SOUTH BEND, IN – The South Bend Symphony Orchestra returns to the Morris Performing Arts Center for the fourth year of the Shein Trust Día de los Muertos concert on Sunday, November 2 at 3 p.m.! This beloved community event blends music and imagery in a tribute to tradition, memory, and cultural expression.
Led by Music Director Alastair Willis, the South Bend Symphony will present a vibrant program inspired by the rich heritage of Mexico and Latin America. This no-admission concert features collaborative performances with Westwater Arts’ Symphonic Photochoreography and the acclaimed Sones de Mexico Ensemble. The result is a cross-cultural experience that honors aspects of Día de los Muertos.
“This year we are excited to welcome Juan Díes and Sones de Mexico Ensemble from Chicago — the country’s premier folk music organization specializing in regional styles of huapango, gustos, chilenas, son jarocho, and more!” says Marvin V. Curtis, South Bend Symphony Board Member. “This year, we will also have the Notre Dame Mariachi Band playing pre-concert music in the lobby from 2:00 p.m. to 2:45 p.m. This is our fourth year of celebrating Día de los Muertos, and we invite everyone to come celebrate with us!”
Admission is free, but tickets are required for entry. Tickets can be reserved through the Morris Performing Arts Center Box Office, their website at www.morriscenter.org, or at www.southbendsymphony.org.
This program is presented as part of the Shein Trust Community Series, with generous support from the Shein Trust and the City of South Bend Venues, Parks & Arts, in collaboration with the Morris Performing Arts Center and the South Bend Symphony Orchestra.
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About the South Bend Symphony Orchestra
The South Bend Symphony inspires, entertains, and connects the community with the transformative power of orchestral music. Producing more than 20 mainstage programs each year and nearly 70 smaller ensemble concerts, the Symphony serves more than 29,000 attendees annually. As the region’s only professional orchestra, the Symphony is committed to fostering a robust, connected arts community in service to the greater Michiana region.
In addition to being recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and other state and local arts funding organizations, the South Bend Symphony Orchestra is the recipient of the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County’s Leighton Award for Nonprofit Excellence, which recognizes the best-run nonprofit organization in St. Joseph County, Indiana.
Learn more about the South Bend Symphony Orchestra at www.southbendsymphony.org.
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About Sones de México Ensemble
Sones de México Ensemble is the nation’s premier folk music group dedicated to preserving and celebrating Mexican ‘son’—a rich tradition encompassing regional styles like huapango, gustos, chilenas, and son jarocho. Founded in 1994 in Chicago’s historic Pilsen neighborhood, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit promotes Mexican folk culture through innovative performance, education, and outreach.
The ensemble has toured extensively across the U.S. and internationally, with performances at Carnegie Hall, the Getty Museum, and the Kennedy Center. They’ve released six acclaimed albums, including the GRAMMY®- and Latin GRAMMY®-nominated Esta Tierra Es Tuya (2007), and 13 B’ak’tun (2013), marking the new Mayan calendar era. Their children’s album Fiesta Mexicana earned a Parents’ Choice™ Award.
In 2015, they composed and performed a new live score for Sergei Eisenstein’s restored 1931 silent film ¡Que Viva México!
Led by founding members Juan Díes and Victor Pichardo, the six-member ensemble includes Zacbé Pichardo, Eréndira Izguerra, Eric Hines, and Rudy Piñon—all multi-instrumentalists and educators proficient in over 80 traditional instruments.
Their award-winning educational programs include residencies, workshops, and school concerts that blend music with lessons in Mexican history and heritage. Sones de México was named Best Latin Entertainer by the Chicago Music Awards for four consecutive years.
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About Westwater Arts
What started as an artistic experiment over 50 years ago has become the standard for visuals with orchestras today. While our technology, scope and style have greatly evolved over the years, Westwater Arts continues to push the boundaries, inspiring today’s audiences with immersive concert experiences.
In 1973, our company’s now-retired founder, James Westwater, pioneered the first performance of symphonic photochoreography in his hometown, with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra in Ohio. In the orchestra world, photochoreography was unlike anything else at the time.
Shortly thereafter, photochoreography made its way onto concert programs across the central and eastern U.S., in cities like Cleveland, Tulsa and Washington, D.C., where the National Symphony Orchestra presented photochoreography at the Kennedy Center in March 1975. Early on, James also had the opportunity to serve as a National Endowment for the Arts Resident Artist and the National Science Foundation’s Artist in the Antarctic. A celebrated career and an original art form were born, and James continued developing new multimedia pieces and innovative orchestral collaborations for the next 39 years. A few of James’s later creations like Reflections of the Spirit, Vanishing Forest, and The Eternal Struggle are still occasionally presented by Nicholas live in concert alongside our more contemporary pieces.
Fast forward to 2009. As James began preparing for retirement, Nicholas Bardonnay joined Westwater Arts. Nicholas brought fresh ideas, energy and creativity to the organization and the art form, leading to technological advancements and new artistic heights. Nicholas expanded the diversity and scope of the repertoire offerings as well as our connections within the orchestral field. Before James’s retirement in 2014, Nicholas and James undertook two major joint commissions—Grand Canyon Country and Czech Journeys—for the principal orchestras in Tucson & Phoenix and Scotland & Toronto, respectively.
To date, we’ve created new symphonic experiences for more than one million classical music lovers, and our art form has been performed with over 200 orchestras of all sizes in almost every U.S. state, and with orchestras in Europe, Canada, Mexico and Asia. Some of Nicholas’s recent projects have taken him to Iceland, Mexico, our beloved National Parks, and the digital archives of over a dozen countries.
Our ties within the orchestra field run deep, and many of our collaborations on both concerts and new commissions have been repeat engagements with music directors and orchestra staff who enthusiastically promote our work. As Westwater Arts continues to evolve we still wholeheartedly embrace that same pioneering spirit from our early days, combined with a freshness and modern sensibility that orchestras and audiences will continue to enjoy for decades to come.
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About Nicholas Bardonnay
Nicholas Bardonnay is a photographer, multimedia artist, and the Creative Director & CEO of Westwater Arts.
Since joining Westwater Arts in 2009, Nicholas has worked on more than 120 concerts with orchestras in cities across the U.S. as well as Scotland, England, Singapore, Canada, Poland, and Germany.
He has photographed, produced and performed over a dozen photochoreography pieces. His first concert piece, Pacifica, blends his photography from the atmospheric coastal Pacific Northwest with six music options by Mahler, Debussy, Górecki, Sibelius, Liadov and Satie. With Copland’s music in mind for his next piece, Rodeo!, he photographed a lively pickup rodeo under the vast skies of northern Arizona.
More recently, he used archival images to produce two companion pieces, No Man’s Land and Citizen Soldier, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War I and the 75th anniversary of World War II. He choreographed them to poignant music options by Copland, Vaughan Williams, Barber and Shostakovich, and both premiered in 2014. For another project, Nicholas spent two months camping across Iceland while photographing its sublime landscapes for Sagaland, which he set to four music options by Vaughan Williams, Sibelius, Pärt and Hovhaness. Sagaland premiered in 2016. Also in 2016, Nicholas premiered his tribute to America’s national park legacy, National Park Suite, at Wolf Trap with the National Symphony Orchestra.
Nicholas has also produced a number of commissioned concert pieces. Highlights include Grand Canyon Country, a piece created for the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and The Phoenix Symphony to celebrate Arizona’s state centennial; a 50th anniversary tribute for the Britt Music Festival in Oregon; and extensive photography across the Czech Republic for Czech Journeys, which is set to selections from Má vlast and was commissioned by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
The London Photographic Association as well as galleries in Los Angeles, Portland, Hong Kong and other cities have exhibited Nicholas’s photography. He has lived in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and he has an interdisciplinary degree in Visual Arts and Social Sciences from The Evergreen State College. When Nicholas is not traveling for concerts or new productions, you can usually find him on the road in his vintage Airstream or planning his next big bike adventure.
One of Nicholas’s most life-changing projects to date was his year in Mexico photographing Mágico and Pre~Columbia. Both pieces premiered in September 2018 with the Dallas Symphony and have been widely programmed since. Nicholas’s latest concert piece is Visions, which honors the legacy of America’s First Peoples through the remarkable sepia-toned images of legendary photographer Edward Curtis.