PORT ANGELES — This music evokes the feeling of being in love.
That’s what Rachel Lee Priday realized — all over again — when she began playing Johannes Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major.
The Juilliard- and Harvard-educated violinist will join the Port Angeles Symphony on Saturday for its first concert of spring.
It will be Priday’s debut as a featured soloist with the orchestra and conductor-artistic director Jonathan Pasternack; they will take the stage together at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, 304 E. Park Ave.
Pasternack will give a brief pre-concert talk at 6:30 p.m.
Tickets are available at portangelessymphony.org, Port Book and News in Port Angeles and at the door.
The public also is invited to the symphony’s final dress rehearsal at 10 a.m. Saturday, for which tickets are available on the website, the bookstore and the door.
“Rachel is a stunning violinist and terrific musician, with a beautiful sound and virtuoso technique to spare,” Pasternack said.
“I can’t wait to play this fabulous concerto with her,” added the conductor, who is marking his 10th anniversary of leading the Port Angeles Symphony.
Saturday’s concert will open with music by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize. The piece is “Avanti! (Fanfare for Jerry),” and it is a brief and powerful one, Pasternack said.
The finale: Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7 in C major, a work that is just more than a century old and still sounds completely original, the conductor said.
“Sibelius originally called his last major work a ‘symphonic fantasy,’” Pasternack said. “Unfolding in one uninterrupted movement, it is a culmination of the artistic achievement of one of our greatest composers.”
Priday, now a professor of music at the University of Washington, is joyfully anticipating this live performance. Standing onstage as a soloist “is kind of like piloting a plane. It’s probably even more visceral than that,” she said.
“You notice every single second of what’s happening. You’re definitely in a different zone … connected with the flow of everything,” her violin, the orchestra, the conductor, the audience.
Priday had her heart set on playing the violin by the time she was 4. Growing up in Chicago, she excelled with her beloved instrument, and she went on to study with Dorothy DeLay and Itzhak Perlman at the Juilliard School in New York City. Later, she earned a degree in English at Harvard and a master’s in music at the New England Conservatory.
When she gets to perform in a concert hall, Priday does not take her listeners for granted.
“I’ve always loved the energy the audience brings. You can definitely feel it,” she said.
“I remember during the pandemic, a lot of musicians including myself had to perform just for a video camera, for an empty space. You really see that we can’t do what we’re doing in the same way without an audience.”
The Brahms concerto is a jewel, Priday added, one “with a kind of grandness to it … This piece really showcases the orchestra; there’s a huge opening before the violin comes in,” and an oboe solo performed by Anne Krabill. The musician from Port Townsend will retire this spring after 27 years playing with the Port Angeles Symphony.
This orchestra, in its 92nd season, brings together performers from across Clallam County as well, including flutist Marie Meyers, trumpet player Nancy McPherson, horn player Brian Palmer and violinist Joy Klimecky, all of Sequim.
The experience of playing live with an orchestra such as this, Priday said, “is really beautiful. We all communicate without speaking.”
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Diane Urbani de la Paz is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Port Townsend.
