Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 things to tune into for Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s live comeback concert
From Beethoven to Anishinaabekwe composer Barbara Assiginaak, the Orpheum performance kicks off the 2021-22 season
Principal conductor Otto Tausk with Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presents We’re Back! Gala Performance September 18 at 8 pm and September 19 at 2 pm PDT at the Orpheum.
ANGELA ELSTER WAS born loving music. That’s how the president and CEO of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and VSO School of Music describes her lifelong love of the genre, and like music lovers the world over, she has missed live performances terribly over the last 18 months. Along with local fans of the form, she’s eagerly awaiting the VSO’s We’re Back! Gala Performance happening this weekend.
“While we were very proud and committed throughout COVID to keeping the music going through our virtual platform, we’ve come back to what our calling is—which is the excitement and the community that build through live performance,” Elster says in an interview with Stir. “To see the VSO moving forward in such a creative and inspirational manner is fantastic.
“It’s a fantastic program for the gala; there are some of the most beloved classical works but we also have new works by [Canadian composers] Dinuk Wijeratne and Barbara Assiginaak,” she says. “That’s a trademark you will see woven throughout our entire season: classical favourites but also Indigenous composers, women composers, and guest artists—new voices and diverse voices.”
On the celebratory, wide-ranging program are Wijeratne’s Yatra; Beethoven’s Fidelio Overture; Symphonie fantastique: Un Bal by Berlioz; Meditation from Thaïs by Massenet; Assiginaak’s Innenohr; Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances Op.72 No.2 & 7; and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5
Here are five things to know about the We’re Back! concert.
Anishinaabekwe composer, musician, and educator Barbara Assiginaak.
Anishinaabekwe composer, musician, and educator Barbara Assiginaak (Odawa/Ojibwe/Potawatomi; Mnidoo Mnissing, Giniw dodem: Manitoulin Island, Golden Eagle Clan) received the Order of Ontario in 2019 for her extraordinary musical career and was recently appointed as assistant professor in Composition at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Ever since she was a child, Assiginaak has been writing traditional Anishinaabe music for pipigwan—a wooden flute—and voice. She has composed for instrumental and vocal soloists, chamber ensembles, orchestras, film, theatre, and dance. Assiginaak also has two decades of experience in environmental outdoor education rooted in traditional Anishinaabe teachings.
Sri Lankan-born Halifax-based artist Dinuk Wijeratne is a Juno-winning composer, conductor, and pianist who was featured as a main character in What would Beethoven do?, a 2016 documentary about innovation in classical music featuring Eric Whitacre, Bobby McFerrin and Ben Zander.
Having grown up in Dubai, Wijeratne studied composition studies at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and, in 2001, was invited by Oscar-winning composer John Corigliano to join his studio at Juilliard School. He studied conducting at New York’s Mannes College of Music, and did his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto.
In 2004, while still a student, Wijeratne made his Carnegie Hall debut while still a student in 2004 as a composer, conductor, and pianist performing with Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble; he followed that with another Carnegie appearance in 2009, alongside tabla master Zakir Hussain.
He has composed works for the symphony orchestras of Toronto, Vancouver, the National Arts Centre, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Buffalo, Illinois, Fresno, Asheville, Saskatoon, Windsor, Victoria, PEI, and Thunder Bay, among numerous organizations and artists around the globe.
Often described as triumphant, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 was poorly received by critics when it premiered in St. Petersburg in November 1888, though audiences loved it. While writing the work, he was experiencing extreme self-doubt. In December of that year, he wrote to his principal patron, Nadezhda von Meck: “Having played my Symphony twice in Petersburg and once in Prague, I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something repellent in it, some overexaggerated color, some insincerity of fabrication which the public instinctively recognizes. It was clear to me that the applause and ovations referred not to this but to other works of mine, and that the Symphony itself will never please the public.”
Today, the piece illustrates why he is considered one of the Romantic era’s finest composers, and it remains one of his most adored large-scale creations.
VSO concertmaster Nicolas Wright will be playing a violin made by German-born London-based luthier Stefan-Peter Greiner. For nearly two decades, Greiner worked closely with physicist Heinrich Dünnwald, a leading scientist in violin acoustics, analyzing more than 1,000 instruments and completing the first tomographic study of Stradivari. He has gone on to continue his analyses of the sound of string instruments, incorporating CAT and 3-D technology while exploring UV-laser and infrared spectroscopy of historic violin varnish and dendrochronology (the method of dating trees through their annual growth rings) of spruce wood. Greiner’s instruments are considered among the finest in the world.
Beethoven’s Fidelio Overture is from his first and only opera. Inspired by a libretto called “Léonore ou L'amour conjugal”, it is a story of martial devotion and daring rescue involving a Spanish noblewoman who disguises herself as a prison errand boy named Fidelio to gain access to the fortress where her husband, a political prisoner husband, is in chains. Completed in 1805, the three-act opera drew on everything from French opéra comique to folk song.
Sri Lankan-born Halifax-based artist Dinuk Wijeratne.
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