Behind the scenes at Gary Kelley’s studio on historic Main Street in Cedar Falls, including works in progress for this weekend’s remarkable interpretation of Holst’s Planets.
On April 27 we debut our imaginative new presentation of Holst’s Planets, featuring a cinema-scale film of world premiere artwork by Gary Kelley. The do-not-miss Cedar Valley arts event of the year!
Student artwork has been pouring into our office the past few weeks, the fruit of a season-long collaborative art and music project with northeast Iowa elementary school art teachers and artist Gary Kelley. Gary, whose own evocative artwork for Holst’s Planets will be featured on our youth concerts on Tuesday (and again for general audiences later this month), visited local elementary school classrooms this winter with Jason to discuss connections between listening and seeing. Thousands of students at those and other area schools then embarked on a project to create their own visual responses to The Planets. Among the standouts are the creations pictured above, which will be screened alongside Tuesday’s performances of Jupiter.
Bravo to all of our partners for making this inspiring endeavor such a huge success!
Our intrepid maestro dug up a fascinating resource on the Brandenburg Concertos, the first of which is pictured above and featured on our Bach at Easter concert this weekend:
The last time I performed the Brandenburg Concertos I posted what was at time the only freely-available digitized version of the autograph manuscript for one of them. Now a facsimile of all six pieces in Bach’s hand is available for download at – where else? – the invaluable IMSLP. Good for many hours of wonderment.
Join us on Saturday for more wonderment over Bach’s incredible music!
