Riots and Prayers

Music by Daniel Bernard Roumain

Riots and Prayers is a work for large orchestra and an array of ‘Speakers’.

Speakers can speak in any language and be drawn from the local community; amateur or professional musicians; dancers, sign language artists, or any movement artists; painters or visual artists; pre-recorded video moments or live, on-line talking heads; members of the orchestra who would like to speak and/or play a short solo on their instrument; members of the Board or administrative staff; solo, small groups, singers, vocalists, or ensembles improvising their parts with the orchestra; the conductor or assistant conductor(s); young children or senior citizens; the able or disabled; or anyone who has a deep need to say or express themselves — with their orchestra — within a moment of music, trust, and collective expression.

Speaker for the world premiere featured speakers from the AFL-CIO, King Street Center, Outright VT, St. Albans & singer/songwriter Dwight Ritcher.

Love Trilogy & Airborne lines and Rumbles

Music By Marie Samuelsson, performed with Malmö Symphony and Nordic Chamber Orchestra.

Composer Marie Samuelsson has in three orchestral works, The Love Trilogy for Orchestra, taken up the concept of love from different perspectives. The last part, The Eros Effect and Solidarity, will now have its American premiere. The piece contains musical quotes from Parts 1 and 2, but in a new context. The music fluctuates between vigorous lines and forward-driven collective sonorities, changing over to a more tentative, fragmentarily questioning and whispering music. Solidarity in collective movements and man ́s yearning for freedom are the themes here. The texts are inspired by The Eros Effect -the title of an article by George N. Katsiaficas about how human emotions can be gathered into affectionate, collective and social peace movements, characterised by solidarity.

The Nordic Chamber Orchestra, with Sarah Ioannides conducting, premiered the work in October 2016 in the city of Sundsvall in northern Sweden. Part 1, Aphrodite –Fragments by Sappho, was composed for mezzosoprano and orchestra and contains texts about sensual love. Part 2, the clarinet concerto A New Child of Infinity, has the love of a child as a theme and is dedicated to Marie Samuelsson ́s two sons. The music is published by Gehrmans Musikförlag.

Bleeding Pines

Music By David Serkin Ludwig

Songs from the Bleeding Pines is an oratorio for singers, chorus, and orchestra based on a play by Ray Owen. The play tells the story of conservationist Helen Boyd Dull, who in 1904, saved an ancient stand of longleaf pines after encountering workers bleeding the trees of their resin for the turpentine industry. Once among the greatest forests, 90 million acreas of longleaf were lost to logging and turpentining by the early 1900s. The trees that Helen preserved are now the world’s oldest longleaf pines, surviving because of her faith and commitment – a traveler who fell in love with the woods and fervently protected the land.

“The Bleeding Pines” is altogether a powerful, painterly piece, starkly conveying both the destruction and the hope of salvation that humans hold over nature and themselves.” – Rosemary Ponnekanti, Sound Magazine

Fire-Mountain

Music By Dan Ott & Film by Derek Klein

“…a culmination of creativity, education, outreach and advocacy that touched our community and brought people together in a powerful shared experience”.-John Falksow, Tacoma Tribune

An environmental commission and a multimedia experience featuring video, glass art and music. A symposium exploring changes to the delicate ecosystem of the mountain and its glaciers. A collaboration between the performing and visual arts and the National Park Service. A once-in-a-lifetime educational opportunity for area high school students.

Conceived by Sarah Ioannides and commissioned by Symphony Tacoma, this was a collaborative effort between Symphony Tacoma, Museum of Glass, Hilltop Artists and Mount Rainier National Park to create a cross-disciplinary multimedia artistic event culminating with the Symphony’s season finale. Commemorating the Centennial of the National Parks System, the project engaged area residents in music and glass art and raised awareness of the plight of Mount Rainier’s glaciers, which are melting at an alarming rate.

This multifaceted commission was featured in Symphony Magazine’s article, “Mission: Commission” in Winter 2019.

“Symphony Tacoma’s community engagement was multi-pronged for Fire-Mountain, which commemorated the centennial of the National Park Service. The ambitious project conceived by Ioannides had involved 155 performers and multiple organizations, including the National Park Service. For example, orchestra students from a local high school explored Mount Rainier on snowshoes, where they learned about the glacial ecosystem and heard from the composer about his creative pro­cess. At a panel discussion prior to the world premiere, the conductor, composer, a climatologist,and a National Park deputy discussed the effects of climate change on the mountain”. ~Symphony Magazine

“Fire Mountain” ended in an elongated, disintegrating diminuendo. The violin sections melted into a single thread of sound, and their whisper faded into profound silence. This silence clung on for a long time. It seemed that nobody in the Pantages Theater wanted this moment to end. The silence broke, and the audience launched into an immediate standing ovation”. ~Tacoma Tribune

Saxophone Fusion

A demonstration of Sarah’s creative curation of music, art and desserts. Roberto Sierra’s Caribbean Rhapsody for saxophone and orchestra with its classical and Latin jazz influences. Poulenc’s satirical Sinfonietta, seeking to free French music from foreign domination in post-World War I Europe. Milhaud’s La Création du monde, telling the creation story according to African folk mythology with influences of Harlem Renaissance jazz, accompanied by film; a multi-collaborative effort with Cincinnati Cincinnati Art Museum. The use of Saxophone in this program is a pivotal anchor where classical music to branches out into jazz idiom. A program to fuse together the French, Classical, Latino and African-American jazz idioms.

“..Ioannides’ leadership was deft and energetic. …McCombs, a faculty member at NKU, created an inventive film – fusing his own imagery in the Overture with artworks from the Cincinnati Art Museum and even the conductor Ioannides. It was perfectly synched to the music, all the way to “The Kiss”. ~ Janelle Gelfand, Cincinnati Enquirer

In May 2021, Saxophone Fusion was included in Symphony Tacoma’s digital ENCORE Series accompanied by a video produced by Sarah Ioannides.