Symphony, choirs to present season-opening Family Concert
Published 1:30 am Thursday, September 24, 2026
PORT ANGELES — Mary Elizabeth Bowden remembers how she felt falling in love with the sound of her first instrument, the cornet — and with music itself.
A girl of 10, she wanted to do as her older brothers had: take music lessons. And when she did, her teacher added a bonus — taking her to see concerts all over Chicagoland.
“I was hooked,” Bowden recalled.
Now a trumpet soloist known around the world, Bowden is on her way to join the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra for its season opener, the Family Concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, 304 E. Park Ave.
In a program filled with music from the Broadway stage, the movie screen and the classical realm, the featured soloist will play the “Athena” Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra — the West Coast premiere of the piece.
“Athena” composer and horn player Jeff Scott, known for his work with Imani Winds, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dance Theater of Harlem and Jazz at Lincoln Center, also will be at Saturday’s concert. He’ll join Port Angeles Symphony conductor and Artistic Director Jonathan Pasternack for a short pre-concert talk at 6:30 p.m. The two have known each other since both were teenagers playing in the brass section of New York’s All-City High School Orchestra: Scott on horn and Pasternack on trombone.
Tickets to the symphony’s Family Concert are available at portangelessymphony.org, at Port Book and News in downtown Port Angeles or by calling the symphony office at 360-457-5579. Season passes are available at significant discounts until Saturday.
This first performance of the orchestra’s 94th season also will feature the combined Port Angeles High School choirs — 60 voices led by director John Lorentzen in songs including Aaron Copland’s “The Promise of Living,” Lee’s “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” and the finale, “America the Beautiful.”
“I love working with John. He is such a great musician, with an amazing attitude and warmth,” said Pasternack, who added that hearing the choir’s voices together with the symphony orchestra is pure thrill.
“There’s nothing like it,” he said. “You have people expressing themselves through music, acoustically, and all these voices are their own instrument.”
Lorentzen added: “We’ve been working hard — it’s very early in the school year — but I look forward to hearing the finished product next Saturday and seeing the excitement on the students’ faces.
“This year is special,” he said, because his choirs also will sing a freshly arranged song from Sequim composer Linda Dowdell. She has created a blend of “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific” and “Children Will Listen” from Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” — two classics from American musical theater, interwoven.
Dowdell’s arrangement fits the Family Concert’s theme of American composers. Pasternack noted that, along with Copland, Scott, Sondheim and Rodgers, the orchestra will stir in music of Charles Ives, John Williams, Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin — Americans who tell their stories with their own flourishes.
The United States is an “intersection of so many different cultures, and thus of musical styles and influences,” said Pasternack, who added that Saturday’s concert, with its full orchestra and youthful choruses, will celebrate that variety.
The performance will have two guest conductors. Dr. Nancy Stephanz, a symphony board member and the winning bidder in the gala auction for the privilege, will lead the orchestra in Leroy Anderson’s “The First Day of Spring.” And because he loves John Williams, symphony timpanist Gary Dahl will conduct the theme from “Jurassic Park.”
When Dahl is not playing timpani in Port Angeles, he serves as associate conductor of the Bremerton WestSound Symphony and conductor of the Kitsap Opera.
In addition to the “Athena” trumpet concerto, Bowden will step forward with her flugelhorn to play Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.” The flugelhorn brings “a beautiful contrast to the C trumpet,” she said.
Bowden, a professor of trumpet at Shenandoah Conservatory in Virginia, is the founder of the Seraph Brass quintet, an all-female ensemble. She has recorded three albums of her own so far: “Reverie,” “Radiance” and her latest, “Storyteller.” Her next album, she promised, will be new works for trumpet, tuba and piano.
It was Bowden who commissioned Scott’s “Athena,” and she is enchanted by the music.
“It is a really powerful, meaningful work Jeff wrote,” she said, adding, “it reimagines the Greek goddess of wisdom and war as a modern mediator,” to tell an epic, cinematic story in music.
Upon hearing the concerto, Bowden said, “I was just blown away by it.”
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Diane Urbani de la Paz is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Port Townsend.