Community Commitment, Programming and Tours, Special Concerts
Community commitment The ESO is committed to serving its entire community, through eclectic programming choices and innovative education and outreach activities. Each season, almost 30,000 students experience the orchestra's music at the Winspear Centre. The Young Composers Project, with local composers as mentors, allows select high school students to compose orchestral works and hear them in performance. The orchestra's annual outdoor Symphony Under the Sky Festival is a popular destination for Edmontonians on Labour Day weekend.
Programming and tours
The ESO's history and the varied nature of its programming reflect its imaginative commitment to its community.
- In 1972, the Procol Harum album Procol Harum Live with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (right) and its hit single Conquistador became the first orchestral recording to achieve international platinum sales.
- In 1985, the ESO premiered Malcolm Forsyth's Atayoskewin at the opening of Shell Canada's Scotford Refinery.
- In 1980, to celebrate Alberta's 75th anniversary, the orchestra toured the province.
- In 1986, the ESO performed at Vancouver's Expo 86.
- In 1992, a televised ESO performance with k.d. lang conducted by Tommy Banks received a Gemini Award for Best Television Variety Performance.
- In 1994, the orchestra undertook a five-city tour (the "Northern Lights Tour") of northern Alberta, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories.
- In 1996, the ESO became the first Canadian orchestra to play on a First Nations Reserve.
- On May 8, 2012, the ESO made its Carnegie Hall debut, its first performance outside of Canada.
Special concerts
Special ESO concerts drawing sold-out houses have featured, among others, k.d. lang in 1985, Tom Cochrane and Red Rider in 1989, The Arrogant Worms in 2002, Corb Lund in 2005, Paul Brandt in 2006, Video Games Live in 2007, Nikki Yanofsky in 2008, reunion concerts with Procol Harum in 1992 and 2010, Ben Folds in 2012, and Ian Tyson on the 100th anniversary of the Province of Alberta on September 1, 2005. In March 2011, the ESO presented a memorable concert devoted exclusively to the music of Frank Zappa, and in December 2005, the orchestra returned to the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium to present two sold-out Christmas concerts with Christian singer/pianist Michael W. Smith. The orchestra continues this tradition of working with musicians from a variety of musical genres.
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Famous quotes containing the words community, programming, special and/or concerts:
“It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“Friendship is learned by watching and listening to you. If she sees that your friends are people you like and trust and don’t pretend with—people who suit you—she probably won’t pick friends who just pass by, or people who can help her or improve her status. If you treat friends in a special way, if you are kinder, more generous, more sympathetic, more forgiving with friends, she probably will be, too.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist on your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light.... Few things would mortify me more than to see you bearing a part in a concert, with a fiddle under your chin, or a pipe in your mouth.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)