This week I’ve been away from San Antonio and back in the high plains and big skies of the Panhandle in Amarillo, Texas. The Amarillo Symphony is performing a truly unique concert entitled Mountains and Oceans. The program features a side-by-side with the Amarillo Symphony Youth Orchestra of Errollyn Wallen’s Might River in honor of Black History Month, the world premiere of Angela Elizabeth Slater’s Mountains Become Oceans, a piece for solo harp and solo percussion that musically represents the eventual expansion of the sun in billions of years, causing planets and moons filled with icy mountains to melt and turn into oceans (I love this! The piece is so evocative of the chaos!), The Swan of Tuonela by Jean Sibelius, and finally closing out the program with Claude Debussy’s iconic La Mer.
I lived in Amarillo from late 2014 until the end of 2017, and it was during that time I won the position with the Amarillo Symphony as their contrabassoonist. I can’t believe it’s been 10 years with this incredible group! Even thought I haven’t lived in Amarillo in 8 years, it’s my home away from home and I always love catching up with the former principal bassoonist, Tina Carpenter, and current second bassoonist, Kathy Kendle.
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