The surging popularity of international figure skating has led to an entertainment crossover from “sport” into “art.” The inaugural Powertel ICE concert is a case in point. The event, which takes place this Saturday and Sunday at the Municipal Auditorium, is a quarter-million-dollar holiday gala that melds the talents of local ice skaters, choreographers, and classical musicians. As the coup de grâce, World and Olympic champion Ekaterina Gordeeva will skate to original music composed by Nashville violinist Conni Ellisor.
Gordeeva’s performance will be part of a program that includes members of the Nashville Skaters Trust—comprised of top-level competitors from the Nashville Figure Skating Club—doing double axles, solchows, toe loops, and death spirals to live accompaniment by the Nashville Chamber Orchestra. “This show has such broad appeal. It’s a real extravaganza,” says NCO conductor Paul Gambill. “If you’ve never seen it snow inside an auditorium before, you will this weekend.”
The Powertel ICE concert is the brainchild of master-rated skating coach Laura Sanders and her husband Bill Fauver, a former pairs skater on the U.S. Olympic and World teams. Both coaches now train Nashville’s highest-level competitors at the local figure skating club, and, along with former Nashville Ballet dancer Thom Yzaguirre, choreograph their programs.
When Fauver contacted Gambill, who readily agreed to place his 49-piece orchestra out on the rink, the organizers tried to come up with a beautiful, artistic skater to star in the show. Gordeeva seemed the natural choice. Even though this year’s biggest professional ice skating competition, Dick Button’s Nutrasweet Professional Challenge, falls on the same weekend, Gordeeva decided to come to Nashville instead.
“I hardly ever have a live symphony playing music for [me]. I’m happy to do this,” says the Russian-born skater, speaking by phone after rehearsals for a national tour with Discover Stars on Ice. In the mid-1980s, Gordeeva burst onto the global figure skating scene as a dazzling, petite teenager paired with the strikingly handsome Sergei Grinkov. She had entered the sport as a 4-year-old under the Soviet system of developing children into champion athletes. When she was 11, her coach paired her with Grinkov, four years her senior, and the couple went on to become the most heralded pair-skating team on the planet, winning two Olympic championships, four World titles, and three World Professional titles.
In the midst of their whirlwind careers, Gordeeva and Grinkov realized that their mutual passion extended beyond the practice arena. They fell in love, got married, and had a daughter, Daria, who is now 6. Tragically, the storybook love affair ended on Nov. 20, 1995, when Grinkov, who had been complaining of physical ailments that he and others assumed were symptoms of athletic injuries, suffered a fatal heart attack during a routine rehearsal. He was 28 years old. At age 24, Gordeeva suddenly found herself a widow, a single mother, and a soloist.
“I feel much more confident now as [a] solo,” she says three years after her husband’s death. Although she usually works with professional choreographers, she is creating her own choreography for her two Powertel ICE pieces—“Meditation From Thias” by Massenet, and “Blackberry Winter” by Ellisor. The latter number features local musician David Schnaufer playing an Appalachian dulcimer called the Tennessee music box.
Musically, the rest of the show is an eclectic mix of standards by Ravel, Beethoven, Mozart, and other classicists, plus holiday favorites and new selections from the NCO repertoire that incorporate folk and Celtic elements into the traditional orchestra format. In addition to “Blackberry Winter,” the NCO tunes include “Stone,” for Celtic band and violin, and “Harvest Home Suite,” for fiddle and chamber orchestra. “We’re also having a full rhythm section,” Gambill adds, “because when we hit those holiday charts, we’re going to swing pretty hard.”
According to Fauver, this kind of show gives skaters, who typically only compete as soloists or as pairs, a chance to expand their technical and performance skills. “We’ve got a quartet, a trio, and every mixture you can think of,” he says. All of the participants, who range in age from 13 to 24, are ranked skaters within the U.S. Figure Skating Association. Most of them put in anywhere from six to eight hours of daily practice on the ice. People will be stunned, Fauver says, at how good they are.
Both he and Gambill are hoping that the Powertel ICE concert will slide right into the holiday extravaganza hole that Amy Grant left when she and the Nashville Symphony moved their annual Christmas show out of town.
“The [intriguing] thing about Nashville is there’s music, music, music,” Fauver says. “But there’s never been anything like this with music on the ice.”
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