SSO’S concert earns two standing ovations

Works reflecting on the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War brought the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra’s audience members to their feet twice on Saturday evening at TCU Place.

The first ovation was for cellist Stéphane Tétreault, who gave a passionate tour-de-force with Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor. Written in 1919 after the composer had stopped writing music for several years during the war, the concerto demands technique and passion from the cellist, and Tétreault delivered both.

The 25-year-old, who plays a 311-year-old Stradivarius, showcased his impeccable skills and his responsiveness to the colourful music. In the second movement, his fingers danced up and down the strings. In the third movement, which slowed to more of a lullaby, the cello’s rich vibrato revealed Tétreault’s sensitive connection to the music. As he lifted his bow after the final movement, audience members were immediately on their feet for a long ovation.

The second ovation came after the intermission, when the SSO played Canadian John Burge’s 2006 composition Flanders Fields Reflections. Transposing as iconic a poem as John Mccrae’s In Flanders Fields into music is a daunting task, but one that Burge mastered.

The first three movements, The Poppies Blow, Still Bravely Singing and We Are the Dead sounded quite literal. A repetitive, slow humming of strings in the first movement evoked images of war cemeteries, with wind blowing through rows of white crosses. Then concertmaster Michael Swan’s violin was indeed the lark singing, often scarcely heard amid the throbbing basses and cellos.

In the fourth and fifth movements, Loved and Were Loved, and We Shall Not Sleep, Burge’s inspiration transitioned from literal to emotional. The lamenting strings rose and fell, filling one’s heart with love and loss.

In the final movement, members of the two violin sections, which were seated on either side of conductor Eric Paetkau, left the stage and played from the sides of the concert hall, their notes echoing each other and calling across the void in a haunting, powerful conclusion to the very Canadian work. For the second time that night that audience was on its feet, touched as deeply by Burge’s music as by Mccrae’s lines.

The concert began with A Song Before Sunrise, a short piece by Frederick Delius written in the summer of 1918 as the war was ending. It is a peaceful and dreamy contemplation of nature, rich in strings and woodwinds, and hopeful in tone.

The concert finished with Maurice Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, a four-movement work dedicated to friends he’d lost during the First World War. Written in 1917, well before the war was over, each movement was surprisingly bright and hopeful, reflecting happy memories of those Ravel was memorializing rather than the situation around him. The symphony played both the Delius and Ravel works with energy and precision, but it is the standing ovation-worthy Elgar and Burge pieces that the audience will long remember.