WELCOME TO WNMF 2023

By its very nature as a celebration of contemporary art music, the Winnipeg New Music Festival has always provided us an opportunity to explore historicity both retrospectively and prospectively – the past and the future intermingling and reflecting off each other from a variety of artistic perspectives.

This theme lies at the heart of this year’s programming. The opening program – the WNMF Launchpad – highlights the new, presenting a tasting menu of some of Canada’s most promising young musical talents in a series of world premieres of works by nine composers, featuring four generations of conductors leading our Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.

As the festival unfolds over the ensuing week, we will be treated to music that sees its creators engaging with their personal, cultural, and ancestral histories. Emerging from this thematic thread, we also find a fascination with science and technology –humanity’s explorative spirit manifested in its examinations of the natural world and its physical mechanisms.

This brings us to a novel venue for two of our concerts: the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada, where art and science will meet while we are seated amidst the artifacts of our civilization’s technological endeavors.

We are thrilled to welcome this year’s distinguished guest composer, Kalevi Aho, among whose works we will hear the Winnipeg Fanfare, composed for the occasion as a gift to the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra for its 75th anniversary. We will be treated to world and national premieres by numerous Canadian and international composers, including Kelly-Marie Murphy and Kati Agócs. We are proud to be joined by exciting and fascinating guest artists, among them Kinan Azmeh and his CityBand, maverick bassoonist Bram Van Sambeek, the SHHH!! Ensemble, pianists Jenny Lin and Nicolas Namoradze, and the formidable Sandra Laronde and Red Sky Performance.

With continued reverence for our own artistic history, we also pay solemn tribute to departed friends, presenting works by Bramwell Tovey, who brought WNMF to life in the first place and has figured prominently in the lives of multiple generations of Canadian musicians, and the great Giya Kancheli. Looking at the turmoils of the present moment, Victoria Poleva contributes a fierce statement of solidarity for the people of Ukraine, standing strong in the face of unimaginable adversity.

We are proud to share all this with you as we come together, once again, for our annual celebration of art and music at WNMF 2023!

Daniel Raiskin

WSO Music Director

WNMF Co-Curator

HARALABOS [HARRY] STAFYLAKIS

WSO Composer-in-Residence

WNMF Co-Curator