WNMF 5 SYMPHONIC MOTION

FRI FEB 3 | 7:30 PM

CENTENNIAL CONCERT HALL

Works

Zhou Long The Rhyme of Taigu Giya Kancheli Nu.Mu.Zu. – Canadian Premiere

Intermission

Victoria Vita Poleva Nova – Canadian Premiere

Kalevi Aho Symphonic Dances – Canadian Premiere

Return of the Flames and Dance

Grotesque Dance

Dance of the Winds and Fires

Artists

Daniel Raiskin, conductor Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra

PRE-CONCERT PANEL

FROM THE STAGE @ 6:45 | CENTENNIAL CONCERT HALL

Kalevi Aho, distinguished guest composer

Edward Jurkowski, scholar

Daniel Raiskin and Harry Stafylakis, hosts

POST-CONCERT Q&A

WNMF LOUNGE (PIANO NOBILE) AFTER THE CONCERT

Kalevi Aho, distinguished guest composer

Daniel Raiskin, conductor and host

Harry Stafylakis, host

Zhou Long

THE RHYME OF TAIGU (2003)

The Rhyme of Taigu is a lively and powerful work for full orchestra. The piece explores the energy and spirit behind Japanese Taiko, or “fat drum” (Taigu in Chinese). As a result, the percussion plays a key role, providing an aggressive drive throughout the whole work and often in competition with the brass, particularly in the thrilling climax.

Giya Kancheli

NU.MU.ZU. (2015) – CANADIAN

Premiere

Kancheli includes a bass guitar in the orchestra and gives prominent roles to harp and, especially, piano. The first of many allusions to the musical past occurs at the outset of the piece. Here the piano plays the theme of Bach’s Fugue in E minor in Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, only slowly and blurred, as though heard in a dream. The orchestra answers with a harmonically distant minor chord and a four-note motif from the oboe, echoed by English horn. Following some consideration of these ideas, the tempo accelerates and we hear another musical anachronism: a merry, dance-like melodic fragment that we might identify as a Beethoven rondo.

Soon the piano introduces a figure in skipping rhythms; this, too, will prove a recurring motif. We also encounter hints of Medieval harmonies, a waltz-like melody and other references to the history of Western music. But as the piece progresses, contrasting material intrudes: grinding dissonances that repeatedly crescendo to thundering exclamations, then give way to ethereal quiet. This gesture — passages of power and momentum juxtaposed against others of delicacy and stillness — is a signature characteristic of Kancheli’s music. The last of them produces a huge explosion of sound and a moment of tense silence. Then, quietly and in exquisitely slow motion, we hear a remembrance of the Bach fugue theme that opened the work.

Victoria Vita Poleva

NOVA

(2022) – CANADIAN PREMIERE

This work is directly related to the terrible war in Ukraine. I think Nova is martial music; not military, not militant, but martial… That huge spiritual impulse that we all feel now has changed us. There are no more good hard-working Ukrainians, there is a new powerful whole, a new spiritual body of Ukraine, which is all of us. And our Nenka-Ukraine is like this today, with the heroic calls of trembita, the howling of air raids and the drumming of machine-guns.