EDGE OF YOUR SEAT III 2026/2027 INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL
ALEX
PAUK
Choosing repertoire for Esprit’s Edge of Your Seat Festival entails much listening and score research. I take care to program pieces in a flow where contrasts play as important a role as thematic unities. Works new to me fold into concerts that include contemporary classics, and often composers’ comments about their pieces trigger my interest by suggesting ways audiences might approach listening or be carried to other realms by the music. The title of Adams’ Short Ride: “You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?” “The Lullaby throughout is pianissimo and has to be performed with much human warmth of expression.” “The basic melodic line from time to time becomes obscured behind the increasingly dense harmonic textures which are perhaps like clouds moving very slowly across a night sky, sometimes exposing and sometimes covering the outline of the moon.” – Andrzej Panufnik For our 2026/27 festival, concert titles are direct in their messages about program content: FAST! BIG! RICH! BOLD!
(Inspired by John Adams) (Big Orchestra, Big Video, Big Band, Big Choir, Big Spectacle) (A fantastic blend of rhythms, colours and textures) (Full of striking, captivating music in bold strokes)
Please join us to hear how words translate into sound and illuminate the FAST! BIG! RICH! BOLD! MUSIC OF OUR TIME!
ALEX PAUK, C.M. FOUNDER, MUSIC DIRECTOR & CONDUCTOR
2026/27 AT A GL ALEX PAUK, C.M. FOUNDER, MUSIC DIRECTOR & CONDUCTOR 8:00PM CONCERTS 7:15PM PRE-CONCERT MUSICAL INSIGHTS WITH ALEXINA LOUIE
FAST! NOVEMBER 29, 2026 KOERNER HALL John Adams United States Andrzej Panufnik Poland Anders Hillborg Sweden Christophe Bertrand France JOHN ADAMS
RICH! FEBRUARY 24, 2027 KOERNER HALL Steve Reich United States Sofia Gubaidulina Russia Nicholas Ma Canada Vito Žuraj Slovenia SOFIA GUBAIDULINA
FESTIVAL LANCE EDGE OF YOUR SEAT FESTIVAL SPONSORS THE MICHAEL & SONJA KOERNER CHARITABLE FOUNDATION AZRIELI FOUNDATION THE CLEARVIEW FOUNDATION ERNST VON SIEMENS MUSIC FOUNDATION THE MARY-MARGARET WEBB FOUNDATION POWER CORPORATION OF CANADA
BIG! JANUARY 27, 2027 KOERNER HALL Simon Steen-Andersen Denmark
SIMON STEEN-ANDERSEN
BOLD! MARCH 25, 2027 KOERNER HALL Unsuk Chin South Korea/Germany Daniel Bjarnason Iceland Gabriela Ortiz Mexico
GABRIELA ORTIZ
MUSICAL INSIGHTS AKA PRE-CONCERT CHATS WITH ALEXINA LOUIE & GUESTS
Looking for an opportunity to engage with the composers and soloists featured in our concerts? Curious about new music and want to learn more about what you’re hearing? Esprit offers FREE Musical Insights in Koerner Hall before every concert. Each discussion is hosted by Juno Award-winning composer Alexina Louie and features lively conversations with guest composers, soloists and Esprit musicians!
ALL MUSICAL INSIGHTS ARE FREE WITH YOUR TICKET PURCHASE AND START AT 7:15PM —45 MINUTES BEFORE SHOWTIME.
As Esprit Orchestra embarks upon our 44th season, we continue to present the most innovative and exciting contemporary music from around the world – but we need your help. When you donate to the Esprit Orchestra, you are directly and positively impacting the future of Canadian music. Donate today and demonstrate your belief in the bold, inspiring nature that characterizes the Esprit Orchestra!
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FAST! CONCERT #1
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 29, 2026 KOERNER HALL 8:00PM CONCERT 7:15PM MUSICAL INSIGHTS WITH ALEXINA LOUIE & GUESTS
FEATURING
Alex Pauk Conductor Teng Li Viola PROGRAMME
John Adams United States Short Ride in a Fast Machine 1986 Andrzej Panufnik Poland Lullaby 1947, rev. 1955 Christophe Bertrand France Scales* 2009 Anders Hillborg Sweden Viola Concerto* 2021
The joyfully exuberant ride of Adams’ Fast Machine, brilliantly scored for large orchestra, bursting with rhythmic and harmonic energy, has the steady beat typical of Adams’ music and an emphasis on consonance unlike anything in Western art music in the last five hundred years. The enchanting glow of two pulsating harps in Panufnik’s Lullaby are alternately exposed or obscured by the ultra-delicate, interweaving harmonic textures of 29 solo strings - like clouds shrouding the moon. From bar one, Bertrand’s music is so fast and thrilling that it takes your breath away. You’ll be on the edge of your seat for the entire piece! Hillborg’s viola solo moves through passages of riveting vigor, calmness with the viola climbing to the stratosphere, an unearthly imitation of the theremin, an allusion to a pop tune and more - carrying the listener along to an electrifying finale.
BUCKLE UP!
*NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
BIG!
CONCERT #2
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 27, 2027 KOERNER HALL 8:00PM CONCERT 7:15PM MUSICAL INSIGHTS WITH ALEXINA LOUIE & GUESTS
FEATURING
Alex Pauk Conductor Elmer Iseler Singers Lydia Adams Conductor Esprit Big Band Mark Camilleri Conductor Simon Steen-Andersen Guest Composer PROGRAMME
Simon Steen-Andersen Denmark TRIO* 2019 for orchestra, choir, big band, electronics & projected video
A big band made up of Toronto’s hottest jazz musicians joins Esprit, the Elmer Iseler Singers and three conductors in TRIO, a 50-minute spectacle centred around a large video screen onto which are projected remixed, newly digitalized clips of historic footage from the early decades of television and film music recording. The video, with ample doses of humour, creates the feeling of musical communication between the live ensembles and their colleagues from the past. TRIO is a game of identity, style and time celebrating the three traditional musical pillars of the major European radio/tv stations. The music freely moves around and skips back and forth in time with Esprit’s live musicians and guest artists in an interplay with documentary clips of concerts or rehearsals of symphony orchestras, big bands, choirs, visiting ensembles and guest conductors.
BANG!
*NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
RICH! CONCERT #3
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 24, 2027 KOERNER HALL 8:00PM CONCERT 7:15PM MUSICAL INSIGHTS WITH ALEXINA LOUIE & GUESTS
FEATURING
Alex Pauk Conductor Michael Bridge Accordion PROGRAMME
Nicholas Ma Canada New Work** 2027 Steve Reich United States Variations for Winds, Strings & Keyboards 1979 Sofia Gubaidulina Russia Fachwerk 2009 for accordion, percussion & strings
Vito Žuraj Slovenia Api-danza macabra 2021
Created at a turning point in the Reich’s career, his Variations introduced new harmonic, formal and timbral materials with constant yet slow recurrence of materials from variation to variation - resulting in a sound quite different from music in the composer’s early output. Gubaidulina’s Fachwerk, teetering on a razor’s edge between beauty and terror, employs the sound world of the bayan (accordion) in blisteringly inventive ways. Ma’s new work, commissioned as part of Esprit’s strategy of engaging young composers to create a new work in each of three consecutive years, will provide one of the concert’s greatest thrills. Bee mortality has become a dramatic loss ecologically and also an acoustic loss. Žuraj addresses bumblebee endangerment by reflecting their sounds with agile strings, buzzing brass mouthpieces and various suitable percussion instruments. The piece also references a familiar musical predecessor – RimskyKorsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”.
TREASURES!
**WORLD PREMIERE, COMMISSIONED BY ESPRIT ORCHESTRA WITH SUPPORT FROM THE RBC FOUNDATION
BOLD! CONCERT #4
THURSDAY MARCH 25, 2027 KOERNER HALL 8:00PM CONCERT 7:15PM MUSICAL INSIGHTS WITH ALEXINA LOUIE & GUESTS
FEATURING
Alex Pauk Conductor Cameron Crozman Cello PROGRAMME
Unsuk Chin South Korea/Germany Frontispiece 2019 Daniel Bjarnason Iceland Emergence 2011 Gabriela Ortiz Mexico Dzonot 2024 concerto for cello & orchestra
Frontispiece, a musical journey through symphonic history, draws on landmark orchestral works – not in direct quotations but through subtle allusions and fleeting references. Musical fragments, reimagined, continually interact or collide and “translate” into one another in unexpected ways. Emergence, a triptych, inexorably progresses suggesting a vast, pre-existing form just coming into view through minimalist gestures and long-term harmonic planes. While harmonies keep steady beneath the surface of the piece, they’re manifested in varied unstable attacks, hesitations and anticipations. Dzonot (cenote in Spanish) is a term used solely in Mexico. In Mayan culture cenotes were considered to be sources of life, entrances to the underworld, sacred places of shadows, gods and spirits. Dzonot was inspired by the cenotes of the Yucatan peninsula - an intricate, delicate system of subterranean rivers and caves. Dzonot is Ortiz’s call to protect and preserve their biodiversity and natural beauty in the context of the ongoing climate crisis.
EYE-POPPING!
GUE MICHAEL BRIDGE, ACCORDION
TENG LI, VIOLA
CAMERON CROZMAN, CELLO
ART
EST ESPRIT BIG BAND
ELMER ISELER SINGERS
TISTS
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EDGE OF YOUR SEAT INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL SPONSORS
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