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James Ehnes
JAMES EHNES &
OWEN PALLETT
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Owen Pallett
CONCERT PROGRAM
Harry Stafylakis
Shadows Radiant: Sesquie for Canada’s 150th
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
8:00pm
(TSO PREMIÈRE/TSO CO-COMMISSION)
Aaron Jay Kernis
Violin Concerto
Peter Oundjian
conductor & host
(WORLD PREMIÈRE/TSO CO-COMMISSION)
I. Chaconne
II. Ballad: Poco adagio, lyrical and floating
III. Toccatini: Presto, with energy
Intermission
Owen Pallett
Songs From An Island
André de Ridder
conductor
James Ehnes
violin
Daniel Okulitch
bass-baritone
(WORLD PREMIÈRE/TSO COMMISSION)
I. Introduction: →
II. Transformer
III. Paragon of Order
IV. The Sound of the Engine
Nico Muhly
Mixed Messages
Please note that this Canada Mosaic performance is being recorded for
online release at TSO.CA/CanadaMosaic.
IN THE
NORTH LOBBY
The New Creations Festival is
generously supported by
David G. Broadhurst.
PRE-CONCERT (7:15pm)
Performance by Element Choir, led by Christine Duncan
Element Choir is an improvising choir, whose cinematic approach to group
vocalizing presents both tonal and non-tonal material in a constantly evolving
and “in the moment” sonic environment.
INTERMISSION
Join TSO Composer Advisor Gary Kulesha in conversation with composer
Aaron Jay Kernis and violinist James Ehnes.
POST-CONCERT
Performance by Prince Nifty: intergalactic unsettled liminalist pop
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THE DETAILS
Harry Stafylakis
Shadows Radiant: Sesquie for Canada’s 150th (TSO PREMIÈRE/TSO CO-COMMISSION)
2
min
Born: Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Dec 15, 1982
Composed: 2016
A troubling question: how to celebrate the
history of a nation—any nation—without
acknowledging the proverbial skeletons in
its closet? The same light that we shine on
our most noble thoughts and deeds radiates
shadows behind those very accomplishments;
and the brighter the light, the darker the shadow.
Perhaps, then, it is only right to celebrate
genuinely, with a healthy dose of self-reflection,
humility, and a hint of mourning.
Program note by the composer
Shadows Radiant: Sesquie for Canada’s 150th by Harry
Stafylakis is a TSO Co-commission with the Winnipeg
Symphony Orchestra, which gave the World Première
in Winnipeg on January 13, 2017.
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ABOUT THE COMPOSER
Harry Stafylakis is a
Canadian-American
composer based
in New York City.
He is the Winnipeg
Symphony Orchestra’s
Composer-inResidence and
co-curator of the Winnipeg New Music
Festival. His works have been performed
by the American Composers Orchestra,
Spokane Symphony, Stamford Symphony,
Victoria Symphony, McGill Chamber
Orchestra, ICE, Mivos Quartet, Quatuor
Bozzini, Nouveau Classical Project,
mise-en, Lorelei Ensemble, and American
Modern Ensemble, and have been featured
at the New York Philharmonic Biennial,
Aspen Music Festival, New Music on the
Point, June in Buffalo, York Guitar Festival,
Cluster, and Guitare Montréal. Awards
include the Charles Ives Fellowship from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
ASCAP Foundation’s Leonard Bernstein
Award, four SOCAN Foundation Awards
for Young Composers, and grants from the
Canada Council for the Arts and NYSCA.
Stafylakis holds a Bachelor of Music from
McGill University. He is a doctoral candidate
at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and lectures
at the City College of New York.
Aaron Jay Kernis
Violin Concerto (WORLD PREMIÈRE/TSO CO-COMMISSION)
25
min
Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, Jan 15, 1960
Composed: 2016
Out of an unexpected 2007 commission from
the BBC in London came my first collaboration
with James Ehnes, Two Movements (with
Bells), a piece that he has played many times
and recorded, and soon after followed the
enthusiastic request from him to write a
concerto. A life in music is indeed a journey,
often going in directions one least expects, and
in this case leads to today and this big new work.
This concerto, for James Ehnes, is formed out
of the essential three-movement form that many
bedrock concertos of the past are built: 1) the
largest, most searching argument, followed by 2)
the shorter, slower, lyrical utterance, and ending
with 3) the even shorter fast, zippy, often hairraisingly difficult closer.
But here, there is much that differs from the
past. The first movement, “Chaconne”, comes
remotely out of the Baroque form: a set of
variations over a repeated series of chords.
This is the most dramatically charged and
changeable movement, with the downward
melody/chord progression in the violin being
the basis of all that follows. This theme is
constantly varied in character and colour, and
only returns to its opening dramatic statement
at the movement’s end.
“Ballad” is the songful, jazz/French-tinged lyrical
middle movement with an angular, wrenching
centre. The language of Two Movements (with
Bells) returns here with hints of the blues and the
influence of composer Olivier Messiaen, an idol
of mine.
Finally, the energy of “Toccatini” closes the piece.
A toccata is a virtuoso, fast “touch-piece” from
the Baroque period. I thought this would be a
tiny or teeny toccata, and the idea of creating
a new martini—the Toccatini—helped get me
through the post-US election torpor. This is a
not-atypical Kernis-ian mashup—bits of jazz,
hints of Stravinsky/Messiaen, machine music,
and wild virtuoso strings of notes all over the
violin give James ever more chances to show his
mettle and showcase his great ability to shape
many thousands of notes with flair and joy.
Program note by the composer
Violin Concerto by Aaron Jay Kernis is a TSO
Co-commission with the Seattle, Dallas, and
Melbourne symphony orchestras.
ABOUT THE COMPOSER
Winner of the coveted Grawemeyer Award, Nemmers Prize, and one of the
youngest composers ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Aaron Jay Kernis’s
works have been heard in the world’s major music capitals performed by
many of America’s foremost performers and institutions. Recently named to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kernis directs the Nashville Symphony
Composer Lab and Workshop and teaches composition at Yale School of Music.
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THE DETAILS
Owen Pallett
Songs From An Island (WORLD PREMIÈRE/TSO COMMISSION)
15
min
Born: Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, Sep 7, 1979
Composed: 2016
This is the first of four parts of a longer song
cycle for singer and orchestra. The cycle
concerns an ex-farmer who washes up in a
port town, and his descent into hedonism and
subsequent spiritual awakening.
I wrote these songs first on guitar and piano.
I wrote them to be fairly consistently bi-tonal,
pairing melodies with keys they don’t belong
in—not as an obfuscating manoeuvre, but
as a method of creating a constant feeling
of transience and instability, and also as a
compositional representation of queerness.
Then, I took these songs and orchestrated
them. My goal was to present these songs in
the broadest possible strokes, with enormous
gestures, spaces, and silences. I drew inspiration
from Miles Davis, Gérard Grisey, Györgi Ligeti,
and the band Cluster. The arrangements are
permeated with a repetitiousness and a stillness
to achieve, hopefully, a sense of transcendence.
I jokingly have been referring to this song cycle
as “my no-content piece”, because the writing
got simpler and simpler with every edit.
Program note by the composer
Commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra
with financial support from the Government of
Canada for performance during the 150th Anniversary
of Confederation of Canada, March 2017.
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ABOUT THE COMPOSER
2017 New Creations
Festival Curator Owen
Pallett is a composer,
violinist, keyboardist,
and vocalist. His violinlooping live project
spawned several
records under the moniker Final Fantasy,
including 2006’s He Poos Clouds, which
won the Polaris Music Prize. He currently
makes universally acclaimed records under
his own name, including 2010’s Heartland,
and most recently, In Conflict.
Pallett has written string, brass, and
orchestral arrangements for numerous
bands. He has scored several films,
including Richard Kelly’s The Box and The
New York Times Magazine’s Emmy
Award–winning Fourteen Actors Acting.
Owen recently completed the film scores
for Anton Corbijn’s Life and M Blash’s The
Wait, and was nominated for an Academy
Award for his work on the original score of
Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her. Pallett’s violin
concerto written for Pekka Kuusisto,
co-commissioned by the Barbican and the
Toronto Symphony Orchestra, was
performed as part of the 2013 New
Creations Festival. He has also composed
works for CBC Radio, Bang on a Can
All-Stars, Luminato Festival, and the Ecstatic
Music Festival.
Text by Owen Pallett
I. Introduction: →
II. Transformer
Every time I sing, you say that I’m gaslighting, falsifying a private Thermidor.
Your love was a warm wind, and me an empty sail, I collapse to the kitchen floor.
When I wish I was never born, my mother tells me I wasn’t born so much as excreted.
But this emptiness is a gift, I’m free to write the future, an empty man undefeated.
I think I’ve found the cure: make sure you’re living a quarter of your waking life in the
present, and the rest I’ll spend remembering scorching our feet on the sand and the
tires of our bikes on wet cement. We were sparklers in the night, and even now your
resting face cannot conceal the light. Your love was a warm wind as the world you left
it falls away and an island rises into sight.
III. Paragon of Order
Rage up the street, a dog on a leash. Men try to corner me to get a piece. You don’t
need to ask, you got it wrong. A child of a broken home can love anyone. And the
unblinking eye that keeps track of our shit, it will look to the left when kids get lit. My
muscles softened since I washed up here, when I traded the scythe for a cig and a
bottle of beer. In the hollow distance, a man tries to be kind. The mainlander boy pays
for the bath, they’ll let you spend the night if you crash, and radiator drone, Sister
Faith and Sister Chance, children of broken homes, we will dance. And I face the
ocean, pray for shame. Freedom and loneliness, one and the same. We pray in secret,
says the scripture, and facing the ocean we silently whisper: In the hollow distance, a
man tries to be kind. Godkillers alive! Godkillers alive!
IV. The Sound of the Engine
Oh, I dream of starships, starships and the void. The faces of the prophets’ history
destroyed. But I will live forever, of this I am sure. I’ll bury my lovers, I am the cure. My
body is wider and stronger than collapsing buildings. And I will see the graves, I will
see the graves of your children. Woke up in an ambulance, beaten and bleeding. The
sound of the engines, oh, I am a wound unhealing. When I was a user my arms were
all in splinters, but out here in the snowy field, I am the winter. My coat flies open, and
I let you in. The Great White Noise will be your undoing. A left to the heavens and a
right, a right to the jaw. A chorus of the angels and I fall. Woke up in an ambulance,
blue-fingered and freezing. The sound of the engines, oh, I am a wound unhealing.
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THE DETAILS
Nico Muhly
Mixed Messages
11
min
Born: Randolph, Vermont, USA, Aug 26, 1981
Composed: 2015
The title of Mixed Messages is, like the piece
itself, multivalent. “‘Mixed messages’ is a
phrase that you hear applied to any number
of interpersonal encounters from the strictly
business to the romantic,” Muhly notes. He
is drawn to this notion that music can be
interpreted along divergent, even contradictory
paths simultaneously. While arising from the
pandemic possibilities of miscommunication in
the modern era (especially when technologically
mediated, as in texting and email), this idea also
opens up new musical possibilities based on
ambiguity, transformation, and layering. “The
materials can be seen as joyful,” he explains,
“but also menacing; each idea contains its own
contradiction.”
Throughout this single-movement piece, the
mixing of messages is achieved in several
ways. First, Muhly keeps the orchestral families
internally intact, but somewhat at odds with
each other. The instrumental families hear and
learn from each other, but never seem to agree
on what has been heard or learnt. Second,
the rhythms themselves are irregular and
asymmetrical. Muhly evokes here a capricious
machine in which the rhythmic engine is
running all the time, but which occasionally
veers off track, pauses in a sudden panic, slows
unexpectedly, or spins wildly out of control.
Finally, amid all the layering of timbre, motif,
and rhythm, Muhly includes palpably Romantic
gestures—a soaring line for the cellos and
English horn, an extended violin solo, and
strings reaching up higher and higher near
the conclusion. In every case, though, there is
a wrench deliberately placed in the works to
mitigate the singularity of Romantic effect.
Program note by Luke Howard for the program
books of The Philadelphia Orchestra, used with
permission. © Luke Howard
ABOUT THE COMPOSER
Nico Muhly is an American composer and sought-after collaborator whose
influences range from American minimalism to the Anglican choral tradition.
The recipient of commissions from the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall,
St. Paul’s Cathedral, and others, he has written more than 80 works for the
concert stage. He has composed for stage and screen, with credits that
include music for the 2013 Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie and
scores for the films Kill Your Darlings, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and the
Academy Award–winning The Reader.
Born in Vermont, Muhly studied composition with John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse at The
Juilliard School before working as an editor and conductor for Philip Glass. He is part of the
artist-run record label Bedroom Community, which released his first two albums, Speaks
Volumes (2006) and Mothertongue (2008).
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THE ARTISTS
For biographies of Peter Oundjian and André de Ridder,
please turn to page 8.
James Ehnes
violin
James Ehnes made his TSO début in February 1994.
Known for his virtuosity and probing musicianship, violinist
James Ehnes has performed in over 35 countries on five
continents. In addition to his solo work, he is the first
violinist of the Ehnes Quartet and the Artistic Director of
the Seattle Chamber Music Society.
James has an extensive award-winning discography of over 40 recordings featuring
music ranging from J.S. Bach and Antonio Vivaldi to John Adams and Aaron Jay
Kernis. He is a Member of the Order of Canada, an Honorary Member of the Royal
Academy of Music in London, and a Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada. James
has also received honorary doctorates from Brandon University and the University of
British Columbia.
Born in Brandon, Manitoba, James began violin studies at the age of four, and at
age nine became a protégé of Canadian violinist Francis Chaplin. He studied with
Sally Thomas at the Meadowmount School of Music and from 1993 to 1997 at The
Juilliard School. James Ehnes plays the “Marsick” Stradivarius of 1715.
Daniel Okulitch
bass-baritone
Daniel Okulitch made his TSO début in December 2016.
Bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch has performed in some of
the most prestigious opera companies and orchestras
throughout Europe and North America. Most recently, he
débuted at Opéra de Montréal as Lieutenant Horstmayer
in Kevin Putt’s Silent Night; the role of Herman Broder in
the world première of Enemies: A Love Story with Palm Beach Opera; and the role of
Ennis Del Mar in the world première of Brokeback Mountain at Madrid’s Teatro Real. He
also joined the cast of the Metropolitan Opera for their production of Don Giovanni,
and returned to Santa Fe Opera as the Count in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.
Recent engagements include Leporello in Don Giovanni and a revival of JFK with
Opéra de Montréal; his return to Vancouver Opera as Joseph de Rocher in Dead Man
Walking; his début with New Orleans Opera in the title role of Don Giovanni; and
his début with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra as Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro. In
concert, he performs Bach’s St. John’s Passion with Master Voices at Carnegie Hall.
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