New Music Festival
Rascher Quartet takes centre stage at Bramwell Tovey’s long- awaited celebration of contemporary music
We start the musical year with one of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s most exciting projects in many a season, a four- concert festival of new music Jan. 17 to 20 at the Orpheum Theatre. A West Coast festival of the new has long been one of the dreams of VSO Music Director Bramwell Tovey, and, quite naturally, our town’s sizable constituency of music stakeholders is counting down the moments to show time.
No slouch as a composer himself, Tovey joined with colleague Glenn Buhr in 1992 to create the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s long- running New Music Festival, which became a conspicuous success in the sometimes ephemeral world of music initiatives. The VSO project bears some similarities ( even if, on the weather side of things, January in Winterpeg and January in Vancouver are quite, quite different).
“The festival is really Bramwell’s brainchild,” says VSO Composer in Residence Edward Top. “About a year and a half ago we started to look for repertoire. There is a sort of a tradition of weeklong orchestral festivals in January. It’s a good way to start off the new year — with new music.”
There are several strands to the VSO endeavour, first and foremost a celebration of British Columbia composers. This on its own is testimony to the remarkable degree of diverse activity that marks our region. And that in itself marks a significant change in the fortunes of contemporary music.
Decades ago the very idea of grown- ups devoting themselves to the creation of new music seemed eccentric, almost preposterous. Not any more. Greater Vancouver now has composers the way ... well, you complete the simile.
And the VSO has stepped up in a major way to provide opportunities. Consider the Jean Coulthard Readings, the VSO’s showcase for emerging composers. Students once had little hope of ever hearing their works played by a real live orchestra, this year some three dozen works were submitted from around the province.
For this inaugural VSO festival, we get to sample works by almost a dozen important figures, almost all local.
But for scope, networking, and variety, the festival has a sort of central invitee, a first among equals, and showcases Australian born composer and violist Brett Dean, whose music will be presented on all of the programs — a festival within a festival if you like, celebrating this important figure’s lifetime of work.
“Bramwell has been cooking on this idea for years, and he’s been in touch with Brett for quite a while,” says Top. “I don’t know the origins of the idea, but he’s based in Europe, played with a major orchestra, and become a composer. Each night of the festival concludes with one of his major works.”
It wouldn’t be a party without a few special guests, including the renowned Rascher Saxophone Quartet, an ensemble that has performed and commissioned new music for over four decades.
“The quartet was my connection,” explains Top. “Six years ago, when I was still living in London, they got in touch with me because they used to play quite a lot of Dutch music. It took a while before we actually got an opportunity to work together. I wrote a saxophone quartet for them a year ago. They really like to work with orchestras and choirs, and although they are Americans living in Germany and Switzerland, they haven’t done a lot of performances in North America recently. We talked about converting my piece into an orchestral work, but I wound up writing a brand- new piece, one that is quite an exciting departure in style for me.”
The other guests include our own Standing Wave Ensemble, which performs on the opening night of the festival.
Top was asked about the idea of so much new work in such a concentrated context. Does this implicitly ghettoize the new?
“It’s a real problem whether or not new music should be slotted into special events. The original idea was to give new music a stage because it wasn’t being performed otherwise,” says Top.
“Now that is really changing, the music itself is much more accessible and less ‘ niche.’ … It’s also really nice for people to realize that there are lots of new Canadian composers, not just dusty old Europeans.”