Tucson orchestra takes on climate change in first concert of the year

Antonio Vivaldi was ahead of his time when he composed his monumental “Four Seasons,” a series of four violin concertos meant to evoke winter, spring, summer and fall.

OK, so he probably wasn’t thinking so much about Mother Nature and climate control and humanity’s impact on Earth’s very survival when he wrote “The Four Seasons” nearly 300 years ago.

But this weekend, True Concord Voices & Orchestra is connecting those dots with a new work the professional ensemble commissioned that tackles climate change head on.

True Concord, in its first concert of 2022 after postponing for a year its 2022 Tucson Desert Song Festival events in January, is performing the world premiere of Jake Runestad’s Earth Symphony (“Choral”) that it commissioned through the Dorothy Dyer Vanek Fund for Excellence. Vanek, a longtime benefactor for the choir who died in 2020, established the fund with a $500,000 donation in 2017 to cover the cost of commissioning new works and recordings.

In addition to commissioning Runestad, True Concord also brought in poet Todd Boss, who has worked with Runestad, to write texts that trace the origins and dangers of climate change.

“What’s unique about the texts is that Todd wrote it from the perspective of Mother Earth,” said True Concord Music Director Eric Holtan. “This is Mother Earth talking and she is talking to us.”

And she is not happy that humanity has taken her gift of the land and the seas and the stars and the moon and destroyed it.

Almost.

Earth Symphony starts at the beginning, thousands of years before Mother Earth introduced humanity to her shores, and weaves the cautionary tales from Icarus whose wax wings melted when he flew too close to the sun to the dangers of water pollution, carbon emissions and blind ignorance of mankind to avoid changing course to save the planet.

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Hopefulness is restored in the 30-minute piece’s final movement “Recover,” which imagines Earth recovering and starting anew.

“It ends with a beautiful picture of the Earth cleansed and rejuvenated, something that we can attain if we work together,” Holtan said.

The movement closes with the brass players putting down their horns and picking up wine glasses to create a sweet high pitch when they rub the rims.

“It’s going to be a really cool sound affect at the end,” Holtan said.

True Concord will have more than 70 artists on stage — 32 vocalists and 40 instrumentalists — for the concert, which they will perform three times this weekend.

Earth Symphony comes after the ensemble performs the original climate change masterpiece of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” But instead of using a single violin soloist to convey the seasons, True Concord will have three “because we have an embarrassment of riches of really great violinists,” Holtan said.

“It’s going to be like an olympic relay race where one violinist plays a season then hands off to the next,” he added.

The trio of soloists — True Concord’s concertmasters Ben Nisbet and Ellen Chamberlain and Freya Creech — will take turns with the final season, Holtan said.