Symphony outlines upcoming season
Season packed with visiting conductors, young soloists
The 2015-2016 Edmonton Symphony Orchestra season is back to its original home for its popular opening event: the open-air Symphony Under the Sky at Hawrelak Park, which last year moved downtown to accommodate the World Triathlon Series.
This year will feature four concerts from Thursday, Aug. 27 to Sunday, Aug. 30. The highlight looks to be Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto 3 with the Russianborn American pianist Natasha Paremski.
The full ESO season includes a mix of classical concerts, lighter classics, pops concerts, a Wednesday series of pre-Mozart music, and concerts especially for children. The Bill Eddins late-night Friday series returns with concerts featuring French clarinet virtuoso Raphaël Sévère and Edmonton-raised trum-peter Jens Lindemann.
The main classical concert series are notable for the number of visiting conductors and youthful soloists. The young American Tito Muñoz conducts the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in a concert that includes one of Prokofiev’s enfant-terrible piano concertos, the Second, played by a rising Canadian star Katherine Chi (Sept. 26). Jayce Ogden, formerly music director of New York City Opera, conducts what promises to be a particularly popular concert, as it features Canada’s Nathan Berg singing Wagner opera excerpts (Oct. 8 and 9).
Conductor Michael Stern (the son of violinist Isaac) teams up with the great Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27 (Oct. 30). British conductor Alexander Prior returns to the ESO for a number of concerts, starting with one featuring Rachmaninov’s popular Piano Concerto No. 2, with the German pianist Bernd Glemser (Nov.20 and 21). The young American Teddy Abrams, who was recently appointed music director of the Louisville Orchestra, conducts on Feb. 19 and 20, in a program that includes a powerful but less-well-known piano concerto, Saint-Saëns’ Fifth, played by American Stewart Goodyear.
Among these young conductors, Canadian Jacques Lacombe is something of a veteran, but he’s teaming with an 18-year-old violinist, Stephen Waarts, the winner of the 2014 Menuhin Competition, in Paganini’s virtuoso Violin Concerto No. 2. ‘La Campanella’ (Jan. 9). April 30 sees Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 flanked by a guitar concerto by Elmer Bernstein and a work by the Canadian-American composer Karim Al-Zand. Winner of the 2014 Solti Conducting Award Cristian Macelaru conducts; Spanish guitarist Pablo Villegas is the soloist. Prior returns June 4 for a very rare performance of a Bruckner symphony on the Winspear stage (Symphony No. 3), together with Bruch’s muchloved Violin Concerto No. 1, played by former ESO concertmaster Martin Riseley, who now lives in his native New Zealand (June 4).
Eddins’s own main series concerts include a colourful all-North American outing featuring Griffes’s The Pleasure Dome of Kublai Khan and Estacio’s King Arthur’s Camelot Suite; celebrated American flutist Carol Wincenc is the soloist in Corigliano’s Pied Piper Fantasy (June 17 and 18). ESO concertmaster Robert Uchida will join Eddins for Shostakovich’s masterly Violin Concerto No. 1, in a program that also includes Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (May 13 and 14). Clarinetist Raphaël Sévère features in a concert primarily devoted to the quintessentially Gallic composer Jean Françaix, but featuring one of the most beautiful of all British symphonies, Vaughan Williams’ Fifth (Oct. 17).
Bernstein and Duke Ellington are the headliners in a concert with trumpeter Jens Lindemann (March 5).
Highlights of the Sunday Showcase series should include a concert featuring young soloists in Vivaldi and Chopin concertos, the ESO debut of the young Canadian conductor Ken Hseih (Jan. 17), and Elgar’s Enigma Variations, with Prior again conducting (May 29).
Season tickets for the various series are available at edmontonsymphony.com.