Symphony of Northwest Arkansas (SoNA) Announces Talent Search / Call for Submissions

Northwest Arkansas (May 10, 2013) — The Symphony of Northwest Arkansas (SoNA) is looking for the region’s most talented singers/performers! All ages may apply, and winners of the Talent Search will be featured at SoNA’s Christmas Concert on Dec. 14, 2013 at Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville.

Interested individuals should submit a photo and an mp3 recording by September 10, 2013. Submissions may be sent via email to info@sonamusic.org, or by regular mail to SoNA at P.O. Box 1243, Fayetteville, AR, 72702. There is no requirement of repertoire for the mp3 recordings. Finalists will be selected by September 13.

Finalists will audition live on September 20, and winners will be announced on September 21.

“We are looking forward to an incredible 2013-14 SoNA season,” says Executive Director Karen Kapella. “This open-call Talent Search is a first for SoNA, and we look forward to featuring winners onstage alongside our stellar classical musicians and talented SoNA Singers. It’s a great opportunity for the winners to gain valuable live performance experience, while also expanding SoNA’s reach into the community.” 

“I’m really looking forward to uncovering the talent we all know is waiting to be discovered in Northwest Arkansas,” adds SoNA Music Director Paul Haas. “It’ll be a treat for all of us to get to hear the results at Christmas!”

Why a Requiem?

Interestingly, I don’t think a lot of people even think to ask the question: why would Paul Haas and SoNA perform a service for the dead in the concert hall?  Because that’s what a Requiem is, after all.  It’s a collection of Latin texts that have traditionally been sung at funeral services in the Roman Catholic Church throughout the last millennium. 
 
In the beginning, they were sung in a specific plainchant, or “Gregorian” chant, as some of us refer to it.  Then, through the centuries, composers started to try their hand at creating a personal expression of that text, culminating in the form we know (and are going to perform on Saturday!), which includes orchestra, chorus of mixed voices, and vocal soloists.
 
The fact remains, though: it’s a service for the dead.  On first blush, it’s a little strange, because we’re not going to a concert to focus on death, we’re there to celebrate life!  We’re there to share an incredible experience and be transported by beautiful and meaningful music.
 
For me, it comes down to this: 
 
Composers through the centuries have grappled with the idea of death, and the Requiem is one way of doing it.  I believe that most of them – like me – don’t identify with the hellfire and brimstone of the Latin text, and they are searching for a way to use this musical form to comfort the people left behind, a kind of silver lining to the tragic “cloud” of death.  Because, in the end, it’s the people who have lost a loved one who need this outpouring of emotion, of solace.
 
As you may have noticed through my tenure as Music Director of SoNA, I feel it’s important to tackle difficult emotions and tragic events at times, because it brings us together as a community.  Performing Verdi’s Requiem is no different.  I feel we as fellow humans deserve the chance to sit and reflect as a community on life’s biggest questions.  It brings us together in ways that are missing from many of our lives.
 
Is it great music that would stand on its own, thrilling audiences without any clue of what the text means?  Yes. Absolutely.  But I feel it’s important that you know the thought process behind this particular programming choice.  I hope it helps you gain more from the experience than you otherwise might have.

What is it about Prokofiev 5?

So here I am, about to conduct Prokofiev’s 5^th Symphony again, and I’m once again overwhelmed with emotion.  It’s a difficult piece – not just to play, though there is that element.  It’s difficult because it so successfully (for me, anyway) brings to life the tragedy and horrors of the Soviet experiment.

Written in 1944 (in one month!), it’s just about impossible for me to put myself in his shoes – I am the quintessential “first world problem” guy, worrying about things like, you know, whether the internet connection is fast enough and whether West Side Market’s banana selection will be ripe enough.  On the other hand, this piece gets inside me, and I feel a connection to humanity, cutting through all that separates me from Prokofiev and from the entire Soviet people.  I feel an intense sorrow, yet also resilience.  In the third movement, which for me is the kernel of the symphony, I get a sense of the soul of Prokofiev, laid bare.  This is one of the hardest, yet most rewarding, stretches of music to conduct or play, simply because it is so raw, so human.  You have to embody (literally allow these feelings to possess your body) such pain, such sorrow, yet the nobility of the human spirit is always present, always buoying you.

If I have hopes for this performance, they are that the audience will get past the surface beauty of the piece (and it is compellingly beautiful!) and join the musicians and me in communion with a desperate people at a horrific time.  Because by doing that we’re able to use Prokofiev’s strength (in the fourth movement) to ascend, to heal again.  I’ve always wondered why his Fifth Symphony has such a hold on me, but I think that’s it: it encompasses the whole universe of human emotion, the entire human experience – the beauty and the atrocity, the love and the sadness.  So I enter this concert with solemnity but also with joy, knowing the astounding road we all will travel in the space of 45 minutes.

– Paul

Arkansas, Fight!

Check out the encore from SoNA's March 17 opening concert: Arkansas, Fight! Go Hogs!

Paradigm Shifts

This is a concert for Northwest Arkansas, inspired by Northwest Arkansans.  Let me explain:

When I came here for the first time, in June 2010, I knew in my bones that this is a special place.  Every person I met, and everything I saw, nudged me closer to the decision I made to come here and be a part of what was going on.  Of course, there are the obvious signs, like Crystal Bridges opening, like a voracious audience for the arts, like the headquarters here of Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt.

Dig a little deeper, and it becomes apparent that generations of Northwest Arkansans have developed an astounding civic pride and widespread philanthropy with but one goal: to make sure that each day is better than the day before, for each and every one of us.

That, to me, bespeaks a paradigm shift, from the “me” culture that reigns supreme in most areas of this country – the world, actually – to the “we” culture that has transformed Northwest Arkansas in so many visible and invisible ways.  To a state of affairs where love and betterment of our fellow man is foremost in the civic dialogue.  To be sure, we’re not perfect, but we are striving to get there.

Now to bring this around to SoNA’s Masterworks III Concert: this program also deals with the same paradigm shift, from the microcosmic love – a glorious and searing passion – we find in Mahler’s Adagietto to the universal love – the love of all humankind – that Beethoven imparts to us in his great Ninth Symphony.

There’s nothing wrong (and much that is right, actually!) with a focus on oneself, or on those nearest and dearest to us.  But what makes us truly unique as a species is our latent ability to shift our perspective from ourselves to others, to derive joy and love from the love and gifts we bestow unto others.

Of course it’s intensely interesting to know that, for example, Mahler wrote this Adagietto as a declaration of love to his future wife Alma.  It’s also worth knowing that Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony at the end of his life, overpowered by deafness and the feelings of isolation and alienation that accompanied his illness, yet unbowed and convinced of the inevitable victory of joy and love over sorrow and sadness.  We hear these things in their music.  We feel these things in their music.

At the end of the concert, though, we’re left with the feeling of being swept along by a surge of expanded consciousness – a journey that leaves us hopeful, joyous, and willing to inhabit that higher space Beethoven and so many other enlightened souls have periodically opened up for us throughout history.  This is what music – and life – are all about.  I hope you’ll join us for the ride.