On October 9, the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra will perform a concert at the Grand Halle on Broad Street in Cambria City, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; the venue is a concert hall and event space in a restored 19th-century Gothic Revival building. Music Director James Blachly will conduct Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite and the “Song Form” movement from Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 1 for Strings. Also on the program will be six works Blachly composed over the past year commissioned by Johnstown Symphony patrons. Blachly said, “Composing these pieces has been one of the greatest pleasures of my time as music director. It has brought me closer to six families that all have strong ties to the symphony. It introduced me to biographies and invited me to learn about family histories, photographs from the 1930s, and long conversations with everyone involved. It also had me composing for our JSO players, which meant having their particular sound quality and performing style in my creative inner ear as I wrote, and this was able to bring me closer to the orchestra, even though we were separated by pandemic circumstances.”
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