Q&A: LSO’s Kellen Gray and a ‘Star City Overture’ premiere

Entering his second season as Lafayette Symphony Orchestra’s conductor, a conversation with Kellen Gray about goals for LSO’s 75th year and beyond.

• Support for this edition comes from Purdue Musical Organizations, presenting the 92nd annual Purdue Christmas Show. The Christmas Show will shine Boilermaker bright with an all-student cast, festive music and dazzling performances. Tickets are now on sale for the Dec. 6-7 shows, where audiences of all ages will come together to celebrate the spirit of the holiday season at this timeless Purdue tradition. Get your tickets here.

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Q&A: LSO’S KELLEN GRAY AND A ‘STAR CITY OVERTURE’ PREMIERE

Kellen Gray enters his second season as conductor and artistic director with the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra with the debut of “Star City Overture,” a piece commissioned for LSO’s 75^th season and the city’s 200^th birthday.

“I can’t wait to share it,” Gray said, during prep for a Saturday performance that also will feature two pieces by Aaron Copland and a series of nods to the city’s bicentennial.

It’s a full evening: LSO performs at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Long Center, 111 N. Sixth St., opening with a pre-concert performance by Purdue’s Sondra Yover Haas String Quartet in the adjoining St. John Pavillion. Afterward, LSO will host “Star City Social,” a post-concert gathering at The Lobby, 526 Main St., where local historian Sean Lutes will offer some lesser-known stories about Lafayette. For tickets: lafayettesymphony.org.

Kellen Gray

Ahead of that, Gray sat down to talk about LSO’s 75^th, goals to expand the reach of the symphony, the origin story of “Star City Overture” and more. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

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Question: Tell me about concert week.

Kellen Gray: I’ve been here for quite a few days, because before this concert week, I was over across the river, working with Purdue for their conductors workshop. But I’ve been in town since then, doing various community collaborations and meeting about future collaborations, which we’re excited about – none of which have solidified or become sort of concrete just yet. But we’re sort of putting the Tetris pieces of a season together for next year that’s even more community embedded.

Question: What’s your vision for that? If it’s Tetris, what’s the next move to make the pieces you want fall into place?

Kellen Gray: We’ve been really enthusiastic and successful in finding some eager partners in the community. In fact, not just for the principle of doing it, which is, honestly, the underlying principle that undergirds what we want to do here. I’m a big believer that if you’re the orchestra that bears the name of your city, you should be the city’s orchestra. It’s not just about being a museum piece that sits in a concert hall to which people come visit four or five times a year, but to actually be active in the community and be able to leave the concert hall and go to the audience. We’re an orchestra that’s quite small to have such a large service area. We have a 14-county service area, which is enormous for an orchestra of our size. From practicality reasons, and also from still recovering from the pandemic, I think the orchestra has not necessarily been out to those 14 counties. But that’s something that we’re looking actively to reignite now.

Question: Usually, you think of Lafayette Symphony Orchestra as Lafayette, not necessarily broader. What do you want to do when you go out to those places? Do you want to take the orchestra there, or do you want to bring people in those places to you?

Kellen Gray: Both. But primarily, we want to take the orchestra there. It’s one thing to reach out and call and invite people to come to your place. But it’s different when you’re willing to take the orchestra there. So, we’re hoping that with our community theme over, specifically, the next two seasons – which is the actual theme of the next two seasons, different plays on the variations of community – that we’ll take the Mainstage programs that we do here and hope to do them in other places, as well.

Question: Do you see that as a B-Sides kind of movement, or do you see a full LSO?

Kellen Gray: I think the community can expect an expansion of our B-Sides programs. Not necessarily the number of programs, but the actual fingerprint of the concerts themselves. The concerts will be larger. Rather than it being perhaps six concerts that have four or five musicians participating, there might only be three or four, but they might have up to a dozen to 25 musicians participating.

Question: Which is a different feel from the B-Sides shows. Those have been more like combos, right?

Kellen Gray: Exactly. But this, I think, offers more opportunity for collaboration in the community. They’re still very much in negotiation. As much as we physically, possibly can every Mainstage, we’ll have some sort of collaboration with a community partner, beginning next season. That’ll be the first season that myself and (new LSO CEO) Janette (Brown) will have our hands fully on the steering wheel together. So community collaborations will be for the Mainstages as well as for the B-Sides. But in both the Mainstages and the B-Sides, we hope to take those on tour. We don’t have any specifics nailed down yet, but we’re in communications with some other venues outside the Lafayette area where we can take some of these programs that are transportable and do second and third performances.

Question: For this season No. 75, before all that happens, what’s your goal?

Kellen Gray: We’ve changed the approach to the actual concerts. There are within the programs that we have now more of a community focus in bringing people to the concert hall. For example, our concert experience is shaped in a slight bit of an arc shape this year. Rather than it just being the Mainstage program, where you come see the premiere of an Edward Hart piece and two pieces by Aaron Copland, there’s going to be a pre-concert performance. A string quartet from Purdue is going to be here to do a performance in the pavilion before the concert starts, along with a booth from the (Tippecanoe County) Historical Association, obviously in alignment with the 200th anniversary of Lafayette in itself. Then we actually get to the performance, which is going to be much more of a multimedia performance.

Obviously, there’ll be the world premiere of the “Star City Overture.” There’ll be the “Clarinet Concerto.” But in “Appalachian Spring,” that’s where (Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski) will join us to give a monologue on the history of the city – sort of an oral scrapbook of Lafayette’s history and its present. Then, while the orchestra is performing, there will be a sort of visual scrapbook, I guess you would call it, of historical photographs of Lafayette from as close to founding as possible up to the 20th century, aligned with where the music is for the “Appalachian Spring.” The approach to the concert is different in trying to have more of an invitation to the broader community, collaborate with the broader community and try to have a much more multifaceted concert experience.

Question: Tell about the new piece coming Saturday. How did you choose it? What’s the origin story?