A wind group will return to its roots in Coquitlam this weekend via the Silk Road.
The Pacific Symphonic Wind Ensemble (PSWE) launches its new season on Sunday with a program that salutes Asian traditions.
And the 45-member band will also put an up-and-comer in the spotlight: an SFU communications graduate who has been taken under a PSWE musician’s wing recently.
Freelance clarinetist Gabriel Lynn was the co-winner of the 2014 PSWE Youth Soloist Competition and has been mentored by Michelle Anderson. He will be featured at its Nov. 8 show for the piece Concertino by Carl Maria von Weber.
The concert itself will begin the Orient journey with Alexander Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia before progressing to Star Ship by Yukiko Nishimura, a Japanese composer.
Variations on a Korean Folk Song was penned by the Texas-born John Barnes Chance, who served in Seoul, Korea, and was a band member with the Eighth United States Army. After the intermission, PSWE restarts its musical expedition with Moth by the 25-year-old American composer Viet Cuong before concluding with the ever-popular Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
PSWE has been on the road — both figuratively and literally — a lot this year.
This past summer the group, under the direction of David Branter, was chosen to play at the 2015 World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles festival, in San Jose.
• Asian Explorations starts at 2 p.m. Nov. 8 at Coquitlam’s Evergreen Cultural Centre (1205 Pinetree Way). Call the box office at 604-927-6555.
