Manitoba Chamber Orchestra
Anne Manson, Music Director and Conductor
Karl Stobbe, Concertmaster
Westminster United Church
9 September 2009

Evelyn Glennie, percussion

 

The Buhler Concert

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Piccolo concerto in c major (rv 443) — arr. Evelyn Glennie

1. Allegro
2. Largo
3. Allegro molto

Evelyn Glennie

José Evangelista (b. 1943)
Airs d’Espagne

1. Dansa dels esquiladors
2. Arada
3. La alegria
4. Alsa Bayona
5. Si la nieve resbala
6. Muñeiras
7. Nana
8. Palomita
9. Charrada

Joe Duddell (b. 1972)
Snowblind

Evelyn Glennie

Intermission

Christos Hatzis (b. 1953)
Mirage?

Evelyn Glennie

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Chamber symphony, op. 118a after string quartet no. 10 — trans. Rudolf Barshai

1. Andante
2. Allegretto furioso
3. Adagio …
4. Allegretto — andante

Concert sponsor / Wawanesa Insurance
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

 

Evelyn Glennie

Evelyn is the first person in musical history to successfully create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist. As one of the most eclectic and innovative musicians on the scene today, she is constantly redefining the goals and expectations of percussion. By combining superb technique, a profound appreciation of the visual and her astonishing musicality, Evelyn creates performances of such vitality that they almost constitute a new type of performance.

Evelyn gives more than 100 performances a year worldwide, working with the greatest conductors, orchestras and artists. For the first ten years of her career, virtually every performance she gave was in some way a first — the first time an orchestra had performed with a percussion soloist, the first solo percussion performance at a venue or festival or the world premiere of a new piece. She has collaborated with artists such as Nana Vasoncelos, Kodo, Béla Fleck, Björk, Bobby McFerrin, Emmanuel Ax, Sting, the Kings Singers, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Fred Frith.

Evelyn composes and records music for film and television and has commissioned one hundred and sixty new works for solo percussion from many of the world’s most eminent composers. Her first high quality drama produced a score so original she was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award — the UK equivalent of the Oscar.

Evelyn Glennie is constantly exploring other areas of creativity — from writing a best-selling autobiography, Good Vibrations, to collaborating with the renowned film director Thomas Riedelsheimer on a film called Touch the Sound, to presenting two series of her own television programmes for the BBC.

Evelyn’s activities also include lobbying the government on political issues as diverse as music education and parking rights for motor bikes (she is a keen biker). Her consortium with Sir James Galway, Julian Lloyd Webber and the late Michael Caman successfully led to the government providing 332 million pounds sterling towards music education. Evelyn is also an international motivational speaker to many corporate companies and events and — yet another example of her varied accomplishments — she performs with orchestras on the Great Highland Bagpipes.

After twenty years in the music business, she has begun teaching privately, which allows her to explore the art of teaching and to explore the world of sound therapy as a means of communication.

In 1993 Evelyn was awarded the OBE (Officer of the British Empire). This was later extended to ‘Dame Commander’ for her services to music, and to date she has received approximately eighty international awards. She is brimming with ideas to improve the experience for the audience and continues to redefine the very format of live performance itself.

Christos Hatzis

With numerous presentations of his music in Canada, USA, Europe, and elsewhere every year, a continuous stream of commissions by an international list of soloists and ensembles and several recording projects by major and independent labels, 2008 and 2006 Juno Award winner Christos Hatzis “is currently enjoying a growing international reputation as one of the most important composers writing today” (CBC Records). A professor of composition at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, Christos Hatzis is the recipient of several national and international distinctions such as the 2008 Jan V. Matejcek Concert Music Award (SOCAN) given each year to the most performed Canadian composer.

Audience members might recall the hugely successful Hatzis 2002/03 composition, Pyrrichean Dances, for viola, percussion and strings — with soloists Beverley Johnston and Rivka Golani and the MCO.

Upcoming projects include Pauline, a full-length chamber opera collaboration with renowned Canadian author Margaret Atwood based on the life of turn-of-the-century Canadian literary personality Pauline Johnston, to be produced by City Opera Vancouver in 2011, a concerto for the Pacifica String Quartet and City Music Cleveland, a violin concerto for American violinist Jennifer Koh and several smaller works for various instrumental combinations. Premieres in 2007/08 included K627: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in the Spirit of W.A. Mozart with Maria Asteriadou and the Camerata Orchestra of Athens, From the Song of Songs for Arabic vocalist Maryem Tollar, tenor Rufus Mueller and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Choir, Water, for Irish folk instruments and multiple children’s choirs, the international Songbridge Project with children’s choirs from all over the world which took place in Copenhagen in 2008, and In the Fire of Conflict, for cello, percussion and dance for Toronto Summer Music.

Hatzis’s music is inspired by early Christian spirituality, his own Byzantine music heritage, world cultures and various non-classical music genres such as jazz, pop and world musics. He is an advocate of borderless culture and many of his most recent works bridge the gap between classical music and today’s popular music idioms. His compositions are structurally complex while sonically accessible. He has created several works inspired by the music of the Inuit, Canada’s arctic inhabitants, and his Inuit-inspired works, particularly the award-winning radio documentary, Footprints in New Snow, have promoted Inuit culture around the globe. His strongest inspiration is his own religious faith, and his religious works have been hailed by critics and audiences alike as contemporary masterpieces.

Piccolo concerto in C major (RV 443)
Antonio Vivaldi (arr. Glennie)

In Vivaldi’s time, it was common practice for a composition to be played on several different instruments. Composers were happy just to have their music heard, and they weren’t fussy about whether it was performed on a violin, flute or harpsichord. Given this attitude, as well as Vivaldi’s well-known love of instrumental colour, it’s quite likely that he would have welcomed the chance to hear one of his works sounding in an attractive (and what would have been new to him) medium such as the vibraphone.

He intended the delightful concerto that Dame Evelyn Glennie will perform at this concert for the smallest member of either the flute family, the piccolo, or the recorder family, the sopranino model. It’s one of just three that he composed for this instrument, perhaps under the inspiration of a virtuoso soloist. The lively outer movements are filled with high, bird-like trills that suit either piccolo or vibraphone admirably. In between comes a stately, almost melancholy slow movement that displays the solo instrument’s lyrical side.

Airs d’Espagne
José Evangelista

The composer has written the following note:

Airs d’Espagne (Spanish Melodies) consists of 15 folk melodies from Spain. They include work songs, lullabies, entertainment songs and religious songs. They come from a variety of regions and most of them are probably fairly old. The melodies are presented as such, or at most repeated, without formal development or modulations. My purpose was to emphasize the melodic character of this material. This piece was commissioned by the CBC (Winnipeg). Tonight’s concert will present the following selections from the full score: Dansa dels esquiladors; Arada; La alegria; Alsa Bayona; Si la nieve resbala; Muñeiras; Nana; Palomita; Charrada.

Snowblind, for solo percussion and strings
Joe Duddell

Duddell composed Snowblind in 2001.
He has written the following note:

In Snowblind the percussion soloist principally has a melodic and harmonic role throughout the piece. On the whole, percussion concertos are more concerned with the rhythmic and colouristic possibilities of the instrument(s). Whilst these are not abandoned in Snowblind, I wanted the percussion to be able to ‘sing’ with the ensemble, hence the use of just marimba, vibraphone, crotales and temple blocks. The use of the larger (and potentially louder!) percussion instruments would, I think, have been unsuitable for the intimate nature of this piece.

The three movements (lasting about 18 minutes) are primarily concerned with unity rather than the Romantic notion of conflict/resolution between the soloist and ensemble — the work as a whole is more Baroque in outlook, having ritornello sections throughout the piece. The first violin, viola and cello are used as ‘link’ instruments between the soloists and ensemble, and have virtuosic sections themselves. The title is purely abstract and, as usual for me, comes from a non-music source — it was the title of a book I was reading at the time of embarking on writing the piece.

Snowblind was commissioned by the BT Scottish Ensemble with a subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council and the Friends of the BT Scottish Ensemble. The first performance was given by Colin Currie and the BT Scottish Ensemble, April 2002, in Inverness, Scotland.

Mirage?
Christos Hatzis

The composer has written the following note:

Commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for Dame Evelyn Glennie and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Mirage? was composed during the winter months of 2009. It was a time when the world was entering an economic downturn which has often been compared with the Great Depression of the 1930s. This dark period was preceded by years of greed, selfishness, political and economic opportunism and plain disregard for basic human rights all over the world, which necessitated the present period of cleansing and testing so we can hopefully reclaim our humanity and faith through the trials and tribulations of today’s economic and geopolitical crucible.

Looking back at the previous period of careless and callous accumulation of wealth by the few at the expense of many, one wonders if the exorbitant life-style which we, the residents of the developed nations, managed to sustain for several decades at the expense of the developing world and the underprivileged among us was real or a mirage: sweet, lovely and seductive, but a mirage nonetheless. The unmistakable connection between the years preceding the present crisis and the ‘roaring twenties’ accounts for the particular musical styles used in the composition and the question mark in the title.

The music of Mirage? is permeated by a sense of sadness and, at one point, of despair. It is lamenting the loss of something pleasurable that could not be held on to: of a way of living that less fortunate generations in our post-apocalyptic future may find hard to believe as possible and relegate instead to the domains of myth and legend, like the myths and legends of lost continents and civilizations of our distant past that are still pounding at the threshold of our collective memory. Were they mirages, too, or are we repeatedly failing the same test over and over again, destroying ourselves and others in the process while blotting our legacy in the collective memory of humankind?

I don’t know if the music of Mirage? answers any of these questions, but they were what led to its being. Perhaps there is still hope, that is hope for human solutions before God and nature take matters into their own hands, but during the days of composing this work that, too, seemed like a mirage.

Chamber Symphony, op. 118a
Dmitri Shostakovich (arr. Barshai)

The 15 string quartets that Shostakovich composed between 1938 and 1974 offer as virtually complete a portrait of the composer as do the equal number of symphonies. At times they provide even deeper insights, since they speak a more intimate language.

The Russian conductor, Rudolf Barshai (b. 1924), enjoyed a close personal relationship with Shostakovich, dating back to Barshai’s studying composition with Shostakovich. The bond continued as Barshai, first as a violist (he was a founding member of the prestigious Borodin Quartet) and subsequently as a conductor, has performed his teacher’s music frequently and with compelling insight. In 1969, he conducted another ensemble he founded, the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, in the world premiere of Shostakovich’s fourteenth symphony.

Barshai received Shostakovich’s permission to transcribe string quartets nos. 8 and 10 for full string orchestra. He has continued to produce such arrangements in the years following the composer’s death. To date he has prepared transcriptions of three further quartets.

Shostakovich composed String quartet no. 10 at the Composers’ Retreat in Dilizhan, Armenia, between July 11 and 20, 1964. He dedicated it to a friend, the composer Moisei Weinberg. The Beethoven Quartet, who gave the first performances of all his quartets except for the first and last, premiered it (in addition to the recently composed String quartet no. 9) in Moscow on November 20, 1964.

As with much of Shostakovich’s music, the first movement, andante, poses more emotional questions than it answers. He delivers one, temporary response through the brusque gestures and high-tension rhythms of the aptly named second movement, allegretto furioso. For the third movement, adagio, he reaches back to the Baroque era for a passacaglia. In form a set of variations, this example has a deeply grieving character.

The two-part finale follows without a pause. In the opening section, a tune with the personality of a Russian folk dance, its inherent cheekiness undercut by Shostakovich’s imposing a slow tempo upon it, competes for attention with other, sombre material. Themes from the previous movements reappear, including the passacaglia from the preceding movement. In the finale’s second panel, much — but not all — of the music’s tension gradually dissipates. Shostakovich’s lifelong Q&A session would resume, another day.

 

 

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