STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
Ellen Sanders is about to get athletic with her cello.
“The violin is considered athletic because they play fast and loud and high, and I’m going to do that on the cello,” she said.
Sanders, a longtime cellist with the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, will appear as a guest soloist with the Wood River Orchestra during its Spring Concert at 4 p.m. Sunday, March 11. The concert, which is free to the public, will be held at the Wood River High School Performing Arts Theater at the Community Campus in Hailey.
This concert will celebrate the orchestra music of Charles-Camille Saint-Saens, a French composer of the Romantic Era in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Sanders will perform the centerpiece of the program—Saint-Saens’ Concerto No. 1 for Cello and Orchestra in A Minor.
Sanders, a graduate of Oberlin College and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, performed the piece with a piano while an undergraduate more than 25 years ago.
“That was fun. But to play it with an orchestra is really special because you have all the colors like the clarinet and oboes,” she said. “That’s why this is such a wonderful opportunity for me.”
The nature of the cello is to be an accompanying instrument. But this concert will put it in the forefront. It’ll be a collaboration in the sense that Sanders will dialogue back and forth with different instruments.
“There are a couple of times when I am playing with the violin section or when the trombone is answering me. At other times it’s like a battle where I’m playing by myself and the whole orchestra comes in. It’s a romantic piece, full of beautiful melodies and it’s played continuously without stopping. And at the beginning it’s very athletic. It really shows off the cello as an athletic instrument,” she said.
In addition to the cello concerto, Sunday’s concert will feature Saint-Saens’ familiar “March Militaire Francaise” from “Suite Algerienne,” the haunting “Danse Macabre” and selections from the popular “Carnival of the Animals.”
“Danse Macabre” is a favorite of some of the orchestral musicians, said Conductor Brad Hershey.
“Every time we play it, I see the excitement in their faces. This is challenging music, but the reward is great for our musicians and the audience, too. I look forward to what I believe will be our most exciting program yet.”
Hershey said he and orchestra members are thrilled to be working with Sanders.
“Working with a soloist of this caliber is a truly inspiring experience,” he said. “Rehearsing the music has provided the orchestra the opportunity to explore new styles and techniques, further expanding the skill set of the ensemble.”
Sanders is equally pleased to be working with the orchestra.
“I’m not Yo-Yo Ma and I’m not getting called by the Berlin Philharmonic so for me to have this opportunity is huge because it’s a role that doesn’t come around that often. It’s a really fun piece and it’s going to be really fun to put together. We’re going to have a rip roaring time,” she said.
The Wood River Orchestra was founded in 2007 to enrich the lives of area residents by providing opportunities to perform and enjoy orchestral music. It’s composed of more than 30 musicians of all ages and abilities, and new members are always welcome.
The orchestra performs three free main concerts each year and at community events across the Wood River Valley.
Sanders has worked with a variety of community orchestras, including a Community Women’s Orchestra in California that she says possesses an over-the-top brain trust with a principal oboe who is an emergency room surgeon and a second violinist who works as a rocket scientist at the University of California-Berkeley.
Lockheed Martin employees in the Bay area field a community orchestra. So does Hewlett-Packard, which puts together an orchestra made up of its engineers and computer technicians.
“Here you have adults who might have put their instruments down for 20, 30 years, yet they had that exposure when they were kids,” said Sanders, who teaches in the Blaine County School District and at the Sun Valley Summer Symphony’s Summer Music Workshops. “And now they’re saying: I really miss it. I want to put in the time. I want to play with the group. I want to play this music. And that is why having this group in the valley is really, really, really important.”
Those who play music late in life could be tapping into an effective way of keeping the brain from atrophying since making music is one of the few things that uses both hemispheres of the brain, said Kim Gasenica, who works with Sanders at the Symphony’s School of Music.
“These kind of orchestras don’t take anything away from the symphony—we’re the Olympic athletes of the music world and we’ve done our 10,000 hours (of practice),” added Sanders. “Even though I’m a professional, I know how important it is for adults to have this outlet. These are people who live here. These are our locals who are producing music for their neighbors for their community. They’re playing this really great music, and they’re playing with their heart.”
For more information, visit www.wrcorchestra.org.