Annie Bartholomew has performed on more than a few stages in venues near and far, but when she got together with some fellow Juneau musicians on Thursday night to rehearse a couple of her familiar folk songs it was anything but just another evening get-together.
“This is the coolest thing I have ever done,” she said, turning around to address musicians of the Juneau Symphony after their first full rehearsal together of songs about women of the Klondike Gold Rush that have been rearranged for orchestra as part of the symphony’s “Homelands” concert scheduled Saturday and Sunday.
The concert will also be an audition for conductor Tigran Arakelyan, the fourth and final candidate to be the symphony’s new music director. When Arakelyan, who in 2023 was among Musical America Worldwide’s Top 30 Professionals of the Year, said he wanted to go over the first part of one of Bartholomew’s songs again she was plenty willing.
“I would love to do the first part again as many times as we can,” she said. “This is incredible.”
The new experience of Bartholomew harmonizing her banjo and vocals with a full orchestra is among multiple novel elements of this weekend’s concerts. “Homelands” will feature the symphony’s first performance of music by an Indigenous composer, with selections from Louis Ballard’s ballet “Four Moons” that celebrates dances and traditions of four tribes in Oklahoma.
Pianist Jeffrey Biegel rehearses “Rhapsody in Red, White, and Blue” under the direction of Tigran Arakelyan, the fourth and final guest music director seeking the position for the Juneau Symphony, on Thursday, May 29, 2025, in the Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé auditorium. This is Biegel’s 50th performance of the piece that he is planning to perform in all 50 states. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
The program also marks the Alaska premiere of Peter Boyer’s “Rhapsody in Red, White, & Blue,” being performed by pianist Jeffrey Biegel as part of a 50-state “Rhapsody National Initiative.” Biegel will perform the composition for the 50th time while in Juneau, although he still has about a dozen or so states remaining to complete the project.
There also will be familiar classical works including the finale of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and what the symphony calls “iconic American music” by Aaron Copland.
Arakelyan, an Armenian-American credited with founding dozens of music projects and conducting for a multitude of symphonies including youth orchestras in South Korea, said in an interview Thursday that one of the intriguing aspects of the Juneau concerts is “more than half the program I’ve never conducted.”
“It’s a good challenge and I learned a lot about various composers that I didn’t know about,” he said.
An encounter with a man at a local coffee cafe also acquainted Arakelyan with his audience.
“He said ‘What’s on the program?’” Arakelyan said. “So I told him all these pieces. I started with Tchaikovsky, thinking he’s the most famous one. And I said Copeland. And he was like ‘OK, cool’ — he’s kind of nodding along. And then I said “Oh, Annie Bartholomew.’ He’s like ‘Oh, now that’s a name I know.’ She’s famous around here, or something, so I probably should have mentioned that first.”
The two Bartholomew songs are from her 2023 debut full-length album “Sisters of White Chapel,” featuring stories and struggles of women during the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1890s. They were rearranged by composer/orchestrator Spencer Edgers, who is also a multi-instrumentalist and the symphony’s operations manager.
Arakelyan’s audition this weekend to be the symphony’s new music director isn’t his first time in front of that ensemble. He was a guest conductor in 2019 for a winter “Russian Romantics” concert as well as a Carnegie Hall/Link Up concert involving grade school musicians performing remotely with a professional orchestra.
“And then I played at the clan house,” he said. “I’m a flutist and I brought my regular Western classical flute, and I brought my Armenian flute as well, and there was a Native American flutist who came from Seattle, I think. He was here for a different event and we ended up ending the program playing together, so that was fun.”
Tigran Arakelyan leads the Juneau Symphony through a rehearsal on Thursday, May 29, 2025, in the Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé auditorium. He is among four candidates seeking to become the symphony’s new music director. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
The “Four Moons” works by Ballard, acclaimed as “the father of Native American composition,” aren’t likely to be clearly distinguished as Indigenous music by audience members, Arakelyan said. Ballard was Western-trained with Copeland among his influences.
“There’s kind of an open way that they compose really,” Arakelyan said.”Lots of space — both harmonical space and rhythmic space in their pieces — so it doesn’t feel like Tchaikovsky when you’re hearing a billion notes within one measure.”
A different element of Americana — but with influences from the same general era — is “Rhapsody in Red, White, & Blue” that invokes comparisons to George Gershwin.
“Like the Gershwin work, Boyer’s ‘Rhapsody’ is in a single long multi-sectional movement,” the Juneau Symphony’s program description of the piece notes. “As Gershwin did a century ago, Boyer has attempted to capture a sense of American energy and optimism in much of the music. Though his musical style typically does not employ any jazz elements, in this work it seemed appropriate to include some allusions to a 1920s, ‘quasi-Gershwin’ style.”
Biegel, in an interview Thursday, described the piece as something of a musical journey across the U.S. in its pacing and sounds.
“What Peter did is he brings in a very strong rhythmic feeling to the piece to kind of reflect the pulse of what it’s like to live in America,” Biegel said. “It’s a very vibrant and forward-thinking pulse. And then throughout he tips the hat to Gershwin with the use of the Charleston rhythm, which is of the 1920s. Nothing ever sounds like Gershwin really, just the rhythm and the pulse.”
“Then he has kind of a throwback to some jazz combos, like…Vince Giraldi from the ‘Peanuts’ TV specials and movies, so that kind of jazz combo sound in there and improvisational sound that he writes out. And then he gets to a very sudden stop, and it goes into the first major lyrical section that’s kind of as though you were taking a hang glider over Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, the Rocky Mountains, and just this glorious splendor of the vastness of America and all of its different landscapes. It’s very cinematic, so they’re going to feel as though they’re watching they’re listening to a movie soundtrack at that point. And then it just wraps up with a wonderful Gaelic dance.”
While the piece is being performed when there are sharp partisan political differences occurring in the U.S., Biegel said “music really is just something that brings the people together.”
“The sense of belonging and uniting with this music is very strong,” he said. “And it’s just a feel-good piece.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
Know and Go
What: “Homelands” concert by the Juneau Symphony.
When: 7 p.m. Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday (with 2 p.m. pre-concert talk).
Where: Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé auditorium.
Tickets and further details: www.juneausymphony.org.
