at Benaroya.

“That’s a really huge deal for us to be able to play on that stage,” Hermann said. “The Seattle Symphony is going to use their world-class camera equipment and audio equipment to help us record it.”

This story was originally published November 1, 2020 at 5:45 AM.