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James Ehnes JAMES EHNES & OWEN PALLETT 12 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 13 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. 14 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. 15 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. 16 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. 17 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). 18 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. 19