Symphony maestro wraps his 10th anniversary season

PORT ANGELES — Ten years ago, against all expectations, Jonathan Pasternack crossed the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge from Brooklyn, N.Y., heading west. Chosen to be the next conductor of the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra, the Manhattan-born Pasternack began his trip in August 2015 to begin rehearsals for the September Pops & Picnic concerts in both Port Angeles and Sequim.

“When I started out in this career, I didn’t have the expectation of a certain trajectory,” Pasternack recalled.

Symphony conductors have to be agile, doing audition after audition, and willing to move wherever the work is. Pasternack was one of eight men and women who, from late 2014 to mid-2015, had sought to lead the Port Angeles Symphony.

Before he auditioned here in November 2014, Pasternack had traveled the world to make music, conducting ballets, operas and symphonies. He had fallen in love with the art form as a teenager, first attending the Manhattan School of Music and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had won a top prize at an international conducting competition in Barcelona, served with James DePriest at the Oregon Symphony and recorded an album with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Yet his desire was to put down roots, to make a home in a place where people value music. That place is Port Angeles.

To his orchestra, Pasternack has attracted guest artists from greater Seattle, New York City, Spain and Germany as well as from Port Angeles High School.

The conductor’s 10th anniversary season wraps this month. On May 3, Pasternack led the orchestra in its 126th performance together, and on Friday and Saturday, he will conduct the chamber orchestra at venues in Port Angeles and Sequim.

As artistic director and executive director — he was appointed to the latter in 2016 — he also has organized eight Young Artist Competitions, dozens of fundraising events — and concert performances of Johannes Brahms’ German Requiem and Giacomo Puccini’s “La Bohème.”

The May 3 concert featured the celebrated Spanish piano soloist Josu de Solaun, with whom Pasternack has performed many times, in both Port Angeles and Europe.

“He’s not just a collaborator but a dear friend, a musical brother,” de Solaun said of the conductor.

“Celebrating Jonathan’s 10th anniversary with the symphony is deeply meaningful,” he added. “It’s a chance to honor not just his artistry but the community he’s nurtured.”

Double bassist Anthony Balducci, who joined the orchestra as a Port Angeles eighth-grader in spring 1990, has performed under three conductors since. Like de Solaun, he’s noticed Pasternack’s particular approach.

“He endears himself to us by being human. He’s not above admitting mistakes, and he’s quick to poke fun at himself for things like that,” Balducci said.

“He has spent great efforts to focus on homegrown talent: finding artists who grew up here,” he noted, “and featuring them as soloists whenever possible.”

These Port Angeles- and Sequim-grown soloists include Grammy-winning violist Richard O’Neill, bassoonist Hunter Gordon, violinist James Garlick, violist Cheryl Swoboda and bassist Stephen Schermer, who stepped into the limelight in 2022.

Schermer, a Port Angeles High School alumnus who performs with the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra and other Seattle ensembles, became the featured soloist in December 2022.

He and the orchestra performed Sarah Bassingthwaighte’s Concerto for Double Bass, a work Pasternack commissioned for the symphony’s 90th anniversary. Then Schermer and Pasternack traveled to the United Kingdom, where they recorded the concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra.

There have been hard times too. It was five years ago, in March 2020, when the orchestra’s home, the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, went dark. The pandemic canceled all concerts there and elsewhere across the world. Long months without live music followed. Pasternack set up Zoom meetings, just for musicians to socialize.

“It didn’t matter what was being said,” he remembered.

“It was just about seeing people’s faces,” and feeling less alone.

When the orchestra could at last return to the stage in late 2021, “It felt like coming home,” Pasternack said.

He added that, through it all, the community has given its support — moral and financial — to the orchestra. That is quite a phenomenon for a rural locale, Pasternack said.

“The symphony had unlikely beginnings [in 1932] in this logging town in the Great Depression,” Pasternack said.

The ongoing support, and good turnouts for concerts and fundraisers, seems to carry forward the magic that got the orchestra started in the first place.

The music, he said, comes from people who are fully engaged, body and soul. Pasternack feels that when he steps onto the podium and raises his baton.

For him, the works of masters such as Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich and Bartok — and many others the orchestra has brought to life — have always carried deep inspiration. He remembers how, when he was a boy, music became sustenance.

“Whenever I was trying to concentrate on something else, music was always played in my head. Even if I wanted to do something else, something was always pushing me toward the stream, the musical stream.”

Marie Meyers, a flutist who has performed with the Port Angeles Symphony for 15 years, also is a member of the board of directors. She headed the search committee for a new conductor in 2014 and 2015.

Pasternack wowed Meyers with his broad knowledge of the classical repertoire and with his ability to speak through his hands. After he was hired, he impressed her with his humility. He not only acts as a teacher and guide for the orchestra, Meyers said. The maestro also helps keep the symphony office floors swept.

Meyers and Pasternack share the belief that music, played with passion, is what sustains us all.

“For so many people who live here, music is like medicine to the soul. It just touches one’s heart,” she said.

Meyers added she hopes Pasternack can stay another 10 years. To which he said: Yes.

This is home, after all.

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Diane Urbani de la Paz is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Port Townsend.