Orchestras Canada

Last week, the Windsor Symphony Orchestra reached an agreement in principle with the City of Windsor for the future use of downtown Windsor’s historic Capitol Theatre. The agreement stipulates that the City would make necessary repairs and renovations to make the Capitol more suitable as a concert hall and home base for the orchestra and its operations, while preserving the flexibility to serve other art forms. Under the agreement, the WSO will manage the facility while ownership will remain with the City.

As regular readers of Orchestra News may recall, in recent years the WSO has explored various options for a new concert hall.

“We are grateful for this opportunity to help preserve a significant heritage building for the benefit of our community and the arts groups that perform here,” says WSO Executive Director Jeth Mill. “The Capitol Theatre will provide an attractive concert hall in which to showcase the Music Director candidates who will conduct the orchestra during our 2012-2013 concert season.”

For more information about the WSO, please visit windsorsymphony.com.

This weekend, January 28 and 29, jazz pianist Ron Davis, the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and its music director, John Morris Russell, embark on a collaboration that will feature two performances and culminate in a CD recording. The project, titled SymphRonica, is jazz piano and symphony orchestra fused together to create what Davis calls, “a stunning new kind of music.”

This weekend’s concerts mark a return engagement for Davis with the WSO, following a successful collaboration in 2009. This time around, though, there will be a pair of concerts followed by a “closed theatre” recording of the program. The release date for the CD will be announced soon. For more, please visit windsorsymphony.com.

Tomorrow (October 20), the Windsor Symphony Orchestra will unveil a new box office and announce the details of a Trillium Foundation Grant to further the development of a ticketing and customer relationship management system. As the media release advises, “the WSO has moved its box office in-house and joined with local web-app developers NYN DESIGNS to establish an integrated, in-house solution to handle ticketing, client contact, data collection and a range of customer relationship management (CRM) applications. This exciting collaboration reinforces this region’s emergence as a tech powerhouse.”

We look forward to sharing details in an upcoming issue of Orchestra News – congratulations to all concerned!

This past weekend, the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, led by Music Director John Morris Russell, gave the first-ever mainstage performance of a new work by high school French hornist, composer and member of the Windsor Symphony Youth Orchestra Eric Swiatoschik. The 8-minute long work, entitled Galactic Conquest, debuted at last Spring’s WSO | WSYO Side-by-Side Concert. Maestro Russell was so impressed by the piece that he decided to bring it to the WSO’s main stage at the Chrysler Theatre.

Swiatoschik, a student at Walkerville Collegiate Institute, worked with Assistant Conductor Peter Wiebe as a co-op student last season. Though his tasks were primarily related to data management, music distribution and other administrative work concerning the WSYO, Mr. Wiebe knew that Eric had done a little composing and decided to further that experience by asking him to assist in creating arrangements. “[Eric] was a very quick study,” says Wiebe, “so I decided to ask him to write a piece for the Youth Orchestra, knowing that he would be on schedule and full of creative drive. I was not disappointed!” The work was performed on a pair of Pops Series concerts by the WSO.

For more information about the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, please visit windsorsymphony.com.

CONDUCTORS/CHEFS D’ORCHESTRE

Windsor Symphony Orchestra
Music Director / Directeur musical
Application deadline/Date limite : October 14 octobre 2011

As the snow falls and the cold winds howl, new music festivals across the country continue to delight and amaze. This weekend, the Windsor Symphony Orchestra wraps up the Windsor Canadian Music Festival, a celebration of community and creative partnerships in Windsor, Ontario.

The festival is a joint effort of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and the University of Windsor School of Music, and features talks, school visits, a conductor/composer workshop, a jam session, panel discussions, chamber music and a full orchestral concert. Over the course of the week, audiences will hear works by Michael Lacroix, Ana Sokolovic, Christien Ledroit, Lee Pui Ming, Claude Vivier, Jim Hiscott, John Burge, Heather Schmidt, and Nicholas Papador – among others. Featured performers include guest conductor Brian Current, soprano Monica Whicher, pianist Lee Pui Ming, tabla artist Shawn Mativetsky, percussion.

And if you’re wondering about the programming philosophy of the festival, here’s how organizers describe it: “Over the last several festivals the WCMF has developed an artistic vision that reflects its commitment to a set of core values. Each year we feature the work of four or five North American composers. Both the WSO and UWindsor music faculty concerts present multiple works by our featured composers. We feature composers from across the country and of different generations, and aim for a diversity of musical styles and voices. The Festival looks for composers who have a mature musical voice and for whom this opportunity will represent a significant step in their artistic development. Of course, we also choose composers that we are confident will compose an engaging new work that will appeal to our local audience.”

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra wrote to let us know that they’ve been sending small ensembles from the orchestra to nursery and elementary schools this year, with 41 schools visited in four days in November, and two more weeks set aside in January and April. In all, over 12,500 young people will have the chance to hear ensembles from the WSO through these programs. “Having these programs in the nurseries and schools opens the door to the symphony world, a world that the kids can enjoy for a long time to come,” says Tanya Derksen, director of Education and Outreach at the WSO. “We’re providing them with a great opportunity to start learning early about symphonic music, the instruments and the musicians that play them, when the kids wouldn’t necessarily get that opportunity, especially at those early ages.” www.wso.ca

Meanwhile, the Windsor Symphony Orchestra has partnered with the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Learning Through the Arts program on a collaborative composition project at three different Windsor-area public schools. Working with WSO music director John Morris Russell, singer/guitarist Ted Lamont and cellist Karen McClellan, grade 4 students from the schools will create a composition based on the Renaissance hit tune, L’homme armé, which will then be arranged for the orchestra by WSO Assistant Conductor Peter Wiebe and presented on education concerts later this spring. Learning Through The Arts is a program administered through the Royal Conservatory of Music and designed to bring artists of all disciplines into partnership with classroom teachers to enliven core curriculum. These grade 4 students will receive instruction in the curriculum Music Expectations integrated with the core subjects including Social Studies (Medieval times), Science (of sound), and Language Arts (writing expectations). For more information about the WSO, please visit: www.windsorsymphony.com

For more information about Learning Through the Arts, please visit www.ltta.ca

The Windsor Symphony Orchestra has recently announced a new partnership with TD Bank Group and two of its colleague orchestras in southwestern Ontario, Orchestra London and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. The TD MyWSO Music Pass has been designed to make music accessible to students at every level, from high school to graduate school.

The pass offers full-time students access to any Windsor Symphony Orchestra subscriber series concerts, as well as access to Orchestra London and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony to attend an unlimited number of subscriber series performances during the concert season.

The TD MyWSO Music Pass costs $65 and can be purchased from the WSO office. The pass may also be used at all series performances with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and Orchestra London, increasing its value many times over.

Earlier this week, the Windsor Symphony Orchestra announced its Education and Music Alive series on-site at Benson Public School in Windsor – and it wasn’t your standard season announcement, either. Instead, the event promised a chance to see WSO music director John Morris Russell in action during a special conducting workshop, working with a group of Benson students from grades 6-8 to show them the basics of conducting.