CHIMACUM — The Port Townsend Symphony Orchestra will perform its December concert at 2 p.m. Sunday.
The free event will be in the auditorium at Chimacum High School, 91 West Valley Road, Chimacum.
Music lovers also are welcome to attend the orchestra’s dress rehearsal at 7 p.m. Friday.
The program will open with the overture to Jacques Offenback’s comic operetta “La Belle Héléne.”
Then Dena Odell will take the podium to guest conduct the Farandole from “L’Arlésienne” by Georges Bizet.
Odell earned her conducting spurs by winning a fundraising auction to support Port Townsend Ballet.
Following the Farandole, which is based on the 13th century Christmas carol “The March of the Kings,” Maestro Tigran Arakelyan will return to direct the “Sleeping Beauty Suite.”
The program also will feature “The Concert Overture” by Florence Price.
Price, a 20th century African American composer, was not well-known until the 2009 discovery of more than 250 of her compositions during the renovation of a house she once owned.
The overture weaves the spirituals, “Go Down Moses,” “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” into a tapestry that melds African American and Western Classical traditions.
Georges Bizet’s Carmen Suite #2 will finish up the program.
The suite was compiled after Bizet’s death from portions of the opera by his friend and fellow composer Ernest Guiraud.
For more information, visit www.ptsymphony.org.
