Underwater Orland

You’ve got to get up early - by 7:15 a.m., to be specific - to catch St. Louis Symphony Orchestra assistant principal oboe Barbara Orland. She’ll appear in a segment on “FOX2 in the Morning” first thing Tuesday (September 15) with reporter Tim Ezell at the World Aquarium in downtown St. Louis. They’ll dive in the shark tank and swim with Amazonian fish (no piranhas, one trusts) as a promo for the first of this season’s “SLSO Presents” offerings, “Blue Planet Live” on Saturday, September 19.

Orland was a natural choice to represent the SLSO; she’s a lifelong enthusiastic swimmer, scuba diver and underwater photographer who once spent three weeks on a boat at the Great Barrier Reef and has done the “Escape from Alcatraz” swim in San Francisco Bay not once but twice.

“Blue Planet Live,” with specially-edited film sequences - many of them filmed underwater - from the acclaimed BBC/Discovery Channel documentary series, will be projected onto a giant screen at Powell Symphony Hall, as the orchestra plays an original score by Emmy Award-winner George Fenton. Nearly 200 filming locations were used; the series took almost five years to make.

It’s all family-friendly, with unretouched footage of diving dolphins, sharks on the hunt, and whales migrating. The conductor is another diver, the talented young resident conductor of the SLSO, Ward Stare; St. Louis native and KMOX sports anchor Tom Ackerman will narrate.