Manitoba Chamber Orchestra
Karl Stobbe, Concertmaster
Westminster United Church
4 December 2007

Alain Trudel, guest conductor
Paris to Kyiv: Alexis Kochan, vocals;
Richard Moody, viola; Julian Kytasty, bandura

Albert Roussel (1869-1937)
Sinfonietta for strings, op. 52

1. Allegro molto
2. Andante
3. Allegro

Traditional
Paris to Kyiv

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Two Norwegian Airs, op. 63

1. In Folk Style
2. Cow Call
3. Peasant Dance

Various composers
Paris to Kyiv / MCO set

Intermission
Refreshments are available upstairs in the concert hall.

Witold Lutoslawski (b. 1913)
Overture for Strings

Andrzej Panufnik (b. 1914)
Old Polish Suite

1. Dance I
2. Interlude
3. Dance II
4. Chorale
5. Dance III

Various composers
Paris to Kyiv / MCO set

This concert is co-presented
by CBC Radio Two and is being recorded
for Canada Live with host Wabanakwut Kinew,
Monday to Friday at 8 pm, Studio Sparks
with host Eric Friesen, Monday to Friday
from 12 noon to 3 pm, Sundays at 1 pm
with host Bill Richardson.

Concert sponsor / Education & Employment Preparation Services
and Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP
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
Chamber Chatter sponsor / PricewaterhouseCoopers
Electronic media sponsor / Shaw Cable

 

Alexis Kochan

Alexis Kochan was born in Winnipeg’s North End. She earned a Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Manitoba while simultaneously studying music and beginning a multi-faceted career as singer, teacher, producer, and recording artist.

Paris To Kiev, released in 1994, brought together musicians and styles from different worlds and began a process of collaborative musical exploration. Further such recordings were released in 1996, 2000 and 2005.

Alexis has performed her music throughout Canada, most recently touring Ontario, Quebec and Nunavut — just after a successful tour of Poland, Serbia, and Ukraine. She has also performed along the eastern seaboard of the United States and in California, most notably at the French Embassy in Washington, DC, at both Harvard and Yale Universities, and for the World Music Institute in New York City.

She co-directs and performs in Night Songs from a Neighbouring Village, a program exploring the commonalities and contrasts between Ukrainian music and the musical traditions of the Jews of Ukraine. To date, Night Songs has been performed at the Jewish Museum and at Symphony Space in New York, at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood, and for Tage Der Jiddischen Kultur in Berlin and the Virtuosi series in Winnipeg. Television and film rights to her work have been acquired by the CBC for Canada: A People’s History and by the television series Psi Factor.

Her voice can also be heard on an album of lullabies produced for the Children of Chornobyl Canada Fund. Ms. Kochan’s special interest in children dates back to her days as a psychologist, when she conducted research in language development and established programs for children with learning disabilities at St. Amant Centre.

Paris To Kyiv

With one foot firmly on Canadian soil and the other foot in Eastern Europe, Alexis Kochan has uncovered a soundscape in between with the development of her Paris To Kyiv project. For the past 10 years Kochan and her collaborators have blended ancient Ukrainian music with contemporary sounds. Drawing on the deep musical traditions of Eastern Europe, they weave a universal sonic tapestry, working in strands of jazz and new music, medieval Slavonic chant, dance tunes inspired by Carpathian Mountain fiddlers and blind bandura players, original compositions and ancient ritual songs with roots in the Neolithic.

Singer Alexis Kochan has partnered with violist / guitarist / singer / songwriter, Richard Moody and bandurist and sopilka player, Julian Kytasty since 1996 and together they create the core Paris To Kyiv sound. Kochan also invites musicians from different cultural worlds to join the ensemble on the projects; musical partners include Christian Dugas, Gilles Fournier and Rodrigo Muñoz. Paris To Kyiv’s fourth album, Fragmenti, is available now on Olesia Records. The ensemble has been recorded for broadcast by the CBC and WNYC in New York City.

Sinfonietta for strings, op. 52
Albert Roussel

Looked at from today’s perspective, Roussel’s Sinfonietta doesn’t much sound like a mid-20th century work written by a French composer late in life. Certainly, there are moments that alert the listener to the fact that the piece was written after the respective heydays of Impressionism and Neo-classicism, but they are mainly on the surface — that is to say, the Sinfonietta is at most a 20th-century-flavoured work. As to its nationality, while Roussel’s active years of composition overlapped with Debussy, Ravel and ‘Les Six,’ his works did not belong to any of these schools, and neither did he found his own. In its energy, concision and precise proportions, the Sinfonietta more closely resembles its German antecedents than its French ones.

These are not objections to the work. Indeed, the Sinfonietta has a compelling freshness despite its conservatism that serves as a tribute to the composer’s inspiration and independence. That freshness, and the piece’s quite youthful energy, belie the circumstances of its composition; Roussel wrote it just three years before his death, and at a time when he was convalescing from pneumonia.

The first movement opens with a typically Rousselian theme — jagged, with large leaps — against which is set a lush chromatic second theme reminiscent of Bruckner. The development makes some brief feints at fugal imitation, but otherwise spends most of its energy setting up the first of two rather satisfying reprises. The second movement is the only one that sounds at all French, belonging not to the orchestral but rather to the other symphonic tradition, that of the great organist-improvisers (such as Widor). The third movement follows without pause, opening with a celebratory theme whose irrepressible motor and scintillating character drive through the rest of the work.

Two Norwegian Airs, op. 63
Edvard Grieg

Grieg’s Two Norwegian Airs for orchestra were composed in 1895, but their genesis dates from the summer of 1869, when Grieg encountered a collection of folksongs by Ludvig Linderman, entitled ‘Older and Newer Mountain Melodies,’ and set twenty-five of them as piano pieces (his op. 17). The second of the orchestral airs is in fact a medley of two pieces from that collection (in other words, there are really three Norwegian airs in Two Norwegian Airs). Cow Call presents a simple pastoral melody, set off initially by an idyllic pizzicato accompaniment, then eventually flavoured with lush dissonances and descending chromatic scales. These scales reappear presently to furnish the introduction and much of the accompaniment to the following Peasant Dance. Here the music is more rustic than in the preceding sections, with drones, accented off-beats, and jangling harmonies conspiring to give the music a heavy-footed and slightly off-balanced jollity.

Backtracking, we come to the first of the ‘two’ Norwegian airs. In Folk Style (based on a nationally-inspired melody by Fredrik Due, then Norwegian and Swedish ambassador in Paris), shares many attributes with what follows, including the use of descending chromatic lines, prominent off-beats, and lush harmonies, but it has an altogether different character. It’s not just that it’s serious sounding, it is also seriously constructed. The piece is a variation movement, although the melody, in common with the settings of the Cow Call and Peasant Dance, is never altered, except insofar as it is taken in turn by different instruments. Thus the variations in the melody are restricted to those of orchestral colour, while the accompaniments provide structure and narrative coherence through changes in rhythm, texture and harmony. These changes are very carefully wrought, with buried chains of association creating a certain heroic nostalgia, out of which may arise a feeling of shared history and national identity.

Overture for Strings
Witold Lutoslawski

After the Second World War, Polish cultural life transferred from Warsaw, the city in which Witold Lutoslawski had started his musical career, to Krakow, where he immediately assumed a leading role. However, he soon fell victim to the shifting political climate of post-war Poland, losing his official positions in both the composer’s union and the national radio. In 1949 socialist realism was imposed as the official artistic philosophy of Poland, and Lutoslawski’s music was branded as ‘formalist’ by the Soviet authorities. For the next several years, he supported himself and his family mainly by composing popular music and children’s songs, but continued to develop his style in private, exploring radical compositional techniques in his sketches and exercises.

The Overture for Strings was undertaken with relative artistic freedom since it was commissioned from outside of Poland by Paul Sacher and his Basle Chamber Orchestra. The same group had sponsored Bartók’s Divertimento ten years previously, and the Overture has much in common with that work. Like Bartók (and Brahms before him), Lutoslawski starts from short melodic motives, combining them into dense harmonies and complex contrapuntal textures. His innovation is to do this with the single-minded thoroughness and mathematical precision of nature. If Bartók’s music sometimes calls to mind the stitch-work of a tapestry, in this and later works Lutoslawski seems to be aiming for the vascular structure of a leaf. That said, the resulting harmonies and textures are presented within a traditional sonata-like structure, so that the general outlines of the piece retain a neo-classical architecture.

With Stalin’s death in 1953, and the subsequent cultural thaw in Poland, Lutoslawski reemerged as Poland’s leading composer, and soon rose to international prominence. This time he retained his standing, and when in the late 1970s the political situation shifted again, Lutoslawski used his position to press for reform. He was awarded the Solidarity prize in 1983, and in 1994 became only the second recipient of the Order of the White Eagle in post-communist Poland, right after Pope John Paul II.

Old Polish Suite
Andrzej Panufnik

Sir Andrzej Panufnik defected to England in 1954, became a British citizen in 1961, and was knighted in 1991. However, he remained invested in Polish history, culture and politics, even though his music was banned in Poland upon his defection. The ban was lifted in Poland in 1977, though he himself could not return until 1990 when, the communist regime having fallen, he attended and conducted in a festival of his own works. Panufnik was posthumously awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta by President Lech Walesa.

The Old Polish Suite did not spring from a neo-classical impulse, but rather a national one. The music is treated almost entirely within the original style, and does not exhibit any of the added or wrong-note chords that one finds for instance in Stravinsky. Let me emphasize: the unusual harmonies one hears in this music are entirely authentic, both Old and Polish.

About this work the composer wrote: “My compulsion to restore some of the early Polish music was engendered as I witnessed the superb reconstruction of beautiful 16th and 17th century houses in the old part of Warsaw, which had been flattened during the Uprising at the end of the Second World War. To see the almost miraculous regrowth of seemingly lost architectural treasures so lovingly brought about by my compatriots, filled me with enormous admiration. My intention was to bring alive the spirit of Poland [of that same era] , and to make use of these precious fragments which otherwise would have remained lifeless on the bookshelves of libraries.”

The historiographical nature of the suite is shown in its alternation between secular dances and sacred dirges, the two types being juxtaposed as they might be in an anthology (but never in their original musical life). While not necessarily fragments, the original dances are very short, so Panufnik combined them, using one to serve as the middle section for the other. The outer dances in the 3rd and 5th movements bear descriptive names that attest to their peasant origins; they are, respectively, the ‘snatching dance’ and the ‘heyduck dance’ (the latter a military recruiting dance from the Hungarian countryside).

 

 

MCO's 2008/09 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 Two 98.3, Golden West Radio & Shaw Cable. MCO's Chamber Chatter newsletter
is sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Heartstrings gala
sponsor: Mackenzie Financial Corporation.

© 2008 Manitoba Chamber Orchestra