Outdoor symphony concert tonight

Concert halls are lovely, but sometimes the finest amphitheater is the open air.

That’s the wonderful quality of tonight’s annual Liberty Lake concert by the Spokane Symphony Orchestra. Conductor Eckart Preu’s baton will go up promptly at 6 p.m.

This is the sixth consecutive year the orchestra has opened its season with an open air concert at Pavillion Park, and Monday’s concert, featuring the same program, at Comstock Park, is in its 20th year.

The Liberty Lake concert is made possible through the efforts of The Friends of Pavillion Park and the city of Liberty Lake. The bowl-shaped design of the park’s concert area is responsible for the wonderful, open-air acoustics.

The weather is scheduled to cooperate and make for a beautiful summer evening – both for concertgoers and musicians alike.

The concert will feature a program of easily recognizable classical music, with a few special treats thrown in for good measure, including a piece designed to showcase principal horn player Jennifer Scriggins Brummett on the alphorn – a wooden instrument most people will recognize from a cough drop commercial.

To be precise, an alphorn is a wooden wind instrument generally carved from spruce by mountain dwellers in Switzerland and other alpine countries. The horn, which has no valves or other openings to alter its pure harmonic sound, is generally eight feet long.

Preu, beginning his third season as the orchestra’s music director, will share his baton during the concert with LeRoy Nosbaum, the chief executive officer of Itron, who will conduct the ever-popular “Stars and Stripes Forever” march by John Philip Sousa.

Much of the classical music will be familiar, even to those who are not generally fans of orchestra music.

For example, the first piece to be performed after the national anthem will be “Entry of the Gladiators,” by Julius Fucik. This piece, sometimes known as “Thunder and Blazes,” will be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever seen a circus, a circus movie or dreamed of running away to join a circus.

Two pieces from popular movie soundtracks are on the program: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music” – the 1965 movie that propelled Julie Andrews to superstardom, and John Williams’ overture from the 1978 movie, “Superman,” starring the late Christopher Reeve.

The concert will conclude with two perennial favorites.

“We used to always conclude the concert with ‘The 1812 Overture,’ with ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ as the encore,” symphony spokesperson Annie Matlow said. “Then, a couple of years ago we decided to change things up a little bit and didn’t include those two pieces in the concert.

“People were up in arms about it. We got calls; the newspaper got calls.”

Adding the two pieces back isn’t exactly a case of giving the public what they want, Matlow said.

“Eckart just thought they would make a nice finale,” she said.

The full program will be:

“”The Star-Spangled Banner,” by Francis Scott Key.

“”Entry of the Gladiators,” by Julius Fucik

“”The Sound of Music,” by Rodgers and Hammerstein

“An alphorn ballad, featuring Jennifer Scriggins Brummett on the alphorn

“Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, by Franz Liszt

“”Dance of the Tumblers” from “The Snow Maiden,” by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov

“”Superman,” by John Williams

“”Saber Dance,” by Aram Khachaturian

“”Light Cavalry Overture,” by Franz von Suppe

“”Voices of Spring,” by Johann Strauss

“”Stars and Stripes Forever,” by John Phillip Sousa

“”1812 Overture,” by Tchaikovsky

To fully enjoy the program, concertgoers are encouraged to bring a blanket or lawn chair.