>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

Area residents will soon have the unique opportunity to hear the full might of the Portland-based Oregon Symphony live — and without trundling down the Columbia River to the City of Roses, either.

The symphony is culminating the first year of its Community Music Partnership in Cove and La Grande with a community concert Saturday.

The extravaganza will be held at the  La Grande High School gym at 7 p.m.

Commanding the podium will be Oregon Symphony Music Director Carlos Kalmar, who has helmed the orchestra for six seasons. A cosmopolitan maestro, Kalmar has, in the past, served as music director of the Hamburg Symphony, the Stuttgart Philharmonic, the Tonkunstlerorchester of Vienna, Austria, and the Anhaltisches Theater in Dessau, Germany.

“I’m really, really excited about playing in La Grande,” Kalmar said a few days before the orchestra hit the eastward road.

Keeping pace with the Community Music Partnership’s spirit, the symphony will be incorporating local musicians into its program. Members of the homegrown Grande Ronde Symphony Orchestra will lend their prowess to Edvard Grieg’s “Holberg Suite.”

Students in the Cove and La Grande high school bands will rub shoulders with the Portland players for Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Bacchanale” from “Samson and Delilah.”

And the combined vocal talents of the Baker City, Cove, La Grande and Union high school choirs will be featured on Alexander Borodin’s “Polovtzian Dances.”

Friday the symphony will perform two concerts at the same venue for Cove and La Grande elementary, middle and high school students. For those shows, Resident Conductor Gregory Vajda will wield the baton.

Vajda visited Cove High School in April as guest conductor and clinician for the Eastern Oregon Small Schools Music Association’s Mass Band Festival.

Maestro Kalmar has fond memories of integrating with Baker City musicians when the partnership was held there several years ago. “That was great fun,” he chuckled.

He said he looked forward to working with the Baker City High School choir again, in addition to all the new collaborators.

Elsewhere that he has worked, Kalmar said, big, urban orchestras may play concerts in smaller towns, but the partnership adds an extra level of sustained integration.

“As a music director of a large symphony orchestra,” he explained, “I think it’s one of the best ideas the orchestra ever had.

“In every city, it’s different, but it’s always a great deal of fun. What I really like, and what I think the community benefits the most from, is the commitment.”

And it’s not just the partnership towns that draw value from the relationship struck with the symphony: The orchestra gets the experience of meeting some of the state’s diverse residents and working with local artists.

While the May concerts are the first time the full Oregon Symphony will appear in the area, representatives from each musical section — strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion — have journeyed to Cove and La Grande since January as part of the partnership.

The musicians have interacted with students, held fireside chats and performed chamber concerts for the public.

“There is definitely an excitement and desire to experience classical music in the communities of La Grande and Cove,” Monica Hayes, the symphony’s acting director of education and community engagement, said in a press release.

“We hope to be a creative conduit between the schools and local artists and arts organizations and to foster a sustained relationship with the Oregon Symphony and with each other.”

This season of the community partnership marks a couple of milestones for the symphony: It is the first time in the program’s six years that two communities are being involved simultaneously, and that the symphony is interacting with a community-based orchestra.

The Grande Ronde Symphony Orchestra, in addition to participating in the partnership, is celebrating its 60th anniversary during its 2007-08 season.

With such an established, active community orchestra, many people in the area have heard classical music in a concert setting.

But for those who haven’t, Kalmar stressed that the experience is fundamentally distinct from listening through headphones or speakers.

“It’s a completely different animal,” he said.

Recording technology has improved dramatically over the years, he noted.

“However,” he said, “it will never, ever be possible to reproduce what is really there. Everyone has to come to hear it and experience it.”

There is, of course, the visual excitement of scores of nattily-dressed musicians and their elegant instruments assembled onstage.

But there’s also the element of sheer creative energy, often more tangible live.

Not to mention the full-bodied sound, which varies depending on acoustics and one’s position in the audience.

“And we bring, of course, really great music — famous music,” Kalmar said.

Even those who don’t consider themselves connoisseurs of classical music will probably recognize the time-tested strains of Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No.4,” for example.

Tickets for the community concert, available through ArtsEast at 663-ARTS, are $8 for adults, $4 for students of any age and $20 for families.

The Oregon Symphony has previously implemented community partnerships in Baker City, Estacada, Klamath Falls, North Bend and Redmond.