Sounds of Summer: The Festival Orchestra Returns to Davis Concert Hall
This afternoon at 4 p.m., Davis Concert Hall does the thing it does best in July: it fills up with more musicians than a subarctic city has any right to muster, and it makes a big, warm, collective noise. "Sounds of Summer: Polaris Choir and the return of Festival Orchestra" takes the stage today, July 26 — a Summer Arts Festival centerpiece and, for a lot of Interior music-watchers, the emotional high point of the fortnight.
The pairing is the point. The Polaris Choir carries the vocal weight and the Festival Orchestra — a pickup ensemble assembled from the festival's visiting faculty and its most capable local and student players — supplies the muscle. It is, in the truest sense, a scratch band: strangers a week ago, a symphony this afternoon. That's the small miracle FSAF pulls off every summer, and hearing it in Davis, which is the best acoustic room the Interior has, is the way to hear it.
Some context on the hall. Charles W. Davis Concert Hall is the University of Alaska Fairbanks's flagship performance space and the year-round home of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra. It's a real concert hall in a place where "real concert hall" is not a given — a room built for orchestral sound in a city where the nearest comparable venue is a long, long drive south. For eleven months it hosts the local pros. For the two weeks of the festival, it hosts the world's, and today's program is where those two populations finally share a stage.
Why single this one out of a hundred festival events? Because the Festival Orchestra is the clearest possible demonstration of what the festival is for. The workshops are private; the recitals are intimate; but the orchestra is the moment where all that concentrated instruction resolves into a single, public, full-throated sound. It's the sound of a remote place briefly refusing to be provincial. You do not get to hear a full festival orchestra in a town this size on a normal Sunday. Today is not a normal Sunday.
There's a bittersweet edge, too, because it's late in the run. The festival closes August 2, which means today's crowd is already doing the thing Interior audiences do every summer — savoring the peak while quietly bracing for the long quiet that follows. By September the visiting faculty are scattered back across the globe, Davis reverts to the symphony's season, and the town settles in for the dark. But not this afternoon.
Get there early; festival concerts in Davis have a way of filling. Sit close enough to watch the choir breathe. And when the orchestra comes in underneath them, remember that most of those players couldn't have picked each other out of a lineup ten days ago. That's the magic trick. Come watch it land.
Sources: Sounds of Summer — UAF Charles W Davis Concert Hall listing (allevents.in Fairbanks); Charles Davis Concert Hall (Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra); The Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, Jul 19–Aug 2, 2026 (Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce)