The WSO’s new Music Director Daniel Raiskin takes the podium in his first full WNMF program, giving Winnipeg a taste of his wide-ranging musical vision. A noted advocate of contemporary music, Maestro Raiskin is joined by his long-time collaborator, Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks, who serves as this year’s WNMF Distinguished Guest Composer.
Vasks’s music revels in stark contrasts – deeply intimate and mystical one moment, ferociously explosive the next. WSO concertmaster Gwen Hoebig performs the meditative Lonely Angel and the Winnipeg Singers join the orchestra for Dona Nobis Pacem, offering two pathos-laden aspects of Vasks’s musical vision.
The WSO also gives the world premiere of a new work one of Canada’s leading orchestral voices, Vivian Fung, already familiar to Winnipeg audiences, as well as Michael Daugherty’s fierce Raise the Roof, featuring WSO principal timpanist Mike Kemp.
Finally, WNMF doubles down on its collaboration with contemporary progressive metal pioneers Animals As Leaders, who join the WSO for the band’s orchestral debut, featuring a symphonic suite of some of their best known works arranged by WSO Composer-in-Residence (and relentless metalhead) Harry Stafylakis.