Spokane String Quartet opens season with a celebration of pictures, music

Local landscape photographer Chip Phillips prefers to let his wife, Amanda Howard-Phillips, do the talking. Especially when discussing how she will display his art at the 38th season opener of the Spokane String Quartet this Sunday at Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox.

The quartet will use Phillips’ bold landscapes to bring a dramatic visual element to their performance of nature-inspired works by Joseph Haydn, Lei Liang and Felix Mendelssohn.

It’s only after the discussion turns from music to nature that Phillips can’t help but interject.

“That was a 9-mile backpack each way, so 18 miles,” said Phillips, who was playing with his young son to distract him from painful teething.

The photo with the grueling backstory is among more than a dozen that Howard-Phillips has chosen to present during the string quartet’s performance of Haydn’s “Sunrise” Quartet. The image is of a sunrise (naturally) along the mountain range in the backcountry of Grand Teton National Park at a moment when golden beams of sunlight and pink clouds spread across the horizon. The scene is made more perfect by the reflection of the mountains in a crystalline lake, made prominent in the foreground.

“This photo has that feeling of kind of inhaling and getting excited for the new day,” Howard-Phillips said. “This was the mood I was trying reflect for the Haydn piece, which is sparkling, hopeful and joyful.”

Gazing at the sunrise pictured on her laptop, Howard-Phillips recalls ignoring her husband’s call on the second morning of that camping trip and trying to stay asleep in their tiny backpacking tent. “I finally peeked out of the tent and saw that incredible scene,” said Howard-Phillips, pointing at the photo. “I was like ‘Oooooh, this is gonna be a good one.’ ”

Howard-Phillips has gone through hundreds of “good ones” in her quest to pick the right mix of her husband’s rugged landscapes to convey the theme for the concert: a salute to 100 years of national parks. She came up with the concept after seeing frequent references to the anniversary celebration.

“I thought it would be cool to tie in music that had a connection with nature with Chip’s photography,” said Howard-Phillips, who plays second violin in the quartet. “Spokane has a huge population of outdoor enthusiasts, and we think they will enjoy this stunning art of the natural world, especially when paired with live classical music.”

To heighten the drama, the larger-than-life slide show will roll on the big screen at the Fox while the musicians perform in the dark, with only their stand lights on in order to read their music.

The second set of Phillips’ photos will serve as a backdrop to a piece by Chinese composer Lei Liang that pays homage to Mongolian music and the Gobi Desert. Images of Death Valley and the national parks in Utah take viewers through sand storms, dunes and stark rock formations.

“(Cellist Helen Byrne) had been wanting to perform that gorgeous piece, and it was a great fit with the theme,” Amanda said. “The Gobi has the famous ‘singing sands’ when the wind blows hard.”

Byrne and the other members of the quartet – first violinist Mateusz Wolski and violist Jeanette Wee-Yang – were enthusiastic about showing Phillips’ works at their show. “I’m just not sure I ever really asked Chip though,” Howard-Phillips said.

“I thought it was a great idea,” he said. “As long as I don’t have to talk.”

But start looking over his photos again, and Phillips can’t hold back from explaining the natural forces and obstacles he has experienced on his adventures. A photo taken along the Wind River Range of western Wyoming appears painterly, as Phillips used a “motion blur” technique.

“That was another tough backpack,” Phillips said. “It’s only 14 miles, which isn’t too bad, but it gets real steep.”

The scrapes Phillips has gotten into photographing out-of-the-way places don’t deter him. But he does miss his family when he treks solo. Now the deal is that Howard-Phillips hauls the couple’s 3-year-old son, while her husband shoulders everything else. On their last trip of more than 22 miles, his backpack weighed more than 70 pounds. “It was soooo heavy,” Howard-Phillips said. “But he misses us.”

The time the artist has spent hiking deep into backcountry has paid off. Phillips has won photography awards and been published in various books and magazines. He is a founding member of Photo Cascadia, a group consisting of some of the top landscape photographers in the Pacific Northwest.

Phillips’ passion for photography came shortly after his love of the outdoors. He was barely walking when his family started spending a month every summer living on a sailboat in a channel between Vancouver Island and the mainland. His dad, an engineer whose idea of leisure was to reroof the house or rebuild a car engine, took him on his first backpacking trip when Phillips was 11 years old.

His dad was also an amateur clarinet player, a trait he passed on to his son, who has taken it to the professional level. Phillips is principal clarinet with the Spokane Symphony. He met Amanda when she joined the Symphony in 2003, where she plays second violin.

Phillips wouldn’t give up either creative pursuit, but he does find the physicality of photography especially satisfying.

“It is something tangible. You can create something that lasts, that you can hold onto,” he said. “Whereas music kind of comes and goes.”

That temporary quality is also part of photography, he said. In his photo taken near Bandon, Oregon, of a sea stack, a tidal pool in the foreground becomes the star, grabbing the viewer’s attention.

“That tidal pool has never been there since,” Chip said. “I’d really like to get the ripples in the sand I saw there once, but I’ve never seen them again.”