Despite what one might suspect from the title, “There And Back Again” is not a pops concert featuring music from “The Hobbit” and other scores. Rather, it’s a reference to the Juneau Symphony’s first road trip in more than a decade as it visits Sitka on Friday for a concert that will be performed again Sunday in Juneau.
It also will mark a return of sorts for the third of four music director candidates making guest appearances at the symphony’s four mainstage concerts this season. Brad Hogarth, in addition to an extensive resume as a music director and conductor, is also a trumpet player who participated in an annual holiday brass concert in Sitka as a musician and leader for about 10 years.
Hogarth, in an interview Tuesday, said being matched with the symphony’s “There And Back Again” program was coincidental, but his previous experience in Sitka as well as the concert’s featured piece — Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 — are an ideal match.
“It’s a wonderful symphony I’ve done many times, both as a trumpet player and a conductor,” he said “And, yes, I totally as soon as they said they were going to Sitka for one of the sets I was like, ‘Oh, I really hope that’s the one I can do.’ You know, I was really, really hoping that would be a fit. Any chance I get to go and visit Sitka is great. I’ve gone there for 10 years now and I’ve got friends there, and I love the community, and it’s a really wonderful community.”
Hogarth, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, said he met Juneau Symphony Executive Director Charlotte Truitt during one of his visits to Sitka, which led to his interest in applying for the music director job after Christopher Koch departed last year. A partial list of his other directing and conducting engagements includes the Monterey Symphony, Art Haus Collective, San Francisco Conservatory of Music Wind Ensemble, Dallas Symphony and National Brass Ensemble.
“It’s four concerts a year so it’s sort of doable to sort of balance that with a lot of other things I’m doing,” he said when asked about balancing the Juneau Symphony with his other works. “And I just I’ve always loved it up here. The public community in Southeast Alaska is just really, really cool.”
While Hogarth has worked with ensembles ranging from large-city professional orchestras to youth groups, he said the Juneau Symphony has a unique dynamic in the range of players who gather on stage for the performances.
“It’s unique in that there’s musicians coming from all over the place to play this concert,” he said. “So there’s people flying in from all over the West Coast to be a part of this orchestra. So I’d say first of all, that’s pretty unique — that happens a lot in summer festival orchestras, but I wouldn’t say that it happens a lot in regular-season orchestras.”
Also, having the Juneau Symphony make its first trip to Sitka in about a decade adds intrigue — and a few complications — to the experience, Hogarth said.
“It’s a huge undertaking to get the catamaran and get housing for everybody in two different places,” he said. “And every conversation where I come in where we we’re talking about how the orchestra sets up (and) every logistical issue with like the size of the stage versus the flow of the concert, and things like that, is doubled.”
Friday’s concert will be performed at 7 p.m. at the Sitka Performing Arts Center, while Sunday’s will be at 3 p.m. in the Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé auditorium. Hogarth said his experience in a range of venues will help when staging the performances at both sites.
“Everywhere you go you sort of listen for what the hall sounds like,” he said. “So, for instance, my decisions on how we approach phrasing or articulation changes quite drastically like, say, if we were in a big echoey cathedral versus a really dry auditorium.”
“There might be balance adjustments like ‘In this hall the trumpets really get out there, so we don’t have to play very loud.’ Or in this hall, they’re kind of buried or hidden. So there’s a lot of balance adjustments and stylistic adjustments. And then, with soloists you always really, really, really want to make sure that your soloists are heard very clearly. So we will make sure in each venue to make sure we can hear our vocalists and our pianists. So those are the biggest things that are discussed.”
The program for “There And Back Again” features what Hogarth calls accessible compositions that will be familiar, even to people who aren’t die-hard fans of classical music. But he said there’s also underlying complexities to pieces such as the Dvořák symphony.
“This symphony is beautiful for a lot of reasons,” he said. “It’s obviously got some absolutely iconic melodies and themes. It’s super-recognizable — it’s become one of the big ones that everybody kind of knows. But I think there’s both a lot of subtlety and drama to sort of be accentuated with the symphony. I think there’s ways to play things very simply and it’d be very beautiful, and then there’s ways to really sort of exaggerate and sort of go over the top with some of the phrasing that’s also really beautiful. So I think this symphony’s ability to both be subtle and dramatic, but just completely captivating from start to end is what I really, really love about it.”
A counterpart of sorts to that symphony is George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” that is also featured as part of the program, which Hogarth described as “a really nice sort of pillar to sort of hold up with the Dvořák.”
“It’s again, iconic, wonderful fun, totally Americana,” he said. “I think the connection between the Dvořák and the Gershwin being that the Dvořák is truly a European-style symphony, but with American influence and someone who came to America, and was just in awe of the music and the culture and the landscape. And then the Gershwin one is really just encapsulating everything that is American music with this sort of combination of the classical style meets sort of the American jazz idiom meets just this beautiful rhapsody of a piece.”
The program will also feature Johann Strauss II’s “Spiel’ ich die Unschuld vom Lande” from his “Die Fledermaus” operetta and conclude with Gioachino Rossini’s “William Tell Overture.”
The Juneau performance will be preceded by a pre-concert talk in the JDHS auditorium at 2 p.m. Parking will be available at the Michael J. Burns Building, with shuttle service to JDHS available at 2:30 and 2:45 p.m., and back to the parking lot after the end of the concert.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
