MUSIC
‘Unstoppable’ season N
orth State Symphony premieres To the Fore,
its final show of the 2020-21 season, tonight (May 6), and the press release boasts that the concert “includes our largest chamber music ensemble of the season.” When asked about this “large” group of players, symphony Music Director and Conductor Scott Season’s reply was: “By the most we mean … six.” It helps to have a sense of humor when the program you lead has by Jason had an entire season turned upside Cassidy down. Restrictions put in place by the state to help slow the spread of jasonc@ COVID-19 hit live entertainment newsreview.com organizations particularly hard. For its 20th anniversary season, the Preview: To the Fore—a virtual symphony was reduced from its chamber concert featurusual 70-plus-member orchestra to a ing works by Ellen Taaffe variety of chamber-sized ensembles Zwilich, Jennifer Higdon that numbered no more than six and Bohuslav Martinu— players each while also being forced premieres tonight (May 6) at 7 p.m. Showing to forgo performing in front of live on community-access audiences altogether. TV in Shasta and Butte The planned schedule was counties and streamscrapped and replaced with a seaing online at the NSS YouTube channel. Visit son dubbed Rediscover, made up of northstatesymphony.org five virtual concerts filmed at varifor details and links. ous Nor Cal locations—Redding’s Old City Hall; the Chico Women’s
Forced to adapt during pandemic, North State Symphony has kept on playing
Club; Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka and the Redding School of the Arts. However, even some of these new plans were upended by ever-shifting conditions. “A lot of times, we were changing things hourly or by the day. We have had at least 30 versions of how this current season went,” Seaton told the CN&R during a recent Zoom interview with him and symphony Executive Director Elizabeth Quivey, who added: “In addi-
tion to the [COVID] health and safety stuff, we also changed dates and rescheduled [some] recording sessions due to the state being on fire and not being able to work in confined spaces without windows being open. It was incredibly topsy-turvy.” “For example,” Seaton added, “our February concert—which we called Conversations—wasn’t originally even called that as early as, I think, January. It was called Love and Friendship—we
Symphony Executive Director Elizabeth Quivey takes a selfie during preparations for the Gypsy Strings program, filmed last fall at Old City Hall in Redding. PHOTO BY ELIZABETH QUIVEY
were playing on the whole Valentine’s thing—and then we learned that we would not be able to record in person at all, not even for a small ensemble. “We decided to go into a realm we hadn’t toyed with at that point, which was completely asynchronous recording. So, all of our musicians from all over the place sent in audio and video recordings that they recorded in their own personal spaces. And then I pieced together those ensembles … and that was something that, even a couple weeks before that, I did not have the skill set to do. It was a huge learning process, but we did it. We turned that project into a great set of education concerts.” The last-minute production change seemed to energize the players cooped up Far left: Bassoonist Jarratt Rossini performs at Redding School of the Arts during the recording of To the Fore . PHOTO BY SESAR SANCHEZ
A string quartet performs at the Chico Women’s Club for the North State Symphony’s Beethoven 250 virtual concert that originally streamed in December. PHOTO BY SESAR SANCHEZ
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