‘Sound the Trumpet’ with Gorge Sinfonietta

Conductor Mark Steighner said that the biggest piece on the program isg the Gaelic Symphony by American composer Beach. “It’s immense, technically challenging and extremely impressive.”

Beach was born in the 1860s and died in 1944. “Amy Beach is best known for her songs and piano music, but she wrote three or four really big works, too. The biggest is the symphony,” Steighner said, premiered when the composer was just 25 and loosely based on folk songs from Ireland. It was also the first symphony by an American female composer to be professionally performed.

“Sadly, concert audiences mostly hear music by white, European or American men,” Steighner said. “The music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms is obviously great, but there’s a lot more to the story. Women have been composers as far back as Hildegard von Bingen, back in the Middle Ages.”

The concert’s title piece is “Trumpet Concerto” by Alexander Arutunian, written in the early 1950s.

The trumpet soloist will be Anders Foster, music teacher at Wy’east.

“Foster’s brilliant trumpet playing matches perfectly with the demands of the concerto,” said Steighner. “There are relatively few concertos for the trumpet...”

Also performed that day will be the tone poem “Finlandia” by Sibelius, which Steighner noted the Sinfonietta has performed once before.

Tickets are available online at gorgeorchestra.org. Students (with school ID) free, $5 tickets available for those with Oregon SNAP cards.

The Wy’east Middle School Performing Arts Center is located at 3000 Wy’east Road, Odell.