In this watershed edition of WNMF, the festival’s founder and WSO Conductor Laureate Bramwell Tovey returns to Winnipeg to lead the orchestra in a massive program that clearly bears his artistic stamp.
One of the most successful living composers, John Adams’s crisis of conscience with the state of concert music in the 1980s led him to take up the baton of accessibility from the American Minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, injecting into this sonic foundation a Romantic grandeur, creating an entirely new sound that has profoundly influenced music history. Harmonielehre became a modern symphonic statement about the power of tonality to express profound pathos, and cemented Adams as one of the world’s leading orchestral voices.
This seminal work of the contemporary orchestral repertoire is complemented by the music of three of Canada’s most prolific orchestral composers, presenting their distinct visions of Canadian musical identity. WSO Composer-in-Residence Harry Stafylakis opens the program with the muscular Brittle Fracture, followed by Kelly-Marie Murphy’s excitingly propulsive Blank Sand. Jocelyn Morlock – Winnipeg native and Composer-in-Residence of the Vancouver Symphony – then presents her ethereal Lucid Dreams, featuring WSO principal cellist Yuri Hooker.
