kamloopssymphony.com 250.372.5000 RHAPSODY IN BLUE
Sunday September 24, 2023 • 3:00pm
A Salmon Arm Series Performance
Volunteers make it happen
We couldn’t do it without you! Thank you!
Cilla and Peter Budda
Wendy Charlebois
Les Ellenor
Joan Ellenor
Barb Ennis
Jean Ethridge
Marline & Tibout Glazenburg
Donna Good
Dale Johnston
SALMON ARM SPONSORS
Gabriele Klein
Tony Lewis
Claire Meuier
Russ Nakonseby
Debbie Olson
Lynne Wickett
Gwen Whyte
Jan & Bob Wilkins
Jeanetta Zorn
YOU VOLUNTEERS!
THANK
A Greeting from the President of the Symphony Board and the New Executive Director
As the gates of summer close behind us, I am inspired by the thought that other gates now open and a new season unfolds before us. I welcome all of you to the rich variety of our 2023/24 season. From the rhapsodic to the romantic, the traditional to the contemporary, your orchestra is eager to bring you many months of music with an excitingly diverse series of concerts and artists.
Whether the music is Canadian or international, popular or time-honoured, the performance is here— live and local. I hope you will let the KSO be your musical home for live performances in the coming months.
And this year it is my pleasure to extend the warmest Kamloops welcome to our new Executive Director, Christopher Young, whose hands will help guide this new season and many seasons to come.
John McDonald Board President
The Kamloops Symphony wishes to acknowledge that this concert is taking place within the traditional lands of the Secwépemc Nation.
I am thrilled to extend a warm welcome to each and every one of you as we embark on an exciting new season with the Kamloops Symphony.
I am honored to stand before you as the newly appointed Executive Director, and it is with great enthusiasm that I join this remarkable community of passionate audiences and musicians
As we gather for our first program of the season, I am reminded of the power of music to connect us, uplift our spirits, and inspire change. Throughout the season, we aim to bring you exceptional performances that transcend boundaries, and delight, move and challenge us. Our talented musicians have poured their hearts and souls into creating unforgettable experiences for you, and will continue to do so under the guidance of our music director Dina Gilbert.
I look forward to getting to know each of you, forging new friendships, and collaborating to ensure the Kamloops Symphony continues to thrive and bring the joy of music to our beloved communities. Your support means the world to us, and together, we will create a beautiful symphony of memories that will last a lifetime.
Thank you for entrusting us with the privilege of enriching your lives through music. Here's to a sensational season ahead!
Yours in music,
Christopher Young Executive Director KSO & KSO Music School
GOVERNMENT GRANTS
MUSIC DIRECTOR
Music Director Dina Gilbert is a Canadian conductor passionate about communicating with audiences of all ages to broaden their appreciation of orchestral music through innovative collaborations. This commitment, along with her extensive knowledge of the orchestra repertoire, has brought her to conduct orchestras across Canada as well as in France, Spain, the United States, Colombia and Japan. She has received critical acclaim for her energic presence on the podium, her versatility, and her audacious programming.
In addition to conducting the Kamloops Symphony, highlights of the 20232024 season include return invitations with the Toronto Symphony, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Orchestre symphonique de Québec, the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, as well as debuts with the Walla Walla Symphony and the Kingston Symphony. As the Principal Conductor of the Orchestre des Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Dina will perform Prokofiev’s Cinderella, as well as works of Lili Boulanger, Clara Schumann, Louise Farrenc and Kaija Saariaho in the ballet premiere of La Dame aux Camélias by choreographer Peter Quanz.
Her innate curiosity towards nonclassical musical genres and her willingness to democratize classical music has brought her to conduct the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the Orchestre national de Lyon in several Hip Hop Symphonic
programs featuring renowned Hip hop artists I AM, MC Solaar, Youssoupha and Bigflo & Oli. Dina is also renowned for her expertise in conducting multidisciplinary projects such as film concert performances (The Red Violin, The Artist, E.T. the Extraterrestrial).
As the founder and artistic director of the Ensemble Arkea, a Montrealbased chamber orchestra, Dina has premiered over thirty works from emerging Canadian composers and has reached thousands of children with her interactive and participative Conducting 101 workshops. From 2013 to 2016, Dina Gilbert was the assistant conductor of the Orchestre symphonique de Montreal and Maestro Kent Nagano, also assisting notable guest conductors including Zubin Mehta and Sir Roger Norrington. In April 2016, she received great acclaim for stepping in to replace Maestro Alain Altinoglu with the OSM in a program showcasing Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Featured in the recent documentary “Femmes symphoniques”, Dina Gilbert earned her doctorate from the Université de Montréal andpolished her skills in masterclasses with Kenneth Kiesler, Pinchas Zukerman, Neeme Järvi and the musicians from the Kritische Orchester in Berlin. Awarded the Opus Prize of “Découverte de l’année” in 2017, Dina Gilbert was also named as one of the “50 personnalités créant l’extraordinaire au Québec” in 2018 by the Urbania Magazine.
Dina Gilbert
RHAPSODY IN BLUE
PROGRAMME
Dina Gilbert, Conductor
Rachel Casponi, Soprano
Daniel Clarke Bouchard, Piano
Samuel Barber ................................Knoxville: Summer of 1915
George Gershwin ............................Summertime
INTERMISSION
Florence Price .................................Piano Concerto in D minor
Phil Nimmons ................................ Phil Nimmons Medley
Arr. Stephanie Hamelin Tomala (I Love to Play – Tides – Too Late Now – Not soon enough)
George Gershwin ............................Rhapsody in Blue
PERFORMANCE SPONSORS
Phil Nimmons
Celebrating the 100th Birthday of Phil Nimmons!
Born in Kamloops BC, Phil Nimmons, OC OOnt is leader of NIMMONS ‘N’ NINE PLUS SIX and the PHIL NIMMONS QUARTET. He studied piano and clarinet in Vancouver, and later worked at The Juilliard School (NY) and the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto). As a composer, he functions in the classical and jazz media. Much of the music played by Nimmons ‘n’ Nine Plus Six has been written and/or arranged by Phil Nimmons. As an educator, he cofounded, with Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown, the Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto (1960), and following that was the Director of the University of Toronto’s Jazz Ensemble, where he currently holds the title ‘Director Emeritus’.
Phil received his earliest education in Vancouver (BC), and is a graduate of the University of British Columbia (B.A., Pre-Med). He was then a scholarship student at The Juilliard School of Music (New York), and he completed his postgraduate studies in composition at The Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto) and the University of Toronto. Phil was a student of notable professors, Dr. Arnold Walter, Professor John Weinzweig, and Professor Richard Johnston.
Phil was a founding member of the Canadian League of Composers (1951) and the Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto (19601966).
Phil has toured extensively throughout Europe and Canada. He has represented Canada on a world tour and his Atlantic Provinces Tour was funded as a special cultural event.
Phil has written contemporary classical works for piano, strings, flute, voice, instrumental in addition to over 400 original jazz compositions. His compositions include Film scores; Radio, TV, Stage Plays, Theatre Specials; CBC, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Royal Alexander Theatre, Crest Theatre; O’Keefe Centre, EXPO ‘67; World Music Week—CBC/IMC of UNESCO, 1975; World Olympics, 1976; The Trojan Women, St. Lawrence Centre.
Highlights amongst the hundreds of orchestrations include: Norman Campbell’s television premiere of Anne of Green Gables and Oscar Peterson’s themes for Ontario Place film Big North Ontario.
YEARS
ARTIST BIO
100
Stephanie Hamelin Tomala Composer
Stephanie Hamelin Tomala is a Canadian-American composer, violinist, pianist and singer with Ecuadorian and Lebanese roots. 4 time Socan foundation award winner, she has written music for over 200 short films, multiple documentary feature films as well as the series “L’industrie de la Vieillesse,” directed by Denys Desjardins for which she was nominated for a Gemini award in 2021 (Prix Gémeaux) in the emerging artist category for her work as a composer. She has composed music for multiple National Film Board of Canada productions since 2020. She is also known for her concert music with two wins in a row for her string quartet music at the composition competition SmackDown string quartet held in Texas in 20192020. She was also nominated in the contemporary/classical instrumental composition category for her orchestral piece Ceremonial Tribute to Krakow at the 2021 ceremony awards of the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. She received an honorable mention at the 2022 HER MUSIC AWARDS and won the emergent culture Télé-Québec prize in 2022. She recently was nominated in the category best original score for a feature documentary for the music of the film I lost my mom, directed by Denys Desjardins. Some of her arrangements and compositions have been featured on network television such as CRAVE, SUPER ÉCRAN, Radio-Canada/CBC, IciTou. tv, Canal Savoir, Illico, and Unis Tv.
ARTIST BIO
Daniel Clarke Bouchard Piano
Daniel Clarke Bouchard began playing the piano at the age of five and gave his first piano recital at the age of six. He received the Grand Prize at the Joy of Music Festival held at McGill University. In 2009, he won the gold medal at the Montreal Classical Music Festival. In 2010, he won Gold at the Quebec Music Educators Association Competition. In 2011, Daniel won first place at the Canadian Music Competition and received the Yamaha, Canimex and Gilles Chatel scholarships.
Daniel has shared the stage many times with the great Oliver Jones, who was his mentor and idol growing up. Daniel performed at the 2012 International Jazz Festival with Molly Johnson, at the Tedx Youth Conference, and at the Place des Arts with the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir and Trevor Payne. Daniel also performed for the Vision Awards Gala in Montreal. He also was the Jeunesses Musicales of Canada’s cultural ambassador in 2014.
Daniel is known by his fans for his numerous appearances on television. His first big television appearance came on the show “Kiwis et des hommes” in 2011. Ever since, he has been interviewed countless times on CBC Radio and RadioCanada and articles have been written about him in magazines and newspapers all across the world. Recently, he made appearances on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Tout Le Monde En Parle, Canada AM and the George Stroumboulopoulos show.
In 2014, he was invited to perform on stage with Earth, Wind and Fire as part of their Shining Star World Tour.
Daniel has performed with many orchestras, including the Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Dina Gilbert, the National Arts Center Orchestra with Alexander Shelley, the I Musici of Montreal with Jean-Michel Malouf, the Sinfonia de Lanaudière with Stephane Laforest, the Metropolitain Orchestra of Montreal with Daniel Myssyk and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Appassionata Ensemble with Daniel Myssyk, with the world-renowned Auryn Quartet and several others. Daniel has won numerous awards, including the Félix Award for the 2014 Classical Album of the Year, the 2014 Montreal International Music Competition’s Choquette Symcox Award and the 2017 SPACQ Foundation’s Eval-Manigat Award.
GUEST ARTIST
Rachel Casponi Soprano
Rachel Casponi is a performer, director and educator holding a Bachelor of Arats in Music and Drama from university of Windsor and a Master of Music from the University of Western Ontario. She has worked across Canada including with BC’s North Peace Community Choir that she led at their Carnegie Hall performance. A regular performer with the Chamber Musicians of Kamloops and director of local choirs, Rachel teaches for the Kamloops-Thompson School District and Kamloops Music Collective.
PROGRAMME NOTES
Yes indeed, Shakespeare knew about summer, as he knew about most things—that “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines.” Yet, like most of us, he lamented summer’s brevity—that “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” Now, we are fortunate (as Shakespeare was not), in that we have the Kamloops Symphony ready to launch their 2023–24 season in a delightful concert that begins by savoring warm memories of summer.
Samuel Barber (1910–1981)
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947)
SSamuel Barber (composer of the widely and justly admired Adagio for Strings) was the musically precocious son of a Philadelphia physician and his wife. At age 14 he was accepted into Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of music to study piano, voice and composition. He was successful almost immediately with works like the Overture to The School for
Scandal, (1931) and Music for a Scene from Shelley (1933); these and other compositions won him Pulitzer prizes and also a prestigious American Prix de Rome. When the USA entered World War 2 in December 1941, Barber was conscripted but did not see active service owing to imperfect eyesight. Nonetheless, his war years were productive musically, seeing the
GUEST ARTIST
completion of his Second Symphony and, just after the war’s end, his Cello Concerto and his ballet Medea for Martha Graham. These works clearly established his musical reputation in the Western Hemisphere alongside that of Aaron Copland.
In spite all his wartime productivity, the war’s disruption provoked other reactions in Barber, a yearning perhaps for a return to the quiet and grace and earlier certainties of his youth. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 which he completed early in 1947, a time when his father’s health was in serious decline, reflects these feelings. The work is a setting for soprano and orchestra of a passage of poetic prose by author James Agee (1909-1955), an autobiographical fragment that Barber had encountered a year earlier. As Barber himself described, “the summer evening [Agee] describes in his native southern town reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home.”
The setting is lightly scored, and opens with a sentence from Agee’s novel A Death in the Family: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in a time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” A five-bar introduction leads to a lilting section for the soloist, Andante un poco mosso, a catalogue of evening sounds and scents. The orchestra reprises this material until the noisy rumble of a streetcar interrupts. The orchestra and soloist carry us forward as the night sky becomes “one blue dew” and the family group rests “on the rough wet grass”. The singer enumerates (and blesses) his adult companions and at the mention of death, “the hour of their taking away,” the music becomes Maestoso. Then comes the restful concluding section, “After a little while I am taken in and put to bed…” and we are left to ponder the child’s final wistful thought—that those closest to him “will not ever tell me who I am.”
George Gershwin (1898–1937)
“Summertime” from Porgy and Bess (1935)
Porgy and Bess is based on the novel, Porgy, by poet DuBose Heyward. It was first staged in Boston in the fall of 1935. The critics were not enthusiastic. It ran for only 124 performances and was a loss financially: Gershwin did not even make in royalties what it had cost him to have the orchestral parts printed. But the composer himself loved it. “I think the music is so marvelous” he commented — “I really can’t believe I wrote it.”
For Gershwin Porgy and Bess was, by his own admission, “a labour of love.” He viewed it as an opera, but an opera for the theatre not for the opera house, and that meant he could write songs for it. “I am not ashamed of writing songs at any time so long as they are good songs.” Well, Porgy and Bess is full of the lovely melodies Gershwin produced at all stages of his career, and the tender cradle song, “Summertime,” with its echoes of
PROGRAMME NOTES
negro spiritual, is among the loveliest of them all, a blend of vitality and
sadness that is part of special appeal of Gershwin’s music.
Florence Price (1887–1953) Piano Concerto in One Movement (1934)
Florence Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her mother was a music teacher and it was she who directed Florence’s early musical education. Her talent showed early: she gave her first piano performance at age four and had her first composition published at age eleven. Opportunities for more advanced musical education for women of colour were distinctly limited in the South so her mother enrolled her in the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. There she majored in piano and organ and studied composition. After graduation she returned to the South, taught and married. Racial pressures of the Jim Crow era, however, prompted her move north to Chicago, and it was here that she made connections with other black artists, Marion Anderson and Langston Hughes among them, and began to find success herself. In 1932 Price won first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards for her Symphony in E minor, and in the following year the symphony received its premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—the first composition by an African-American woman to be played by a major orchestra, an event that brought her a measure of national recognition. Changes in musical styles before and after World War 2, and Price’s death in 1953 overshadowed the impact of her
music, as did the actual loss of some of her works. Recent rediscovery of a cache of her manuscripts, including violin concertos and another symphony, have begun to restore her reputation once more.
Price’s Concerto in One Movement for piano was premiered in Chicago in 1934 with Price herself as pianist. The premiere was followed by another performance in Chicago by the Woman’s Symphony of Chicago, with Price’s student Margaret Bonds as soloist.
Although its title declares otherwise, Price’s piano concerto is comprised of three different “movements,” Moderato—Adagio—Allegretto , that are played through without interruption. A meditative call on the trumpet opens the concerto with fragments of a theme, the melody encompassing the pentatonic scale in D minor, deliberately calling to mind African American folk song. The woodwinds reply and this dialogue continues briefly until the piano introduces itself emphatically in an impressive cadenza. The second movement, Adagio, in the key of D major, is almost a piano solo with little orchestral accompaniment. The pentatonic scale helps voice the melody’s unmistakable Spiritual qualities. And this lyrical theme is treated in a variety of ways: “calls”
PROGRAMME NOTES
and responses between oboe and the lightly scored orchestra with piano embellishments, western harmonies that converge with chromatic excursions, even a few jazzy outbreaks. The concluding movement, also, draws on black musical traditions, this time a spirited folk dance, specifically the lively body percussion style known as “pattin’ juba.” Price uses this dance
form in other of her works both for piano and for orchestra. Here she develops the movement’s theme through a range of keys and rhythmic patterns, and exciting interchanges between orchestra and piano which, with all its inherent folksy energy, brings the concerto to a boisterous conclusion.
Phil Nimmons (Born in Kamloops in 1923)
Medley of Original Tunes
(I Love to Play – Tides – Too Late Now – Not soon enough) arranged by Stéphanie Hamelin Tomala
Now is a time to celebrate the achievements of a great Canadian musician, a centenarian no less, Kamloops born, Vancouver raised, clarinetist, composer, arranger, bandleader and educator Phil Nimmons through a special commission by the Kamloops Symphony in which you will discover four of his original tunes arranged by Stéphanie Hamelin Tomala.
Nimmons originally attended UBC intending a career in medicine, and while there he played in local dance bands, including that of longtime band leader Dal Richards, and began his calling as an arranger and composer. Medicine’s loss was Canadian jazz’s gain. Nimmons went to the Juilliard School in 194547 to study clarinet, and then to the Royal Conservatory of music to study composition. In 1953 he formed his own jazz group which in 1957 became the Nimmons’N’Nine, and then, in 1965, was enlarged to
Nimmon’N’Nine plus Six. This big band group performed and gave clinics in many Canadian schools, toured widely in Canada and twice performed at Canadian Armed Forces bases in Europe.
Nimmons was a founding member of the Canadian League of Composers, and also established jazz programmes at several schools and universities, including Banff, and the University of Toronto where he became director emeritus of the degree program in jazz studies. His composing career has been long—his early compositions include a Sonatina for flute (1948), Toccata (1949), String Quartet (1950), and many other works through the 1960’s and 1970’s. After his band dissolved in the 1980’s he had more time for composition including several commissioned pieces, some for fellow clarinetist James Campbell, as well as a trumpet concerto and a concerto for vibraphone and piano. Over the years, his composing has
PROGRAMME NOTES
included collaborations with radio, especially CBC, with television, in film work and, naturally, recording. We salute his astoundingly productive
and influential career for which he is justly referred to as the “Dean of Canadian Jazz”.
George Gershwin (1898–1937)
Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Born in Brooklyn, American composer George Gershwin was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. He described himself musically as a “modern Romantic,” his style rooted in jazz and in the urban “folk music” of New York. That is, in part, because he left school early to make his living as a pianist and “song-plugger” in Tin Pan alley, playing the latest popular songs to entertain (and sell to) shoppers as they shopped. Initially self-taught as a composer he was, even before the age of twenty, contributing his own songs with increasing success. Inspired by the example of composers like Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, his music introduced a new style of sophisticated jazz coloured by subtle rhythmic inflection and a delicacy that is uniquely Gershwin’s.
Gershwin had taken some lessons in composition and theory, however, and was eager to master “classical” techniques and to establish himself as a composer of concert as well as popular music. His opportunity came in 1924 with a commission from band leader Paul Whiteman for a concerto for piano and jazz band. The result was Gershwin’s first purely instrumental work, Rhapsody in Blue, which he described as “a kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot.”
The adaptation of jazz to the concert hall was not entirely new—there had been French composer Milhaud’s ballet “La Création du Monde” in 1923, and ragtime flavoured pieces by Debussy and Stravinsky earlier still, though Gershwin may have been unaware of these. In Gershwin’s Rhapsody may hear echoes of Franz Liszt who evolved the loosely structured “rhapsody” form in the 19th Century, and at moments the piano style may remind us of Rachmaninov or Tchaikovsky. For the rest, from the opening clarinet glissando, to the solo “improvisations” on the piano, to the blues and jazzy riffs, Gershwin is pretty much right: this is music that has a distinctly American identity. That unique clarinet glissando by the way was itself a happy improvisation by the Whiteman orchestra’s clarinetist replacing the simple chromatic scale Gershwin had written. The first version of the Rhapsody was scored for Whiteman’s Big Band, but the version we will hear tonight is the orchestral one scored by the American composer, Ferde Grofé, the version most frequently performed nowadays.
PROGRAMME NOTES
HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR 2022/23 SEASON
$2000+
