Tonight: free Olympic Strings concert

PORT ANGELES — Tonight’s Olympic Strings Workshop concert is an uncommon experience for at least two reasons.

First, the 7 p.m. performance is live and in person, starring 14 chamber musicians, young women and men who opted to spend a portion of summer preparing for it.

Admission is free to the concert, which is open to fully vaccinated guests only, at First Presbyterian Church, 139 W. Eighth St. Masks will be required.

Another reason: The music on the program includes two works by Black composers, long underrepresented in the classical canon, said James Ray, one of the young musicians’ mentors.

Along with artistic director Monique Mead, Ray leads the Olympic Strings Workshop, a weeklong summer camp for high school and college students.

The Olympic Strings ensemble will perform music by R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943), a Canadian descendant of the enslaved people who escaped to the North and settled in Drummondsville, Ontario.

Dett studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and at Harvard; he earned a master’s in music at Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.

“He’s not well-known, though he ought to be,” Ray said.

Sharing tonight’s program will be Handel’s Concerto Grosso in G major, a relatively well-known work. Then there’s the premiere of “West Coast Journey,” a commissioned work by contemporary composer and cellist Caleb Vaughn Jones of Los Angeles.

So it’s a big moment, said Ray.

“We’ve had to go so long now under the shadow of the pandemic. That has made us realize how strong our connection is, as a human species, to live performance,” he said.

“This is in the context of the incredible work the students have put in,” preparing for tonight. The musicians have not only spent this past week in day camp at the Presbyterian church, but also completed a series of Zoom sessions earlier this summer.

The Olympic Strings musicians include high school students Reef Gelder, Adam Weller, Olivia Wray, Luke Gavin, Olivia Carroll, Etienne Strandberg-Houzé, Tino Cardenes and Maïté Sadeh, while the youngest student is eighth-grader Violet Knobel. College students Evan Cobb, Meiqi Liang, Karson Nicpon, Marley Cochran and Lauren Waldron are working as camp counselors as well as ensemble musicians.

To learn more about the program, see olympicstringsworkshop.org.

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Jefferson County senior reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz@peninsuladailynews.com.