Leaping over the Holidays with the Wind Ensemble
The winter holidays often feel quite short, but this year they felt perhaps even shorter than usual. One reason is that the holiday concert season ran late into the month of December, with the Rouge River Winds putting on “A Most Wonderful Christmas” on the 6th and the Milton Philharmonic Orchestra presenting “Winterlude XI” on the 20th. The MPO concert featured special guests from The Dance Shoppe who performed a newly choreographed “Dream Pantomime” from the holiday favourite opera Hansel and Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck, accompanied by the orchestra.
The Good Soldier Schweik
Another potential reason the holidays felt especially short this year is that the University of Toronto Wind Ensemble’s last concert, “Vignettes”, took place on November 22, which means rehearsals for the upcoming program bridge across the holidays and reduce the sense of closure that the winter break might otherwise provide. That November concert featured two very interesting pieces. The first was the Dixtuor (dectet) by Louise-Marie Simon, who published her works under the name Claude Arrieu. It is written for the unusual combination of two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, horn, trumpet, and trombone. I challenged our intrepid group of ten players to perform it without the benefit of a conductor, and they did a fantastic job! (The recording of the third movement is below.) The second piece was the Good Soldier Schweik Suite by Robert Kurka, based on the satirical anti-war novel by Jaroslav Hašek. Kurka’s music exhibits a sharp wit and a biting tone, both befitting of the source material.
Our next concert, “Intrinsic Light”, is only two short weeks away. It is part of UofT’s annual New Music Festival, and so all of the works on the program were written in the last 20 years (two of them within the last year and a half!). One of these is a premiere of a newly-commissioned concerto for two percussionists and wind ensemble by Fish Yu, with guest performers KöNG Duo. We will also give the first performance of the recently revised large-scale work The Greatness of the New-found Night by veteran composer and faculty member Gary Kulesha. This will be a full-circle moment of sorts, as I played in the ensemble that premiered the original version more than a decade ago. Similarly, I am looking forward to performing my good friend Cait Nishimura’s Intrinsic Light for the first time, after having conducted a read-through/workshop of the piece prior to its premiere in 2019.
The Greatness of the New-found Night
Finally, I am super excited to be heading to Winnipeg in February to adjudicate at the Manitoba Band Association’s Concert Band Festival! The MBA festival is one of the largest and best-run in the country, and I have been hoping to be invited to adjudicate there for some years now. I’m honoured to have been asked to join a panel of my esteemed colleagues, including Gillian MacKay, Darrin Oehlerking, Colleen Richardson, and Jeff Reynolds.