Manitoba Chamber Orchestra
Anne Manson, Music Director and Conductor
Karl Stobbe, Concertmaster
Westminster United Church
6 January 2010

Measha Brueggergosman, soprano
Peter John Buchan and Scott Reimer, tenors
Kris Kornelsen, baritone; Derek Morphy, bass

 

Pavel Haas (1899-1944)
Study for Strings

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Brettl-Lieder, cabaret songs — orch. Patrick Davin

1. Gigerlette
2. Einfältiges Lied (Simple Song)
3. Mahnung (Warning)
4. Arie aus Der Spiegel von Arkadien (Aria from The Mirror of Arcadia)

Measha Brueggergosman

Gideon Klein (1919-1945)
Partita for Strings

1. Allegro
2. Variations on a Moravian Folksong
3. Molto vivace

Intermission

Kurt Weill (1900-1950)
The Seven Deadly Sins

1. Prologue
2. Sloth
3. Pride
4. Anger
5. Gluttony
6. Lust
7. Avarice
8. Envy
9. Epilogue

Measha Brueggergosman

This concert is being recorded by CBC Radio 2
for Tempo, with host Julie Nesrallah, Monday to Friday
from 9 am to 2 pm, and Sunday Afternoon in Concert,
with host Bill Richardson, Sunday, 11 am to 3 pm.

Concert sponsor / Gail Asper & Michael Paterson
Project support / The Jewish Foundation of Manitoba
Season sponsor / The Great-West Life Assurance Company
Print media sponsor / Winnipeg Free Press
Radio media sponsors / CBC Radio 2 98.3, CBC Radio One 990,
Espace musique 89,9 and Golden West Radio

 

Measha Brueggergosman

Noted by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a singer of rare gifts and artistic intensity” and by the Miami Herald for possessing “a superb voice capable of just about everything,” Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman has emerged as one of the most magnificent performers and vibrant personalities of the day. She is critically acclaimed by the international press as much for her innate musicianship and voluptuous voice as for a sovereign stage presence far beyond her years. Her extraordinary versatility, intuitive musicality, and radiant star quality have yielded an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. Her first recording on the label, Surprise, was released in 2007 and garnered a Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year.

A dynamic scope of repertoire, coupled with a profound depth of artistic commitment, brings Measha Brueggergosman together with many of the finest international orchestras and most esteemed conductors of our day. During the 2008/09 season, performances included her Minnesota Orchestra debut presenting Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony under the direction of Osmo Vänskä, Mendelssohn’s Elijah with L’Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Berio’s Recital I for Cathy at Paris’s Cité de la musique with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and David Robertson, Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 with l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and Kent Nagano as well as with the Orquesta Nacional de España and Josep Pons, Strauss’ Vier Letzte Lieder with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Peter Oundjian, and New Year’s Eve gala concerts with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Ingo Metzmacher. The artist is deeply honoured to be guest soloist with Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra with appearances in Cleveland, Miami, and at Carnegie Hall; on two separate programs she performs Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and Janácek’s Glagolitic Mass.

Measha Brueggergosman was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2002 Jeunesses Musicales Montreal International Competition and has been a prizewinner at The Dutch International Vocal Competition ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Wigmore Hall in London, George London Foundation in New York, The Queen Sonja International Music Competition in Oslo, and the ARD Music Competition in Munich. She studied at the University of Toronto with Mary Morrison and pursued postgraduate studies in Germany with Edith Wiens. She has also worked with such distinguished musicians as Christoph Eschenbach, Ruth Falcon, Brigitte Fassbaender, Margo Garrett, Håkan Hagegård, Jessye Norman, Rudolf Piernay, and Thomas Quasthoff.

Beyond the great concert halls of the world, Ms Brueggergosman lends her voice, passion, and energy to social and environmental causes as a Canadian good-will ambassador for three international organizations: African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF); Learning Through the Arts; and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Her commitments to these organizations have taken her on a broad spectrum of missions — from primary schools in New Brunswick to internally displaced persons camps of northern Uganda.

Tonight’s concert marks the fifth time Measha has performed with the MCO.

Peter John Buchan

Peter John Buchan, a native of Winnipeg, has been involved with choral and vocal music since he joined the men and boys choir at All Saint’s Church in 1979. He has appeared as a chorister and soloist with many of Winnipeg’s foremost choirs, including The Winnipeg Singers, Renaissance Voices, and Camerata Nova. Internationally, PJ has performed as a soloist in London’s Millenium Centre and Prague’s St Vitus’s Cathedral, and was guest soloist at the 2005 Reykjavik Winter Festival. In the last few years, PJ has sung various roles with Manitoba Opera, The Musical Offering and Little Opera Company and has performed as soloist with the MCO and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.

Scott Reimer

Scott Reimer grew up in a family and community with a strong choral tradition. Raised in Gretna and a graduate of W.C. Miller Collegiate in Altona, he recently completed his B.Sc. from the University of Winnipeg and is currently enrolled in the University of Manitoba’s Education program. Since moving to Winnipeg, he has sung with The Winnipeg Singers, Camerata Nova, Prairie Voices, and All Saints Anglican and now sings and conducts at St. Margaret’s Anglican. His recent choral highlights include representing Manitoba as a bass in the National Youth Choir in 2008 on the east coast of Canada, traveling to Europe to sing tenor with the World Youth Choir 2009, and being a founding member of the choral ensembles Antiphony and 8ctavo.

Kris Kornelsen

Baritone Kris Kornelsen is no stranger to the music scene in Winnipeg. He has sung as both a soloist and chorister with The Winnipeg Singers and Canzona and has enjoyed guest appearances with The Mennonite Oratorio Choir and the Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir. Kris has performed as soloist in performances of Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation, and Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. He is known for his musicianship and ability to actively communicate with his audiences. He brings to his performances a refreshingly bright yet warm vocal quality, marked by sensitive phrasing. Currently, Kris is very active singing various styles of music, from classical to jazz, gospel and pop with the mixed vocal quartet, Encore. Kris obtained a Bachelor of Church Music at Canadian Mennonite Bible College before going on to the University of Manitoba to complete a Bachelor of Music. He is a Chartered Accountant with Deloitte; he and his wife Kristie have three sons.

Derek Morphy

Derek Morphy was born in Morecambe, England in 1941, and was educated at Rydal School in Wales. He sang as a Choral Scholar in the chapel of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he was also a member of the Cambridge University Opera Group and the Cambridge University Madrigal Society.

He studied voice in England with Roger Stalman and in Canada with Leonard Mayoh, and he has performed the bass solos in a number of oratorios. Most recently, he sang the part of the deacon in Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy with The Winnipeg Singers, and the role of Sarastro in performances of Mozart’s The Magic Flute with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

Derek Morphy taught choral music for many years in Brandon and at Kelvin High School in Winnipeg. His Neelin High School Chamber Ensemble in Brandon won the George S. Mathieson Trophy, a national choral competition, in both 1982 and 1983. He currently conducts the chamber choir, Renaissance Voices, serves as Director of Music at St. Andrew’s, River Heights, United Church, and this year is conducting two choral ensembles at Canadian Mennonite University.

Study for Strings
Pavel Haas

This concert presents music by four Jewish composers whose lives were powerfully affected by the rise of Nazism. In the cases of Pavel Haas and Gideon Klein, their promising careers were utterly obliterated by the holocaust.

Haas’s studies at the Brno Conservatory were highlighted by two years of composition lessons with the quirky Moravian genius, Leoš Janácek. At first he took his teacher’s style as his primary model. A more individual language developed gradually, one in which the influences of such widely disparate elements as Moravian folk song, medieval hymns and Jewish religious chants, jazz and contemporary European music may be heard.

Haas suffered greatly during the Nazi occupation of his homeland. Performances of his music were banned and he and his wife were not allowed to work. In 1941 he was sent to the ghetto of Theresienstadt (also known as Terezin), 60 kilometres north of Prague. Other Jewish musicians were confined there as well. They kept up their spirits by writing music and putting on concerts — at first in secret, then later with the permission of the authorities, who saw potential for propaganda in these activities.

During the three years Haas spent in Theresienstadt, he composed the Four Songs on Chinese Poetry, a symphony which he did not finish, and the Study for Strings (1943). It was premiered by the musicians’ string orchestra, with Karel Ancerl conducting. Ancerl survived his term in the ghetto and went on to a distinguished international career.

The Study for Strings was reconstructed in 1991 by Lubomír Peduzzi, using the orchestral parts that had survived the war. It displays plentiful energy but an underlying sense of unease. That feeling intensifies in the slow section that appears mid-way through. The music concludes with a bustling fugue.

Brettl-Lieder (Cabaret Songs)
Arnold Schoenberg

Schoenberg was born a Jew but converted to the Lutheran faith in 1898. He began his career as an exponent of the rich, late Romantic school of Brahms, Mahler and Strauss. Feeling that it had been exhausted, he set off in new, exploratory directions that eventually abandoned traditional ideas of key signatures (atonality) and relationships between notes (serialism). Many listeners reviled his sometimes brutal, strident experiments, but his methods attracted numerous disciples, and composers continue to use them today.

He fled from Europe in 1933 to escape the mounting tide of anti-Semitism. At the same time he re-embraced the Jewish faith. Settling in the United States, he earned a modest living as a highly respected teacher. In later years, he returned in some degree to traditional musical practices.

By 1901 he was living in Vienna and had completed Transfigured Night, a deeply romantic tone poem for strings, and was in the process of composing two even more intense and ambitious works: another tone poem, inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s dream-like play, Pelléas et Mélisande, and Gurre-Lieder, a lengthy cantata whose colossal performing forces and deliriously decadent emotions out-Wagnered Wagner.

Meanwhile, a trendy nightclub, the Überbrettl (Beyond Cabaret), was about to open in Berlin. It was modelled on similarly vibrant, experimental establishments in Paris. Its owners — a group of gifted young writers, including Ernst von Wolzogen, Frank Wedekind and Otto Julius Bierbaum — intended its music to surpass the intellectual dimension of its Parisian counterparts, while offering equally sophisticated entertainment.

They had recently published a volume of verse entitled Deutsche Chansons (German Songs), light-hearted satirical poems suitable for being set as songs in popular style. Schoenberg set some of them for voice and piano, and gave them the collective title Brettl-Lieder (Cabaret Songs).

When he and Ernst von Wolzogen met in the summer of 1901, he played the Brettl-Lieder for him. They impressed Wolzogen so strongly that he invited Schoenberg to become the resident conductor and orchestrator at the Überbrettl. Schoenberg moved from Vienna to Berlin to take up the job. His duties included producing several thousand pages of cabaret arrangements for the club’s house band.

The Überbrettl company and their brand new Art Nouveau hall, the Bunte Theatre, quickly proved extremely popular, regularly drawing the cream of Berlin’s musical and literary elite. Just one of Schoenberg’s Brettl-Lieder, Nachtwandler (Night Wanderer — the only song from the set that he orchestrated) was performed at the Überbrettl. The fact that, due primarily to financial difficulties, the club remained open only until the summer of 1902 probably had some bearing on this.

The Brettl-Lieder offer a rare glimpse of Schoenberg’s playful, popular side. They only found their way into print in the 1970s. Tonight’s concert presents four of them, in orchestrations by Patrick Davin.

The main subject, of course, is love. The maiden Gigerlette invites her man to an amorous rendezvous, first over tea in her seductively appointed room, then in a horse-drawn coach. Einfältiges Lied (Simple Song) is a sly fable about the vanity of kings. Mahnung (Warning) adopts a less frivolous tone, to offer advice to young women about the best sort of man to look for. In Arie aus ‘Der Spiegel von Arkadien’ (Aria from The Mirror of Arcadia, with a text by Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute), the poet offers a tribute to all women. Schoenberg’s setting maximizes its comic potential without undercutting the sincerity of the message.

Partita for Strings
Gideon Klein

Klein, 20 years younger than Pavel Haas, had his career terminated at a much earlier stage. He studied at the Prague Conservatory and at Charles University, but a 1939 German decree cut short his education. Two years later, he was deported to Theresienstadt. In October 1944, he was transferred first to the Auschwitz concentration camp, then to Fürstengrube, where he was executed shortly before Allied forces liberated the area.

He played a major role in Theresienstadt’s musical activities. He composed new works, performed as a piano soloist, and gave lessons to fellow inmates. The pieces he created during this period were found only by chance.

His final composition was a Trio for violin, viola and cello. Its style reflected his country’s folk music more than the modernistic approach of such composers as Schoenberg that he had adopted previously. This may be taken as a gesture of patriotic defiance toward his captors. When Czech composer Vojtech Saudek transcribed the Trio for string orchestra in 1990, he gave it a new name: Partita.

The energetic opening movement radiates a steely sort of confidence. The second movement is a stark, powerfully emotional set of variations on a folk lullaby from Moravia, Klein’s home province. In the finale, Klein returns to the defiant optimism of the first movement. Nine days after completing it, he was sent to Auschwitz.

The Seven Deadly Sins
Kurt Weill

Like Schoenberg, Weill left Europe in time to escape the Nazi holocaust. He is best-known for his theatre music, from the satiric scores for his early Berlin pieces Three-Penny Opera (1928) and Happy End (1929), to the more romantic but still individual Broadway shows and Hollywood film scores he composed after his arrival in America.

He exhibited musical talent quite early. By age 12 he was writing and staging presentations in the family home. At 18 he moved to Berlin to study music; his teachers included Engelbert Humperdinck (whose conservative thinking didn’t suit him) and Ferruccio Busoni. At the same time he gained valuable experience in a variety of fields: vocal coach at the opera house in his home city, Dessau; critic; and teacher of piano and musical theory. During this early period he composed a number of instrumental concert works, including a string quartet, a symphony and a concerto for violin and wind orchestra.

His reputation increased as the `20s unfolded. By mid-decade his renown had grown to match or surpass those of his fellow young Germans, Paul Hindemith and Ernst Krenek. In 1926 his first opera, The Protagonist, debuted successfully in Dresden. Like his other works of the period, it showed the influences of American jazz, and demonstrated his desire to join with the finest authors of the day in a concerted effort to make musical theatre more up-to-date.

In 1927, Weill first worked with author Bertolt Brecht, who was destined to be one of his most important creative partners. Such daring, genre-bending Weill/Brecht projects as Three-Penny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny outraged the conservative Nazi cultural authorities, who launched a calculated campaign against their creators. Sensing danger, Weill fled to Paris in March 1933.

Journeying on to America two years later, he was so encouraged by his successes there that he decided to stay. Sensing that the more liberal atmosphere of the Broadway stage was better suited to his creative outlook than the ultra-conservative world of opera, he began his American phase with Johnny Johnson (1936), followed by Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), Lady in the Dark (1941), One Touch of Venus (1943), Street Scene (1946) and Lost in the Stars (1949), as well as scores for several Hollywood film musicals.

His American literary partners proved every bit as distinguished as those with whom he had worked in Europe. Among them were Maxwell Anderson, Ira Gershwin, Moss Hart and Ogden Nash. His music for these shows is notably more serious and substantial than the average stage show of the day, without sacrificing the sharp wit that had characterized his theatre music from the beginning.

The music Weill had composed in Germany became known and appreciated in America only after his death. A New York production of Three-Penny Opera, for example, ran for 2500 performances over a seven-year period. His early music also proved highly influential, as the Broadway shows of Stephen Sondheim and, in particular, the 1966 John Kander/Fred Ebb production, Cabaret, clearly demonstrate.

The saucy, diverting hybrid piece Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins) was commissioned for the debut of a Parisian dance company. Headed by the celebrated Russian émigré choreographer, George Balanchine, it was known as Les Ballets 1933. Weill, who had just arrived in the city, hit upon the idea of a ‘sung ballet,’ and invited Brecht to write the libretto. The premiere took place on June 7, 1933. It drew a largely puzzled reaction, hardly surprising given its innovative style and contents. It didn’t return to the stage until it was revived in New York in 1958. The challenges of producing it effectively have led to its being performed most often, as it will be this evening, in a concert format rather than a theatrical one.

The scenario is an absurdist, anti-capitalist morality play. The pressures of a money-centred society have split Anna’s personality in two. Anna I, the singer, is calm and entirely practical. Anna II is an impulsive dancer. The two halves of Anna’s personality do what is good for each other. Throughout the seven-year quest that takes Anna to seven American cities in search of enough money to build a home in Louisiana for their family (who are represented in the score by a quartet of male singers), Anna II is tempted by the seven deadly sins: sloth, pride, anger, gluttony, lust, greed and envy. Anna I resists them all by enforcing self-denial. Perversely, she sees nothing wrong with Anna II’s committing the equally toxic sins necessary to gain the desired fortune — prostitution, robbery and blackmail among them. Weill wraps every surreal twist and satiric jab of the lyrics in an aptly, at times deliriously, irreverent musical equivalent.

Tonight’s performance of The Seven Deadly Sins is funded
in part by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Inc.,
7 East 20th Street, New York NY 10003.

The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Inc. administers, promotes
and perpetuates the legacies of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. It encourages
broad dissemination and appreciation of Weill’s music through support
of performances, productions, recordings and scholarship; it fosters
understanding of Weill’s and Lenya’s lives and work within diverse cultural
contexts; and, building upon the legacies of both, it nurtures talent, particularly
in the creation, performance, and study of musical theatre in its various
manifestations and media.

 

 

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