Manitoba Chamber Orchestra
Anne Manson, Music Director
Karl Stobbe, Concertmaster
Westminster United Church
16 February 2010

Scott Yoo, guest conductor
Maria Luz Alvarez, soprano
Rodrigo Muñoz, guitar
Kerry DuWors, violin
Karl Stobbe, violin

 

Edvard Hagerup Grieg (1843-1907)
Two Melodies, op. 55

1. Norwegian
2. The First Meeting

Jim Hiscott (b. 1948)
The Song of the Stars

Manitoba Arts Council commission
Premiere performance, 19 May 2009 Thompson, Manitoba

Maria Luz Alvarez
Rodrigo Muñoz

David Raphael Scott (b. 1962)
The Widening Gyre

Canada Council commission
World premiere performance

Edvard Grieg
Two Elegiac Melodies, op. 34

1. The Wounded Heart
2. The Last Spring

Intermission

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)
Concerto grosso, no. 1

1. Preludio: andante …
2. Toccata: allegro
3. Recitativo: lento
4. Cadenza …
5. Rondo: agitato
6. Postludio: andante — allegro — andante

Kerry DuWors
Karl Stobbe

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

 

Maria Luz Alvarez

Born in Spain, Maria Luz Alvarez started her musical education at the Royal Superior School of Singing of Madrid. She later studied in Holland, graduating in Early Music Performance in 1994 at the Sweelinck Conservatorium of Amsterdam.

Since then, Maria Luz has been invited regularly as soloist by ensembles such as Accentus, Musica Alta Ripa, Al Ayre Español, Clarincanto, El Concierto Español, Los Músicos del Buen Retiro, Compagnia Vocale and Gabinete Armonico. She has recorded several CDs of Renaissance polyphony music: Leal Amour and Tota Vita (Music for the courts of Phillip II and Charles V), Fortune Helas (Chansons of T. Crecquillon), Ronsard et les Neerlandais and Gheerkin de Hondt, a portrait.

Her repertoire ranges from the Middle Ages to the present time, with special focus on the Baroque oratorio and cantata. She has also performed in Baroque operas such as Dido and Aeneas, Dioclesian and The Fairy Queen by Purcell, Acis and Galatea by Handel and Azis y Galatea by Literes — this last one also recorded on CD for Harmonia Mundi. Since 1995 she has been invited regularly by the Telemann Institute of Japan to perform the Japanese premieres of several Handel oratorios, and also Bach’s passions, cantatas and the B minor mass.

Ms Alvarez now makes her home in Thompson, Manitoba; she continues to travel to Europe and Asia for regular performances and recording sessions, but enjoys nature, gardening, and the friendly community in which she now lives.

Rodrigo Muñoz

Rodrigo Muñoz studied classical guitar at the University of Manitoba Faculty of Music under professor Harold Micay. He has released two classical guitar CDs which contain both original compositions and classical guitar favourites as well as two more CDs as the leader of the popular Latin group Papa Mambo. Rodrigo performs frequently in Winnipeg as a solo artist as well as fronting his Latin jazz ensemble, and he has had the honour of collaborating with many artists including The Winnipeg Singers, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Manitoba Opera Association, The Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra. He has also collaborated with Juno award winners Jane Bunnett and Hilario Duran, Grammy award winner Changuito (José Luis Quintana), and multi Grammy winner Tito Puente.

In Winnipeg he frequently performs with artists such as Skender Sefa, Steve Kirby, Jeff Presslaff, Ken Gold, David Lawton, Gilles Fournier, Will Bonness, Jaime Carrasco, Larry Roy, Amber Epp, Victor Lopez and Mira Black.

Kerry DuWors

Violinist Kerry DuWors has earned accolades for her “poise and maturity” and “spellbinding expression” (Winnipeg Free Press). She is Assistant Professor of Violin and Chamber Music at Brandon University, and first violinist of the Toronto-based Rocca String Quartet. She also maintains a demanding concert career as soloist and chamber musician. Kerry began music studies in Saskatoon and continued at the University of Victoria (B. Mus.) with Ann Elliott-Goldschmid of the Lafayette String Quartet, and at the University of Toronto (M. Mus.) as a student of Lorand Fenyves. At the University of Toronto, she received many coveted awards and scholarships including the Eaton Graduate Scholarship, the Yo-Yo Ma Fellowship for Strings, a Canada Council Career Development Grant for Emerging Professional Classical Musicians, and the Felix Galimir Award for Chamber Music Excellence.

Winner of the 26th Eckhardt-Gramatté Competition, Ms DuWors made a debut Canada-wide recital tour with pianist Lydia Wong in 2003. Recently she has collaborated with, amongst other musicians, James Ehnes, Angela Cheng, Denise Djokic, Yehonatan Berick, Jonathon Crow, Marc-André Hamelin, Andrew Dawes, Paul Marleyn, and Scott St. John. She has studied and performed with artists such as Laurence Lesser, Krzysztof Penderecki, Gary Kulesha, Jeanne Lamon of Tafelmusik, Raffi Armenian, Erika Raum, the Penderecki Quartet, the Gryphon Trio, and the St. Lawrence and Lafayette string quartets.

Lately, Kerry DuWors has performed at the Aeolian Concert Series (London, ON), the Northern Lights Music Festival (Mexico), Brandon University’s Pro Series, the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society, the Agassiz Chamber Music Festival in Winnipeg, GroundSwell, the Vancouver Recital Society Summer Combustion, the Maureen Forrester Young Canadian Artist Series (Stratford Summer Music Festival) and the Gustin House Concert Series. She has also played in the CBC’s Galleria, Music Around Us and In Performance broadcasts, and performed the world premiere of David R. Scott’s Concerto for Violin and Cello. In addition, Kerry has been part of triple quartet collaborations with the Penderecki and Lafayette Quartets at the Perimeter Institute (Waterloo) and SoundAxis Festival (Toronto).

From 2003 to 2006, Ms DuWors played on the 1902 Enrico Rocca violin on loan from the Canada Council for the Arts and an anonymous donor. A winner in the 2006 Canada Council for the Arts Instrument Bank Competition, she currently plays on the 1747 Palmason Januarius Gagliano violin.

Jim Hiscott

Jim Hiscott was born in 1948 in St. Catharines, Ontario. In 1971, after earning a Master’s Degree in Theoretical Particle Physics, he switched to music composition, studying with Samuel Dolin at the Royal Conservatory of Music and David Lidov and Richard Teitelbaum at York University. He is the recipient of the Creative Arts Award of the Canadian Federation of University Women. His compositions have been performed across North America, in Europe and Asia, by artists including the Hilliard Ensemble, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Vancouver New Music Society ensemble, Rivka Golani, Arraymusic, and Philadelphia’s Relache.

Jim Hiscott has performed his own works for button accordion in the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival, the Vancouver New Music Society series, Toronto’s Big Squeeze Festival, and on the main stage of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. He has appeared as button accordion soloist with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Niagara Symphony, the New Orchestra of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.

Recent premieres of music by Jim Hiscott include Spiral (two violas), by Daniel and Michael Scholz; I Spoke to No One (chamber ensemble), given by the GroundSwell Ensemble conducted by Earl Stafford; The Song of the Stars (version for soprano and small chamber ensemble) premiered in Thompson, Manitoba by Maria Luz Alvarez with players of the MCO and Rodrigo Muñoz; Manimasii Aura (button accordion and chamber ensemble), with Simeonie Keenainak and the CBC Radio Orchestra conducted by Alain Trudel; Beating Heart (solo violin and button accordion with chamber orchestra), by Atis Bankas, Jim Hiscott, and the Orchestra of St. Mark’s, led by Daniel Swift; In Memoriam Walter Klymkiw (SATB Choir, soloists, and violin solo), by the Oleksandr Koshetz Choir with vocal soloists and violinist Gwen Hoebig, conducted by Laurence Ewashko; and North Wind (dizi and orchestra), by Xiao-Nan Wang and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, led by Music Director Andrey Boreyko.

String quartet no. 2, from his recent CBC Records CD Blue Ocean / Music of Jim Hiscott, was nominated for Outstanding Classical Composition at the 2004 Western Canadian Music Awards.

David Raphael Scott

Over the past 20 years, David R. Scott has had the opportunity to work with many professional ensembles and soloists in Canada, the United States and Europe. He has also worked directly with young people on collaborative creative projects, given masterclasses and taught theory, history and composition at all levels — from grade-school through graduate school. He worked for a number of years as a freelance producer for the CBC and is currently with the Manitoba Arts Council.

Recent composition projects include: a commission from the Penderecki String Quartet for String quartet no. 3 (2008); a cello concerto (2007) for Paul Marleyn and the Thunder Bay Symphony; a double concerto (2006) for violinist Kerry DuWors, cellist Mark Rudoff and the Brandon Chamber Players; and The Rising Curve of Day (2006) for mezzo-soprano Rosemarie van der Hooft and the Victoria Symphony.

David is a member of the Canadian League of Composers, an Associate of the Canadian Music Centre and was one of the Artistic Co-Directors of GroundSwell from 2001 to 2008. He has degrees from the Universities of Manitoba and Alberta and received his Doctorate from the University of British Columbia in 2000.

Two Melodies, op. 53
Edvard Grieg

But for a chance encounter, Grieg might have become a gifted but rather colourless and cosmopolitan composer. In 1864, he met and befriended another young Norwegian composer, Rikard Nordraak. Nordraak believed that the future of their country’s art music lay not in a continued reliance on Germanic models, but in tapping into the country’s rich heritage of folk song. Grieg quickly came to share this view.

Nordraak died of consumption in March 1866, at 23. For a time, Grieg’s grief led him to consider abandoning the nationalist path he and his friend had agreed upon, but a visit to Nordraak’s grave convinced him to stay the course. In a letter to Nordraak’s father, he promised “that his cause should be my cause, his goal mine. Do not believe that what he aspired to will be forgotten; I have the great vocation of bringing his few but great works to the attention of the people of Norway, of campaigning for their recognition, and of building further on that splendid foundation.”

Grieg expressed himself most successfully in miniature forms. The songs and brief piano works, such as the many books of Lyric Pieces, stand among his finest achievements. On several occasions, he transcribed his songs for string orchestra. The Two Elegiac Melodies (see below) are the best known of these arrangements, but the others have just as much to offer.

In 1880, Grieg composed a set of 12 songs on texts by Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, a Norwegian poet and travel writer who shared Grieg’s love for native Norwegian culture. Vinje wrote his poems in Landsmål, a new, synthetic language with fully Norwegian roots, rather than late-nineteenth century Norwegian’s partly Danish origins. That was one reason why the deeply patriotic Grieg found them so attractive. He drew upon them for the Two Elegiac Melodies that he prepared immediately after completing the songs.

When he prepared this second set of song transcriptions in 1890, he used another Vinje song as the basis for the first movement. It was originally entitled The Goal, but here Grieg changed it to Norwegian. The text is a stirring call to keep Landsmål alive, but Grieg revealed that he thought of it as a more generalized ode to brotherhood. The outer panels are march-like, confident and richly scored. The central section adopts a slower tempo and creates a mood of sweet yearning. The scoring begins more sparely than the outer sections but rises to a strong, sonorous climax.

This is followed by The First Meeting. Grieg drew its themes from the first of his Four Songs from The Fisher Maid (1870-72). The texts came from a collection of poems by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. The First Meeting not only captures the gentle innocence of young love, but subtly forecasts the possibility of deeper passions ahead.

The Song of the Stars
Jim Hiscott

The composer has written the following note:

The Song of the Stars is a setting of an anonymous Passamaquoddy poem of the same title, which runs as follows:

We are the stars which sing,
We sing with our light;
We are the birds of fire,
We fly over the sky.
Our light is a voice;
We make a road for spirits,
For the spirits to pass over.
Among us are three hunters
Who chase a bear;
There never was a time
When they were not hunting.
We look down on the mountains.
This is the Song of the Stars.

The Passamaquoddy are an Algonkian people from the area of present-day New Brunswick. The poem was translated in the nineteenth century by American folklorist Charles G. Leland, but it is undoubtedly much older. There are also several peoples whose language is of Algonkian origin in Manitoba, such as the Saulteaux and Cree; so the poem and its imagery have a connection to our part of the world as well.

The nightscape of bright stars on a canvas of deep space has always been very special to me. This exhilarating panorama inspires wonder and humility, regeneration and pure aesthetic pleasure, and is an experience into which people everywhere in the world have projected their myths and imagination. The poem The Song of the Stars captures this with powerful and evocative simplicity, full of spiritual metaphor. It gives magical voice to star-spirits, alluding to ancient stories and beliefs about the night constellations. In my setting of it, I have tried to suggest the vastness and majesty of star-filled space with long melodic lines, peppered with what might be imagined as points of twinkling stars. The Algonkian context of the poem is set against musical influences from various parts of the world: Maria Luz Alvarez’s clear, expressive voice evoking early Spanish music, Rodrigo Muñoz’s Latin-American guitar, and interlocking rhythms inspired by the Balinese gamelan’s ‘music of the spheres.’

The Widening Gyre
David R. Scott

The composer has written the following note:

The time I spent on the coast-guard icebreaker Amundsen was wonderfully thought-provoking. It allowed me the opportunity to experience the natural beauty of the high arctic and contemplate the implications of our human presence. While on board, I was particularly struck by the gradual shift in the quality of light, the distortions of my perception of time and the utter lack of silence. I also thought a great deal about issues of sovereignty, climate change and our place in the use and abuse of natural resources. Through text and music, my work will attempt to explore some of these issues from a highly personal perspective.

Two Elegiac Melodies, op. 34
Edvard Grieg

In preparing these transcriptions of two songs with texts by Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, Grieg changed the title of the second from Spring to The Last Spring. He wrote, “The profound sadness that pervades these poems accounts for the serious character of the music and prompted me, in the arrangements for strings, where the words are not heard, to bring out the meaning by giving the pieces more evocative titles.” They chart a satisfying emotional progression, from the dark urgency of The Wounded Heart, to the sweet consolation of The Last Spring.

Concerto grosso, no. 1
Alfred Schnittke

One of the most significant Russian composers since Shostakovich (with whom he has often been compared), Schnittke composed a large catalogue of works exhibiting an almost bewildering range of styles. He frequently used several styles within a single piece, such as the one you will hear at this concert. In these compositions, the most advanced techniques and a blistering dramatic intensity rest side-by-side with graceful, almost trite melodies that pay homage (sometimes satirically) to Mozart and Schubert.

In his 1996 book on Schnittke, Alexander Ivashkin writes, “For many years the concerto concept, inherited from Shostakovich, was most important in Schnittke’s music. His numerous concertos and concerti grossi represent symbolically the typical Schnittkean idea of conflict between the individual (the soloist) and the collective (the orchestra), a conflict which very often ends in disaster... Shostakovich, under the burden of Stalin’s dictatorship, was much more cautious, preferring to speak indirectly and symbolically. Schnittke’s generation grew up in a different situation and wanted to speak more openly and more directly.” Listeners may approach Schnittke’s concertos in this extra-musical way if they choose. These pieces also provide considerable interest on a purely musical level. The list of distinguished dedicatees includes cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, violinist Gidon Kremer and violist Yuri Bashmet.

Concerto grosso, no. 1, the first of six such pieces that Schnittke composed between 1976 and 1993, has become one of his most frequently performed and recorded works. He wrote it for Gidon Kremer and fellow violinist Tatiana Grindenko. During his first visit to the west, he played the piano/harpsichord part himself in several performances.

'The concerto pays homage to a favourite form of the Baroque period. Johann Sebastian Bach (Brandenburg concertos), Arcangelo Corelli and George Frederic Handel, among many others, composed outstanding examples of the concerto grosso (grand concerto). It is founded upon the interplay between two groups of instruments, one larger than the other. The smaller ensemble in Schnittke’s piece is made up of two violins. The larger group consists of a string orchestra, a harpsichord and a piano, part of which has been ‘prepared’ by placing coins and pieces of rubber and wood between the strings. This produces many unusual sounds.

This concerto is one of the most representative examples of Schnittke’s polystylistic approach. He described it as, “a play of three spheres, the baroque, the modern and the banal.” He noted that this last element enters as it were “from the outside, with a disruptive effect.” Elsewhere he wrote, “I dream of the Utopia of a unified style, where fragments of serious and entertaining music are not used for comic effect but seriously represent multi-faceted musical reality. That’s why I’ve decided to put together some fragments from my cartoon film music; a joyful children’s chorus; a nostalgic atonal serenade; a piece of hundred-per-cent-guaranteed Corelli; and finally my grandmother’s favourite tango played by my great-grandmother on a harpsichord. I am sure all these themes go together very well, and I use them absolutely seriously.”

The first movement, Preludio, begins with the piano, unaccompanied, playing two thematic elements. The lengthier of the two (Schnittke called it a ‘sentimental song’) appears in the higher register, which has been ‘prepared.’ The other, a simple, melancholy tolling sound resembling bells, appears in the lower register, which has not been ‘prepared.’ These materials will reappear towards the end of the full work. The two solo violins quietly introduce what proves to be the main, recurring theme of the concerto. As this simple idea grows increasingly tense, it draws the strings of the orchestra into the music. The agitated mood evaporates, leaving the two soloists alone once again.

The next movement, Toccata, follows without pause. It begins with what might almost be taken for authentic Baroque materials, but Schnittke’s treatment of them is very modernistic. A great deal of energy is expended as this dynamic, almost frenzied section unfolds. The “nostalgic atonal serenade” appears midway through.

Recitativo is a dark, funereal lament that incorporates a veiled quotation from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. The music rises gradually to a high-register climax that borders on a hysterical shriek. The two soloists then perform an impassioned dual Cadenza. It leads without pause into the concerto’s lengthiest movement, Rondo. The harpsichord appears, accompanying the soloists as they introduce the bold main theme, the Soviet children’s chorus mentioned above. A startling variety of episodes and materials pepper this movement. One is the ‘grandmother’s tango,’ which Schnittke introduces on the harpsichord. The materials of the Preludio return abruptly, providing a bridge to the final movement, Postludio. This brief summing-up ends the concerto on a mournful and emotionally exhausted note.

 

 

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