When Susanne Schmidt first participated in a Moth StorySLAM in Burlington in 2015, she won. The live storytelling event, which occurs monthly in 28 cities worldwide, is culled for the NPR-affiliated “The Moth Radio Hour.”
The story she told involves her father, “who was a character,” and “a pretty big adventure on a camping trip,” said Schmidt, 63, now the regional producer for the Moth in Vermont. The Burlington resident has since told the story several times onstage, including for WGBH in Boston, but never the way she’ll tell it this weekend — that is, accompanied by the Vermont Symphony Orchestra.
In a novel approach to its annual statewide tour, the VSO is integrating music and storytelling this year to present “Made in Vermont With the Moth Radio Hour.” The three concerts, in Stowe, Manchester and Bellows Falls, feature 16 musicians led by music director Andrew Crust alongside Schmidt and other Burlington Moth regulars, including six-time slam winner Bill Patton and author Stephen P. Kiernan. Kiernan and Irish singer and actor Maxine Linehan will read a story by Charlotte artist Tom Baginski, who had to cancel for health reasons.
“The storytellers are the soloists,” Schmidt said, adding that the concerts are a VSO event, not a Moth one.
VSO executive director Elise Brunelle hit on the idea of combining storytelling and music, and Crust took the lead, selecting Vermont-flavored stories from the transcripts Schmidt sent and choosing musical pieces to accompany them that “wouldn’t be harmed by someone reading over them,” he said.
Crust, 38, who lives in Montgomery and Montréal, also considered orchestration and length while scanning the myriad musical possibilities. (Conductors “end up having a massive vault of pieces in our brain,” he admitted.) Three works by Edward Elgar fit the bill, as well as Leroy Anderson’s “Plink, Plank, Plunk!,” a completely plucked string composition.
Schmidt will tell her story to the first movement of Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite. “I’ve spent a lot of time [practicing] with the music in the background,” she said. “The timing of the story and the tempo might be tweaked.”
In the spirit of the “Made in Vermont” series, the storytellers will also recite two iconic Vermont texts while the orchestra plays: Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and president Calvin Coolidge’s address a year after the devastating 1927 Vermont flood, “Vermont Is a State I Love,” which ends with his oft-quoted salute to “the people of this brave little state.”
The concert program also includes stand-alone music pieces that tell their own stories. Sonny-Ray Day Rider’s “The Grief-Eater Firaga” is a musical interpretation of a Blackfoot story. Joaquín Turina’s “La oración del torero” (“The Bullfighter’s Prayer”), from 1925, was inspired when the Spanish composer spotted a bullfighter kneeling in a chapel just before his life-threatening performance in the ring.
“All the music is story-related,” Crust said. That includes the finale: Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony, one movement of which is based on a song Britten wrote to a Rudyard Kipling poem. The British Kipling married a woman from Dummerston and lived there for four years in the late 1800s.
The VSO has often collaborated with local narrators on its “Holiday Pops” concerts, including indie-soul singer Myra Flynn in 2023 and author M.T. Anderson this December. But the “Made in Vermont With the Moth Radio Hour” concerts are “a new idea to dig in our soil in a way we haven’t achieved yet,” the conductor said.
“It’s wonderful to join music and stories,” Schmidt said.
The VSO presents “Made in Vermont With the Moth Radio Hour” on Friday, November 14, 7 p.m., at Spruce Peak Arts in Stowe, $33.89-53.15; Saturday, November 15, 7 p.m., at Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester, $36.22-59.06; and Sunday, November 16, 4 p.m., at Bellows Falls Opera House, $26.50-54.50. vso.org
This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2025.
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