Manitoba Chamber Orchestra
Karl Stobbe, Concertmaster
Westminster United Church
28 February 2006

Tuomas Ollila , conductor
Gwen Hoebig and Karl stobbe, violins

 

Ana SOKOLOVIC (b. 1968)
Piece for string orchestra
— inspired by Balkan music

CBC Commission
World Premiere Performance

Arvo PÄRT (b. 1935)
Tabula Rasa, for two solo violins, piano and strings

1. Ludus (game) 2. Silentium (silence)

Miss Hoebig & Mr. Stobbe

Sergei RACHMANINOV (1873-1943)
Vocalise, op. 34, no. 14 for violin and strings

Mr. Stobbe

Intermission
Refreshments are available upstairs in the concert hall.

Béla BARTÓK (1875-1937)
Music for strings, percussion and celesta (1937)

1. Andante tranquillo
2. Allegro
3. Adagio
4. Allegro molto

This concert is co-presented by CBC Radio Two and is being recorded
for In Performance, Monday to Friday at 8 pm, Studio Sparks with host Eric Friesen,
Monday to Friday from 12 noon to 3 pm, Symphony Hall with host Katherine Duncan,
Sundays at 10 am, and On Stage with host Shelley Solmes, Sundays at 2 pm
on Radio Twoand 8 pm on Radio One.

Concert co-sponsor / Angela B. Ross
Season sponsor / The Great-West Life Assurance Company
Print media sponsor / Winnipeg Free Press
Radio media sponsors / CBC Radio Two 98.3, CBC Radio One 990 and Golden West Radio
Electronic media sponsor / Shaw Cable

Tuomas Ollila

Tuomas Ollila started his musical education as a violinist and acquired his violin diploma at the Sibelius Academy in 1988. In 1985 he started his conducting studies at the Sibelius Academy in the famous class of Professor Jorma Panula and received his diploma in 1991. He completed his studies under Professor I.A. Musin at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire 1990-1992 and in the summer of 1993 at the Tanglewood Music Centre, where he studied with Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle and Roger Norrington. In April 1996 he took part in masterclasses in contemporary music in Paris with Pierre Boulez, with the Cleveland Orchestra, and with the Ensemble InterContemporain.

Tuomas Ollila has conducted numerous Scandinavian orchestras, including the Finnish Radio Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Swedish Radio Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Copenhagen Philharmonic, and has made guest appearances in most European countries, e.g. with The Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra. In 1997 Ollila successfully made his Australian debut with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra in Perth, receiving regular re-invitations to Perth as well as to Melbourne, Sydney and other cities in the following years. Ollila made his British debut in 2000 with the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra and since then has conducted the Ulster Orchestra and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. In Netherlands Ollila has conducted the Radio Symphony Orchestra and Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2003 he made his debut with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and was immediately invited back.

From 1994 to 1998 Tuomas Ollila held the position of Chief Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra and from 1999 to 2001 he shared with Jean-Jacques Kantorow the position of Permanent Conductor of the Tapiola Sinfonietta. For two years, starting in 2001, Tuomas Ollila was the Principal Guest Conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and in 2004 he made his debut in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. In that year he also toured New Zealand with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

Tuomas Ollila has made numerous recordings of Finnish music. His recording of Sibelius’s complete Karelia Music with the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra (Ondine) received a Cannes Classical Award, a Finnish IFPI’s Janne Award in 1999 and was chosen by the UK Sibelius Society as ‘Record of the Year’ in 1998.

Gwen Hoebig

Recognized as one of Canada’s most outstanding violinists, Gwen Hoebig is a graduate of the Juilliard School in New York City. As a student she won every major Canadian music competition, and in 1981 was the top prizewinner at the Munich International Violin Competition. A champion of new music, she has given the Canadian premieres of violin concertos by S.C. Eckhardt-Gramatté, T.P. Carrabré, Gary Kulesha, Joan Tower, Christopher Rouse and Philip Glass, and as soloist with orchestra she has performed all the major violin concerti with orchestras across Canada, the United States and Europe. As a chamber musician she appears frequently in recital with her husband, pianist David Moroz, and has performed at many of the country’s foremost festivals including The Banff Arts Festival, the Festival of the Sound at Parry Sound, the Domaine Forget, Festival Vancouver, the Scotia Festival of Music, the Stratford Summer Music Festival and the Centara New Music Festival.

Gwen Hoebig joined the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra as Concertmaster in 1987, having been awarded the position as the unanimous choice of the audition committee. In 1993 she was honoured by the Government of Canada when she received the Commemorative Medal for the 125th Anniversary of Canadian Confederation, in recognition of her contribution to the Arts. She has always taken a great interest in the development of young musicians and maintains a private teaching studio in Winnipeg, has recently joined the faculty at the University of Manitoba’s School of Music and also teaches regularly at the Mount Royal College in Calgary, where she is a member of the Extended Faculty. She is founder and Co-Director of The Morningside Music Bridge, an international summer program featuring the finest young violinists, cellists and pianists from across China, Europe, the United States and Canada.

Ana Sokolovic

Ana Sokolovic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1968. She studied composition with Dusan Radic at the University of Novi Sad and with Zoran Eric at the University of Belgrade before completing a master’s degree at the University of Montreal under José Evangelista.

Her catalogue includes orchestral and piano works and several chamber music compositions. She has also written numerous scores for the theatre. In 1996, she was the Quebec Delegate at the Unesco International Rostrum of Composers in Paris.

Between 1995 and 1998, Ana Sokolovic won the SOCAN Young Composers’ Competition for Ambient V, for two violins, Secret de polichinelle, for four instruments, and Pesma, for mezzo-soprano and seven instruments. In 1999, she was awarded the First Prize at the CBC National Young Composers’ Competition for her work Géométrie sentimentale in the chamber music category, as well as the Grand Prize (all categories).

She has received commissions from the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal, the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec, the Brune dance company, the Quatuor Molinari, the Esprit Orchestra, the Orchestre baroque de Montréal, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Co, the Pentaèdre wind quintet and pianist Marc Couroux, and she has been the recipient of several grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Tabula Rasa,
for two solo violins, piano and strings
Arvo Pärt

The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt pioneered an eastern European brand of minimalism, apparently unaware of what was being accomplished in the west, principally by American composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

At first he wrote in a neo-classical style. Later he developed a language of his own through the exploration of the 12 note system and other avant-garde techniques. He then turned back to the music of Bach and an intense study of Renaissance plainchant and the early polyphonic school. Eventually Pärt produced his own distinctive synthesis of old sounds plus modern rhythms in the form that has won him world-wide renown.

One of his most frequently performed works of his new tintinnabuli style in Tabula Rasa, a double concerto for 2 violins, strings and prepared piano.

The most extended of the composer’s purely instrumental works, it is dedicated to the violinists Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko and cast in two movements — Ludus (game) and Silentium (silence). There are also contrasting tempi indications of con moto (with movement) and sensa moto (without movement).

The concerto grosso nature of Ludus, with its instrumental blend and with the prepared piano taking a continuo role, bears a resemblance to Vivaldi, especially the violin figurations.

Vocalise, op. 34, no. 14for violin and strings
Sergei Rachmaninov

Rachmaninov composed some 80 songs and, like his piano works, they offer a clear picture of his stylistic development, spanning as they do his most prolific period as a composer, from the 1890s to 1916. For most of his songs he chose texts from the works of Russian Romantics. After leaving Russia in 1917, he never again composed a solo song; it’s somewhat ironic, then, that the last song in his op. 34 set is perhaps his best known and is, of course, wordless.

‘Vocalise’ means a vocal exercise or concert piece sung to one or more vowels. Rachmaninov’s Vocalise has been arranged for orchestra and other instrumental combinations. Other composers, who have written wordless songs are Ravel and Vaughan Williams.

Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1937)
Béla Bartók

In 1904 Bartók, with his compatriot Zoltan Kodaly, had succeeded in identifying a new (or rather, very old) kind of Hungarian folk music — belonging to the indigenous peoples, rather than the travelling gypsies from whom music Liszt had mainly derived what the world called the “Hungarian” style. This true Hungarian music — and the neighboring Romanian and Slovakian music — had peculiarities of melody and rhythm which were to fertilize Bartók’s own compositions.

Sometimes he directly quoted folk music, sometimes varied it; periodically he seemed to use its harsh intensity as a foil against romantic smoothness. Not wishing to harmonise folk tunes in a way that would suggest an earlier romantic style, Bartók used new chords derived from the tunes themselves; he also harnessed bitonal procedures which were being explored in other contexts by Stravinsky and Milhaud.

The combination of technical modernity with the melodies and rhythmic vitality of folk song is at the root of Bartók’s mature style. Works which show his interest in new sonorities (often harsh) include the Sonata for two pianos and percussion and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, both from 1937.

It was Bartók’s declared aim in these compositions to create a fusion of “Bach-inspired counterpoint, with the tight motivic logic of Beethoven with a heightened awareness of sonority derived from Debussy.” The other crucial element is of course the folk music of his native Hungary.

Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, two string ensembles are directed by the composer to be separated from each other to the right and left of the conductor. Between them is a large battery of percussion instruments. The germ of the work, from which the whole composition grows, is the chromatic subject played by the violas at the very opening. This motif undergoes numerous transformations in the ensuing ‘Allegro’ and motifs derived from it link sections of the Adagio and exuberant Finale.

The opening movement of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is an intricate fugue that is suffused with the intense melancholy of many Hungarian folk tunes. The lively Finale dances in Bulgarian rhythm, while the eerie sounds of the Adagio are a striking example of the ‘night music’ found in several of Bartók’s scores. Even so, arresting sonorities are a feature of the entire work.

The work was commissioned by Paul Sacher for the Basle Chamber Orchestra to mark its tenth anniversary. The Basle Orchestra gave the first performance in Basle on 21 January 1937.

 

 

Anne Manson / Music Director and Conductor

MCO's 2010/11 season is sponsored by The Great-West Life Assurance Company.
Support has been received from Media sponsors The Winnipeg Free Press, CBC Radio One 990,
CBC Radio 2 98.3, Espace musique 89,9 and Golden West Radio. Heartstrings gala sponsor:
Mann Financial Assurance Limited. Sponsor of open dress rehearsals: Canadian Bridge Federation.
Arts Accessibility Program: Sun Life Financial.

© 2010 Manitoba Chamber Orchestra