Greek conductor drawn to Olympia’s name, but discovers an orchestra that loves to play

The first thing that drew conductor Zoe Zeniodi’s attention to Olympia was its name.

Zeniodi — who’s a candidate for the Olympia Symphony Orchestra’s music director position and who’ll lead the orchestra on Sunday, April 24 — was born in Greece and currently lives in Athens.

In 2019, she read that the orchestra was seeking a new music director. “I saw ‘Olympia,’ ” she said. “That is in Greece, too, so I found it exciting in itself.”

Now, after seeing the city and working with the orchestra, Zeniodi is excited about much more that.

“It’s a wonderful place,” she told The Olympian. “I really love it. … Normally, I don’t like rain. I’m known for not liking rain, and I haven’t minded it in Olympia, even if you have had rain all these days. The area is amazing — the nature and the way the city is built. Everything is clean and fresh here.”

“Wonderful” — a word that she uses often — is also the way Zeniodi describes the orchestra.

“This orchestra has surprised me very beautifully,” she said. “I have felt a very beautiful connection with the musicians on a human level and on a musical level.

“It’s an orchestra that loves playing music,” she said. “They love being where they are. They are dedicated to what they do — very attentive and very sweet and very beautiful. They’ve made wonderful progress.”

Indeed, the orchestra has risen to the challenge of working with a new conductor each month as the music director candidates complete their interviews, said Chris Barnes, the chair of the search committee. The final candidate, Canadian Adam Johnson, will visit in May, and the orchestra will announce its new music director at a gala on June.

“It continues to be really gratifying and exciting to watch the dedication of our musicians,” Barnes told The Olympian. “They are doing their best to be present and engage with different personalities and different styles and different music. We’re excited about this period of growth.”

Zeniodi, who holds multiple advanced degrees in music, has been a guest conductor for all of the major Greek orchestras and for orchestras from Bogota to Tokyo to New Zealand. She’s also played piano in major concert halls around the world. In recent years, she’s been balancing these international engagements with parenting her 6-year-old twins, who travel with her on longer trips.

Just before the pandemic, she’d turned her attention to applying for music-director positions. She was a finalist to lead the Missoula (Montana) Symphony Orchestra, but because her audition concert was scheduled for April 2020, she was unable to complete the process.

If she is chosen to direct the Olympia Symphony Orchestra, Zeniodi said she would work to deepen the connection between the orchestra and the community.

“My aim would be to involve a lot people personally, to make the orchestra relevant and relatable,” she said. “It’s not enough to do beautiful concerts.”

She imagines the orchestra playing more concerts each year, repeating concerts beyond Olympia, and participating in collaborations with other arts groups.

Live performances can be a transcendental experience for both musicians and audience, she said, and the conductor helps to create a space where connection and transformation can occur.

“Music is about the sharing of ideas and emotions and states,” she said. “It’s about soul. You can’t really talk about soul in words, but it has to do with connecting and being together.”

For Sunday’s concert, Zeniodi chose pieces themed around storytelling, women and resilience. Included in the program are the overture to Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” an opera about a woman who dresses up as a man to get into a prison and rescue her beloved, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights,” about a woman who saves her own life and countless others by telling fascinating stories to a king known for marrying a virgin each day and having each wife killed the next morning.

Also on the program is Dobrinka Tabakova’s Concerto for Cello and Strings, featuring Seattle Symphony cellist Nathan Chan, a social-media sensation. (A piece by Tabakova, born in 1980 in Bulgaria, was included in the orchestra’s last concert as well.)

“It is one of the most beautiful and transcendental pieces I have ever heard in my life,” Zeniodi said. “She is creating a soundscape that is unique. … It creates a lot of beauty and a lot of intensity. For me, that piece also falls into the space of storytelling.”

Olympia Symphony Orchestra

• What: Zoe Zeniodi, one of the finalists for the position of music director of the orchestra, will conduct the orchestra for a concert as part of the hiring process.
• When: 3 p.m. Sunday, April 24
• Where: The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, 512 Washington St. SE, Olympia
• Tickets: $6-$65
• More information: http://www.olympiasymphony.org
• On the program: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Overture to “Fidelio,” Op. 72; Dobrinka Tabakova’s Concerto for Cello and Strings, featuring cellist Amber Nathan Chan; and Nikolai Rimsky-Korzakov’s “Scheherazade,” Op. 35
  
  
• The rest of the season: The remaining music-director finalist, Adam Johnson, will conduct the orchestra May 22, and the new music director will be announced June 24.
• Also: Audience members are encouraged to wear masks.