MRU Presents: Land's End Ensemble with Evelyn Glennie, A 20th Anniversary Celebration

LAND’S END 2016 – 17 SEASON

Celebration DAME EVELYN GLENNIE & LAND’S END ENSEMBLE:

A 20th ANNIVERSARY

Friday, May 26, 7:30pm Bella Concert Hall, Mount Royal University

Message from the Conservatory

Welcome to the Music to Your Ears concert season at the Bella Concert Hall in the Taylor Centre for the Performing Arts! We are so excited to launch our inaugural season featuring seven separate series with over 25 diverse events.

As a world-class centre for arts education and training, we are committed to providing education and performance opportunities for our students as well as showcasing exemplary artistic achievement in music and speech arts.

From reggae legends and jazz aficionados to eastern classical masters to Canadian astronauts, this year’s line-up quite literally has something for everyone.

Mark DeJong Artistic Program Coordinator

Message from Vincent Ho Land’s End Ensemble’s Artistic Director

To celebrate our 20th anniversary and Canada’s sesquicentennial, we are thrilled to have with us one of the world’s greatest musicians in our season’s closing gala concert: Dame Evelyn Glennie (percussionist). Together with our Land’s End musicians, we present a dynamic program of new works created especially for this concert by some of Canada’s most illustrious composers: Derek Charke, Omar Daniel, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Allan Gordon Bell. This is the first time ever Ms. Glennie is performing with a chamber ensemble in Canada and the most number of Canadian works she will be premiering, making this a historic event in our nation. It is indeed a tremendous honour to bring you this momentous event to highlight our milestone occasion, and one that will have a lasting impact on our musical culture and community.

Land’s End Ensemble and Evelyn Glennie

Program I. Markings

i. Cirrus Faint & Swirling ii. Slip-offs & Cutbanks iii. Erratic, Chatter & Groove Allan Gordon Bell (b. 1953)

Entanglement

Luna Pearl Woolf (b. 1973)

littoral/liminal

Allan Gordon Bell (b. 1953)

Piece for Dance

James Keane (b. 1968)

INTERMISSION II. Spiegel im Spiegel Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)

STELCO

Omar Daniel (b. 1960)

Tree Rings

Derek Charke (b. 1974)

Kickin’ It 2.0

i. Twister ii. Filigree iii. Cadenza iv. Burn Vincent Ho (b. 1975)

Dame Evelyn Glennie Evelyn Glennie is the first person in history to successfully create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist, performing worldwide with the greatest conductors, orchestras, and artists. With over 80 international awards to date, including the Polar Music Prize and the Companion of Honour, Evelyn is also a leading commissioner of new works for solo percussion, with more than 200 pieces to her name from many of the world’s most eminent composers. To this day, Evelyn continues to invest in realising her vision – to Teach the World to Listen – while looking to open a centre that embodies her mission: “to improve communication and social cohesion by encouraging everyone to discover new ways of listening. We want to inspire, to create, to engage and to empower”.

Land’s End Ensemble Juno-nominated Land’s End Ensemble of Calgary (John Lowry, violin; Beth Root Sandvoss, cello; Susanne Ruberg-Gordon, piano; Vincent Ho, Artistic Director) is dedicated to introducing audiences to new music by Canadian and International composers, and to performing landmark chamber works of the 20th and 21st centuries. LE Ensemble is continually creating legacy projects with living composers and is proud to champion the music of Canada, and has performed works by more than 120 Canadian and Albertan composers.

Karl Hirzer

Originally from New Westminster, British Columbia, Karl Hirzer has performed across Canada, as well as in the United States, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. He completed his graduate studies in 2015 at the McGill University Schulich School of Music, studying piano performance with Ilya Poletaev, and orchestral conducting with Alexis Hauser. He was subsequently accepted into the prestigious Menuhin Festival Gstaad Conducting Academy, where he worked over the summer following with the Gstaad Festival Orchestra and Neeme Järvi, Leonid Grin, and Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Upon returning to Montreal in the fall, he ďŹ lled the role of Assistant Conductor to the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble under the direction of Guillaume Bourgogne.

Davida Monk

Davida Monk is a dance artist, choreographer and teacher. She began her career in 1985 with Le Groupe de la Place Royale of Ottawa, and was instrumental in the development of Le Groupe Dance Lab. Monk’s works, that often featured contemporary music compositions by Allan Gordon Bell among others, have been seen across Canada as well as at the Canada Dance Festival and Dancing on the Edge, and in Gdansk, Warsaw, and Helsinki. Monk toured her own solo creation Under cover of Darkness, commissioned by the Land’s End Ensemble, performed at the Festival Transamériques and with collaborator musician Bill Horist, at St. John’s Newfoundland’s Sound Symposium, and with Land’s End at the Festival of the Sound, Parry Sound, Ontario.

Monk is Associate Professor Emerita of Dance (University of Calgary), the Artistic Director of m-body, and Artistic Director of Calgary’s Dancers’ Studio West.

Program Notes Markings – Allan Gordon Bell Each of the three phases of water carves a mark upon the world: as atmospheric vapour, as flowing streams and rivers, and as glacial ice. The contours, gestures, and rhythms of Markings are one composer’s response to the elemental music suggested by these phases.

The overall structure of its movements – slow, moderate, fast – proceeds in the reverse order of the actual temporalities of the phases (cloud time, river time, glacier time).

The poet C.D. Wright wrote a series of essays all entitled “In a word, a world.” Through its exploration of the musical implications of a single harmonic sonority, Markings responds to her with its own proposition: in a chord, a world. – AGB

Entangelment – Lune Pearl Wolf

A work for two players, but only one instrument, Entanglement delves into the musical, dramatic, physical and spatial possibilities of a work for cello and percussion, wherein the percussionist plays only what is at hand, finding her instrumental voice in the body and neck of the cello, the head and limbs of the cellist, the percussionist’s own body, the surrounding floor… This commission, written for Dame Evelyn Glennie and cellist Beth Root Sandvoss of the Land’s End Ensemble, was inspired by the intimate, sensual opening of Mélange à trois, a

wordless opera for violin, cello and percussion in which a story of misplaced and regained love is told by three instrumental characters in a fully staged, one-act production. Entanglement is stripped bare and intensely focused on the two players and their relationship to each other, the cello and the space around them - pushing both beyond the realm of simple instrumentalist and into the realm of actor, dancer, pure dramatic exemplar. – LPW

littoral / liminal – Allan Gordon Belle Evelyn Glennie’s challenge: a piece for one cymbal with no mallet changes.

Working method: immersion in the frequencyrich world of a single crash cymbal.

Discovery: a world of sound in the margins between pitch and timbre, ever changing, like waves on a shore. – AGB

Piece for Dance – James Keane This piece was written for the choreographer Joss Arnott whose work is rhythmic, athletic, technical and highly energized, and for Dame Evelyn Glennie to play live on stage with the 5 dancers. Also, I had in mind Lee Curran's lighting design and its use of very sudden changes of states tightly synchronized with the music. It is essentially a set of concerto variations with samples of stressed metal, tuned and pulsed, taking on the role of accompaniment and providing harmonic material, which is developed in a marimba cadenza. This reduced and revised version was created for Dame Evelyn Glennie. – JK

Spiegel im Spiegel – Arvo Pärt

Spiegel im Spiegel is a well-known example of Arvo Pärt’s “tintinnabuli” style and has been used in many films. Written in 1978, the work illustrates his creative principles: above a permanent flow of chords on the piano, the cello unfolds a cantilena in long note values, which grows out of succinct steps. This cantilena spins out sweeping, chorale-like arches and spreads itself out more and more. It thus gives rise to a new architectonic configuration, which, like a mediation chapel, stimulates reflection, prayer or the desire for redemption.

STELCO – Omar Daniel Industrial machinery is noisy, intimidating, and can be legitimately dangerous to be close to.

But, my nostalgia for the seemingly endless sound-landscape produced by foundries, steam locomotives, mills and factories is real. Situated in Hamilton Ontario, Stelco Steel was founded in 1900 by the amalgamation of the Hamilton Steel and Iron Company with the Canada Screw Company, Montreal Rolling Mills, the Dominion Wire Manufacturing Company and the Canada Bolt and Nut Company. Their employees formed a union under the umbrella of the United Steelworkers of America in 1946. Stelco Steel was sold to U.S. Steel in 2007, and in 2013 steel was no longer being produced at the Hamilton Works location.

The seduction of the sound of industry has inspired many composers (Verdi, Wagner, Antheil, Varese, Ruttmann, Andriessen). But, one of the

great ‘instruments’ of urban life is now getting harder and harder to experience first-hand. It has been years since I first experienced the sound of a steam locomotive (Tallinn, Estonia), HydroElectric Generator (Niagara Falls) and steel forge (Hamilton), but I remember each of them vividly.

To celebrate Canada’s 150th year, my piece is be a homage to these places and the people in Canada who risk life and limb to manipulate and assemble the heavy materials that have created our urban world.

Tree Rings – Derek Charke

Tree Rings muses on the life span of a tree. The music reflects yearly cycles through alternating sections of different, but related material— imagine the lifecycle of a tree sped up. The sections tend to get longer and longer as the piece progresses, perhaps analogous to the length of the rings as a tree ages. The music harnesses a range of emotions to reflect seasonal changes—storms, rain, drought, sun, etc. Tree rings is dedicated to Land’s End Ensemble, John Lowry and Evelyn Glennie. – DC

Kickin’ It 2.0 – Vincent Ho

Kickin’ It 2.0 is a virtuosic work, written for drum kit and piano trio, that was inspired by a number of elements: the art of improvisation, the music of Squarepusher, jazz, gamelan music, Chinese folk music, and the crime novels of James Ellroy.

Compositionally speaking, the work brings together three separate streams I have been developing in my musical language over the past

seven years. One is my experience in writing for percussion instruments, most especially in the works for acclaimed percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie (two concertos and two solo pieces).

Another is my ongoing pursuit in developing my pianistic language – the tactile and gestural elements (or “signatures”) that define my own performance practice for the instrument. The third is my own manner of string writing that I been developing over the same period of time.

Kickin’ It 2.0 therefore represents the confluence of all three streams. The players are all featured on equal levels of importance as they maintain their constant dialogue with one another while covering a wide expressive range. – VH

Performers Dame Evelyn Glennie, percussion John Lowry, violin Beth Root Sandvoss, cello Susanne Ruberg-Gordon, piano Karl Hirzer, conductor Davida Monk, outside eye

Acquisition of our Hamburg Steinway Piano was made possible through generous support from an anonymous donor and The Community Facility Enhancement Program, Alberta Culture and Tourism.

Composers’ Bios Allan Gordon Bell Allan Gordon Bell has created works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, orchestra, band, and electroacoustic media as well as scores for contemporary dance productions and an opera. He received the 2014 JUNO award for the Classical Composition of the Year. His music has been performed many orchestras across Canada including the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Esprit Orchestra, the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, as well as many other professional and amateur organizations in North America, Europe and Asia. Mr. Bell is Professor of Music at the University of Calgary.

Derek Charke

Derek Charke is a JUNO and ECMA awardwinning composer and flutist. Derek has been commissioned by world-renowned artists including the Kronos Quartet, Winnipeg Symphony, Symphony Nova Scotia, St. Lawrence String Quartet, and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, as well as an impressive list of other performers and organizations. Derek is a professor at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia where he teaches composition and theory, and he continues to perform regularly as a new music performer and improviser on the flute.

Omar Daniel Omar Daniel has composed extensively in solo, chamber, electronic and orchestral idioms, and was the 1997 recipient of the Jules Lèger Award for New Chamber Music. Other composition awards include the 2007 K.M. Hunter Arts Award, the SOCAN National Competition for Young Composers and the CBC National Radio Competition for Young Composers. He is also an active pedagogue, and holds the position of Associate Professor in Composition at Western University. Daniel’s music is characterised by a strong sense of drama. His style is firmly rooted in the European concert-music tradition, and exhibits a broad palette of instrumental colour, intricate harmonic language, a strong rhythmic profile and rigorous architectural design.

James Keane

Trained at Trinity College of Music. A composer, multi-instrumentalist and improviser, James Keane has written and performed for dance, theatre, TV, animation and recitals and has conducted music for opera, concerts, TV, films, and CDs. He was associate musical director for the world premiere of Here All Night, words

by Samuel Beckett, music by Paul Clark at the Brighton Festival 2013 and was musician in residence for the 2014 Festival.

Vincent Ho

Vincent Ho is a multi-award winning composer of orchestral, chamber, vocal, and theatre music. His many awards have included Harvard University’s “Fromm Music Commission”, The Canada Council for the Arts “Robert Fleming Prize”, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Award, four SOCAN Young Composers Awards, and CBC Radio’s Audience Choice Award (2009 Young Composers Competition). During the period of 2007-2014, Dr. Ho has served as the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence and had presented a number of large-scale works that have generated much excitement and critical praise. He is currently the New Music Advisor for the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and the Artistic Director of Land’s End Ensemble.

Arvo Pärt

Trained at Trinity College of Music. A composer, multi-instrumentalist and improviser, James Keane has written and performed for dance, theatre, TV, animation and recitals and has conducted music for opera, concerts, TV, films, and CDs. He was associate musical director for the world premiere of Here All Night, words

by Samuel Beckett, music by Paul Clark at the Brighton Festival 2013 and was musician in residence for the 2014 Festival.

Luna Pearl Woolf

The music of composer Luna Pearl Woolf has been praised for its “psychological nuances and emotional depth,” by the New York Times.

Her works in opera, dramatic chamber music, silent film and music-storytelling have been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Washington National Opera, Minnesota Sinfonia, Salle Bourgie, ECM+, as well as individual artists and festivals, collaborating with artists such as Joyce DiDonato, Frederica von Stade, Daniel Taylor, Lisa Delan, Christopher O’Riley, the Brentano String Quartet, and the Russian National Orchestra, as well as Academy Awardwinner Jeremy Irons and author Cornelia Funke.

Other recent projects include Better Gods, commissioned by Washington National Opera and premiered in 2016, Lili‘uokalani for solo cello piccolo, and an overture to Bach’s Cello Suite VI commissioned by Matt Haimovitz.

Woolf has also been named a finalist for Houston Grand Opera’s 2017 Song of Houston, commissioning competition.

Land’s End is extremely grateful to the following donors: Edmonton Community Foundation: Ron & Brenda McCullough Fund; Mark Ellestad; Christine Halasa; Ian Thom; Donna Lowry; John Lowry; Liza Scriggins; Anne McWhir; Jeffrey Neufeld and Brinna Brinkerhoff; Christopher & Judith Smith; Suncor Energy Foundation; School of Creative and Performing Arts at the U of C; Rick Schultz; Hendri & Carol Vorster; Mary Westell

Land’s End Board and Staff Jeffrey Neufeld............................................President Christopher Sandvoss........................Vice President Hendrick Vorster..........................................Treasurer Christine Halasa...........................................Secretary Katrina Archer................................................Director Mark Limacher................................................Director John Lowry ......................Musician’s Representative Vincent Ho.........................................Artistic Director Po Yeh..........................................Ensemble Manager Kyle Lamont...................................................Founder

Music to our ears Thank you to our partners and sponsors for helping us bring concerts, community and culture to our hometown through the performing arts.

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Acquisition of our Hamburg Steinway Piano was made possible through generous support from an anonymous donor and The Community Facility Enhancement Program, Alberta Culture and Tourism.

Take Your Seat at the Bella Concert Hall Ensure that you always have the best seat in the house. A tax-deductible donation of $1000 is all it takes to place your name on a seat in Calgary's brand new Bella Concert Hall in the Taylor Centre for the Performing Arts. With only 300 seats left, now is the time to support your arts community by sponsoring in your name, or the name of a loved one. Each seat sponsorship comes with the gift of a pair of concert tickets to an MRU Conservatory event of your choice at the Bella in 2017.

To take your seat, and for more information, contact Heidi Christophel at 403.440.6591.

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