Sibelius mini-festival will be among highlights of next year’s ESO season
Conductor Prior — also a very prolific composer — will debut two of his works
The most exciting feature of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra’s newly announced 2018-2019 season is a mini-festival devoted to just one composer, with six concerts from Feb. 22 through March 9, 2019.
The composer is the Finn Jean Sibelius, whose music the ESO’s mercurial young chief conductor Alexander Prior has already so successfully championed in the Winspear.
The festival, conducted by Prior, opens with tone poems on Feb. 22 and 23.
Two vivid scene-painting favourites, the Karelia Suite and Sibelius’ great paean of Finnish nationalism, Finlandia, feature on Feb. 28, along with the violin concerto played by the award-winning Norwegian Ragnhild Hemsing.
The concerto is repeated in a latenight concert (March 1), and the festival ends with two of Sibelius’ magnificent late-Romantic symphonies (March 9). The fourth is his darkest symphony, while the fifth is one of his most self-confident, sometimes seen as a reflection of his home landscape.
Such a festival might well attract the attention of Sibelius lovers far beyond Alberta and help to spread word about the ESO. I do hope that the orchestra will consider other events to go along with the concert, perhaps teaming up with the Finnish Society of Edmonton for the folklore background, and with musicologists for events on his life, times, and music.
Prior is also a prolific composer and arranger as well as conductor, and the season includes the world premieres of two works. The first is his orchestration of Schubert’s much-loved extended song-cycle, Die Winterreise, with the baritone Samuel Hasselhorn (March 29 and 31). The second is a brand-new violin concerto, written for Simone Porter, who so impressed in her 2017 Winspear debut (May 31 and June 1).
As always, the season opens with Symphony under the Sky in Hawrelak Park. It runs from Aug. 30 through Sept 2, 2018, with rock/ pop ’60s and ’70s favourites from Jim Witter and the orchestra, and the traditional evening of Hollywood Hits, both conducted by Robert Bernhardt. Prior joins him for the two classical concerts, the first including Dvorak’s Symphony No .8 and Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 (with Russian Ilya Yakushev), and the final concert Bernstein and Puccini.
The symphonies in the new season are perhaps a little safer that those in the past couple of years, but include another major event on Sept. 28 (repeated Sept 29). Prior will conduct Bruckner’s famous Symphony No. 9 with the recently restored final movement. If you haven’t heard this completion, it’s a must — it completely changes the whole symphony, and what we thought we knew about Bruckner’s final thoughts on life and death.
Conductor Jayce Ogren returns for Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 (Oct .28), and then VaughanWilliams’ haunting Pastoral Symphony (Nov. 3). Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 will be conducted by Prior on Oct. 4, and Schubert’s Symphony No. 3 on Jan. 24 and 26. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 — one of the lesser known works of his cycle — will be conducted by Rune Bergmann on March 21 and 23, and Prior conducts his ever-popular sixth (The Pastoral) on March 31.
The concertos, too, are largely drawn from the well-known repertoire. Leduc-born James Campbell is the soloist in the ever-popular Mozart Clarinet Concerto (Sept, 28 and 29). Joyce Yang, nominated recently for a Grammy, is the soloist in Beethoven’s first piano concerto (Nov. 3), and the popular Canadian Karen Gomyo plays Brahms’ Violin Concerto on Nov. 16 and 17.
Shostakovich’s ebullient youthful Piano Concerto No. 1 (for piano, trumpet, and strings) will be given by Juno-nominated Stewart Goodyear with the ESO’s Robin Doyon on trumpet, in an interesting concert that includes works by Ravel, Stravinsky, and Hétu (Jan. 11 and 12).
The ESO’s concertmaster Robert Uchida plays one of the most moving of violin concertos, Elgar’s, on Jan. 26. Tony Yang (CBC Music’s Classical Young Artist of 2016) plays Tchaikovsky ’s Piano Concerto No. 1 on Feb. 10 in a program that includes a second performance of McPherson’s Concerto for Two Horns Mountain Triptych, premièred earlier this year.
The Polish composer Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto, with its rather mystical romanticism and its folk-dance feel, is definitely worth encountering with celebrated British violinist Tasmin Little (March 23). Uchida plays Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and child prodigy Kevin Chen Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1, on May 5.
Christmas will be heralded in on Nov. 29 and Dec. 1 by excerpts from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, conducted by Prior, and then the Messiah returns in its more traditional Baroque guise, conducted by Jean-Marie Zeitouni (Dec. 14-16).
The new year will delight Last Night of the Proms fans — the ESO will be playing its version of the British classic on Jan. 18, 19, and 20.
The whole season ends with a blockbuster of a concert conducted by Prior on June 14 and 15. Sara Davis Buechner will play Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, alongside music from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and a tuneful John Adams orchestral showcase, Naïve and sentimental music.
The pop concerts include A Tribute to the Beatles (Oct. 10). The orchestra joins vocalists Cassidy Catanzaro, Katrina Diderikson, and Shayna Steele for Women Rock, a show touring North America that celebrates some of the great female pop vocalists (Nov. 9 and 10).
The Family Day weekend sees the combination of acrobats, contortionists, aerial flyers, and orchestral music that is Cirque de la Symphonie (Feb. 16 and 17). Star Trek fans have a music special on March 12 and 13, conducted by Bernhardt, and the Irish a traditional folk Celtic Journey for St. Patrick’s Day (March 15 and 16).