Classical music: A superstar trio of composers
Credit to Author: Stephen Snelgrove| Date: Wed, 08 Jan 2020 19:00:03 +0000
When: January 11 to 16
Where: Various locations
Tickets and info:vancouversymphony.ca/vsonmf2020/
For its last seven seasons, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra has enlivened the dull dark days of January with a festival of New Music, including both orchestral and chamber combinations.
Originally a blurred Xerox of the Winnipeg New Music Festival, the VSO endeavour quickly became its own institution under the visionary leadership of Bramwell Tovey. His Vancouver festival became a “big tent” housing an invigorating jumble of local, national, and international work, and even some looks back at great experiments of the past.
For Festival 2020, titled (re)-creations, VSO music director Otto Tausk has a different perspective. In announcing his plans last fall, Tausk explained he wanted to revisit some spectacular masterworks of the recent past by big name international composers. True, the festival will include content from composers like Missy Mazzoli and Max Richter. But the real thrust is in two orchestral concerts anchored by music from a trio of contemporary luminaries: Kaija Saariaho, Unsuk Chin, and Thomas Adès. Though hardly unknown to the Vancouver audience, they all cry out to have major works performed by our hometown orchestra.
Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s work will be performed Jan. 11 at the Chan Centre.
Now 67, Helsinki-born Saariaho is the star among stars of the crop of exceptional Finnish composers, conductors, and performers who have risen in the last decades to extraordinary international prominence.
This is due to Finland’s genuine and meaningful commitment to universal quality musical education, said Vancouver Chamber Choir’s new artistic director Kari Turnnen
Saariaho has resided in Paris since the 1980s. Her recent opera L’Amour de loin, has been performed at the English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera — the sort of success most composers only dream about.
Opera is only part of her remarkable repertoire, which includes works in most genres of classical music. Festivalgoers here can sample her D’om le vrai sens, January 11, at the Chan Centre, which features Finnish clarinetist Kari Kriikku, who gave the work its premiere a decade ago.
Guy Rickards noted in Gramophone magazine: “Cast in six interlinked movements, the concerto (the subtitle renders roughly as ‘Man’s true sense’) explores the five senses as depicted in the medieval tapestry series The Lady and the Unicorn.”
Chin was born in Soul in 1961 and has been based in Germany for the last three decades. Her Violin Concerto won the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition back in 2004 and has been performed by Christian Tetzlaff, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and Simon Rattle.
Vancouver got a chance to experience a remarkable Chin composition when the Seoul Philharmonic toured here in 2012. Chin’s concerto Su for Chinese Sheng and Orchestra stole the show, and you’d be hard pressed to think of a more impressive concerto written in the last decade. It will be a treat to hear her prize winning Violin Concerto, also January 11 at the Chan Centre with Viviane Hagner who, like Kriikku, gave the concerto its first performances.
Composer Thomas Ades’ work will be performed at the Orpheum Theature in Vancouver on January 16 as part of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival.
Adès, born in London in 1971, rounds out the trio of superstars. His latest opera The Exterminating Angel has been given high profile performances in Salzburg, London, and New York. But, unlike Chin and Saariaho, he’s visited Vancouver — as a performer. Adès will perform at the Orpheum Theatre on Jan. 16.
Back in 2010 the Vancouver Recital Society co-commissioned Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face, a major piano piece derived from materials in his 1995 opera (the X-rated saga of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll). Adès himself gave the first public performance of the piece at the Chan Centre, the core of a stunning program that included music by Beethoven, Schubert, Janáček, and Prokofiev. And what a recital it was: Adès — a stellar pianist, by the way — revealed a web of interrelationships between his work and that of his fellow composers, creating what amounted to a collage of materials shaped with exquisite taste and extraordinary sensitivity.