Courtesy of TSO Nicholas Bardonnay’s visuals will be projected onto a 440-square-foot screen as the Tucson symphony plays.
The Tucson Symphony Orchestra is celebrating the Grand Canyon’s 100th birthday with Ferde Grofé’s monumental “Grand Canyon Suite,” a work composed in 1921 under the working title of “Five Pictures of the Grand Canyon.”
The title seems apropos for how the orchestra will perform the suite — as the soundtrack to a film the orchestra co-commissioned with the Phoenix Symphony in 2011 to celebrate Arizona’s 100th birthday the following year.
The orchestra is bringing back multimedia visual artist Nicholas Bardonnay, who shot the film in 2011 over six visits to the Grand Canyon, including a nine-day rafting trip.
“We went to various places that folks don’t get to see very often, like Toroweap Overlook,” a viewpoint located in a remote area on the North Rim, Bardonnay said last week, days after he and his wife pulled their 30-foot 1987 Airstream RV into Tucson.
Bardonnay, whose California-based Westwater Arts has created 15 photochoreographic multimedia films for orchestras, is the guest artist for this weekend’s TSO “Grand Canyon State” concert. Bardonnay will be the guy working the controls of the visuals being projected onto a 440-square-foot screen hanging above the orchestra at Tucson Music Hall.
“Just like a musician, I will be following the maestro. I’ve memorized the music to the point that I know the queuing,” he said.
What we can expect to see are stark and sweeping images of the canyon that you don’t get from the visitor center postcards or by aiming your camera from an observation deck.
Take the Toroweap, a spot that you reach through Utah, driving along a rutted dirt road that gets so “wild and wooly” that it’s almost impossible to traverse without a high-profile vehicle.
“It’s one of the best views in the canyon because you are looking about 3,000 feet down, with the Colorado on both sides,” he said. “It’s like looking over a 3,000-foot cliff.”
Bardonnay said that while his film offers the visual glimpse, it’s the orchestra that provides the emotional connection to tie it all together.
“It’s kind of like any great film. Take ‘Lord of the Rings’: if you take away the soundtrack, you lose something,” he explained. “It’s meant to create kind of a dynamic where it’s not necessarily literal of what the composer was thinking when they wrote the music. It was meant to be more of a montage of the visuals.”
The Grand Canyon Suite anchors a program that opens with Aaron Copland’s “El Salón México,” a hat-tip to our southern neighbors. Bardonnay will accompany the orchestra with his latest project, “Mágico,” which he shot while he and his wife, Erin, were living in Mexico for a year.
The orchestra also will perform Copland’s “The Tender Land Suite” and two works by Spanish composer Manuel de Falla. Bardonnay said he’s also planning a little surprise at this weekend’s performances. He wouldn’t elaborate, but expect it to be something visually enticing.
Adding multimedia elements to classical music, he said, “makes the concert experience more dynamic and engaging, and for (newcomers), it makes it a much more approachable experience.”
“When you connect those dots between what you’re seeing and what you are hearing, it adds new dimensions for people,” he said.
