The Foothills are alive with the sounds and colours of autumn.
Celebrating that in their fall show are the Foothills Philharmonic Orchestra and Chamber Chorus with Music to Colour your Fall, for one night only on Saturday, Oct. 29 at the Okotoks Alliance Church.
“Painters speak about colour, but musicians speak about colour as well,” said orchestra director Terry Lee. “What are the flavours, what are the things, what are the images that we're conjuring up as we play beautiful music.”
The concert will be a collaboration between the two groups, with the string section of the orchestra backing up the chorus.
“It’s really lovely, it’s really, really beautiful choral pieces,” said Lee, who will be joined by Sarah McLean directing the chorus.
One highlight from the chorus will be the ethereal Sacred Heart by Ola Gjeilo, and the music is as diverse as the colours of autumn, with a variety from different composers, periods and subjects.
“There’s a range from classical to modern, maybe one piece you can consider to be from the Baroque era,” Lee said. “There’s a range of musicianship – we're a small orchestra, but there’s full chamber orchestra pieces and two different Beethoven overtures."
One of those pieces, Beethoven’s Egmont, is the overture to an opera about Lamoral, Count of Egmont, a historic figure who died taking a stand against oppression.
Other highlights include Beethoven's Elegischer Gesang and Whitacre's Five Hebrew Love Songs.
“Another overture the full orchestra is performing is The Creatures of Prometheus, which is an overture to a ballet,” Lee said. “It’s not a particularly well-known ballet if I understand correctly, because Beethoven didn’t write a lot of ballets.”
For another piece, Robert Schumann’s The Fantasiestucke, orchestra member Robert Seymour will be performing a clarinet concerto, accompanied by Amberly Steed.
Returning to live performance with an ever-growing program, the Foothills Philharmonic Society, to which the orchestra and chorus belong, will be holding regular concerts throughout the coming year.
“The society will be running a sequence of concerts, this will be the first in the 2022 to 23 season,” Lee said. “It’s not a series in the sense that we have not yet been able to offer a subscription for the entire set, though that is an ambition.”
The non-profit society aims to bring musical growth opportunities to musicians in Okotoks and the surrounding Foothills community, where before most had to travel into Calgary.
“Up until recent years, if you wanted to play classical music in an orchestra, or sing in a good quality classical choir, you had to go to Calgary,” Lee said. “Now it’s available close to home for folks, and people are literally coming from all over.”
Admission to Saturday's show is $22.23, or $16.93 for students and seniors; children 12 and under are free, but require a spot to be booked with ticket purchase.
The show is at 7:30 p.m. and tickets can be found at www.foothillsphilharmonic.com/concerts.
