Orchestras Canada

This weekend, May 4 and 5, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra gives its hometown audiences an opportunity to hear the program that the orchestra (led by music director Bill Eddins, and featuring soloists Jens Lindemann, trumpet; Angela Cheng, piano; Juliette Kang, violin; and Denise Djokic, cello) will perform as part of this year’s Spring for Music Festival at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, May 8. The ESO is one of only 6 North American orchestras to be invited to take part in the festival – due in large part to its intriguing programming – and is this year’s sole Canadian contender.

The program includes three ESO-commissioned works, along with Bohuslav Martinů’s First Symphony. The ESO commissions are John Estacio‘s Triple Concerto for Piano, Violin and Cello (written for the ESO’s inaugural performance at the Winspear Centre in 1997), Allan Gilliland‘s Dreaming of the Masters III, and a brand new work by current ESO Composer in Residence, Robert Rival, entitled Lullaby. For more information about the ESO at S4M, please visit springformusic.com.

We recently received media releases about a pair of noteworthy orchestra education programs – and we thought they were intriguing enough to share with a national audience.

The Edmonton Symphony will be performing its final school concerts of the season shortly, and the program (for grades K-3) was devised by the ESO’s resident conductor Lucas Waldin. Entitled Canadian Road Trip, the program presents a musical voyage across Canada, exploring diverse cultural traditions, landscape, flora and fauna. Jingle dancers from Ben Calf Robe School, River Cree Drummers, Métis child jiggers and Edmonton fiddler Daniel Gervais all take the stage to give students a unique and authentic experience. Students will hear and see the Women’s Jingle Dress Dance and the Red River Jig; the program also includes Aaron Copland’s Hoe-Down, John Estacio’s Farmers Symphony and ESO Resident Composer Robert Rival’s The Great Northern Diver.

The teachers’ guide takes a cross-curricular approach, applying the program themes to assist with Drama, English, Social Studies, Science and Art curricula, with activities that examine topics that run the gamut from loon lifecycles to Franco-Canadian heraldry. As well, students can find interactive games, videos and information online via DiscoverESO.com.

Down the road in Red Deer, AB, the Red Deer Symphony Orchestra presents the 14th annual version of Choir Kids, which brings together sixteen choirs from elementary schools in Red Deer and central Alberta to rehearse and perform with the orchestra April 23 and 30. Each choir will perform two specially-orchestrated selections with the orchestra, and the concerts will end with a mass choir piece. Of particular note: the orchestrations have all been prepared by RDSO music director Claude Lapalme, who is a gifted arranger as well as conductor. For more information about Choir Kids, please visit rdso.ca.

November 9 and 10, the National Arts Centre Orchestra – led by guest conductor Julian Kuerti, and featuring pianist Jan Lisiecki – will give the Ottawa performances of a program they’ll be repeating during their Atlantic Canada Tour, which runs from November 13-25. The program includes not only Mozart’s Piano Concerto #20 and Brahms’s Symphony #1, but also the world premiere of a NACO commission by John Estacio, entitled Brio: Toccata and Fantasy for Orchestra.

Both programs will be preceded by a pre-concert chat, featuring Maclean’s writer Paul Wells and composer John Estacio.

We read a lot of media releases – and this month, we’re reading about a number of performances of new and tested works by Canadian composers. What’s caught our eye?

November 13, the Hamilton Philharmonic, led by Music Director James Sommerville, reprises last January’s successful premiere of the HPO-commissioned Black Sand by Kelly-Marie Murphy. On that same night, the Kamloops Symphony, led by Bruce Dunn, performs John Estacio’s Such Sweet Sorrow, for string orchestra.

November 15, the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra, led by David Currie, performs Oskar Morawetz’s Carnival Overture and Andrew P. MacDonald’s Violin Concerto, featuring Symphony Nova Scotia concertmaster Robert Uchida.

Late last week, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s Adventures in Music program kicked off its spring cycle of performances.  Between now and April, the orchestra will perform in three Manitoba cities (Winnipeg, Brandon and Winkler), and will provide over 13,000 students in Grades 4-8 the opportunity to experience the full WSO in performance.  As well, over 500 students will perform with the orchestra:  either playing recorder, strings or percussion, or singing, or dancing!  (We’d love to be backstage.  On second thought, maybe not.)

The program also features the Rusalka Ukrainian Dance Ensemble, Viva Brasil (Brazilian martial arts & dance group), Young Stars (musical theatre group) and Xiao-Nan Wang (a Chinese flute master).

The students have been carefully prepared for the experience, too:  their teachers have been working with the WSO’s curriculum-based study guide since the fall, after a workshop presented by the Manitoba Orff Chapter.  As well, students have been encouraged to paint and draw works inspired by John Estacio’s Frenergy, and many of these will be projected overhead while the work is being performed by the WSO.

A tantalizing glimpse of what’s to come at the Winnipeg Symphony’s New Music Festival 2010 was revealed yesterday, with the announcement that the WSO will debut a a new work by Darren Miller, the Saskatchewan composer who won the 2010 Emerging Composer Competition of the Canadian Music Centre, Prairie Region. Miller’s work will be premiered on February 10, 2010.  According to the media announcement, “the winning composition by Miller, for amma, was chosen from orchestral works submitted by emerging Canadian composers, all of whom have Prairie connections. Each entry was judged by a jury, which included the WSO’s composer-in-residence – and former Emerging Composer Competition winner – Vincent Ho.”

The National Arts Centre has just announced the most recent winners of the NAC Awards, three $75,000 packages encompassing musical commissions and residencies.  The honorees, well-known in the Canadian orchestral community are (alphabetically) John Estacio of Edmonton; Peter Paul Koprowski of Ottawa; and Ana Sokolovic of Montreal.  Each composer will be commissioned to write three works that will be performed by the NAC Orchestra over the next five years, and will help teach student musicians as part of the NAC’s Summer Music Institute.  The NAC initiative was established in 2002, with Gary Kulesha, Denys Bouliane and Alexina Louie the inaugural recipients. The goal is to present the awards about every five years in future.