Grieg's Peer Gynt

Daniel Raiskin, conductor
John de Lancie, narrator
Andrea Lett, soprano
Julie Lumsden, soprano
Chloé Thiessen, Claire Wright, Alice Macgregor, vocal trio
University of Manitoba Singers, choir • Elroy Friesen, director

Peer Gynt | Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Act I
Act II
Act III

 – Intermission –

Act IV
Act V

Known for cultivating a broad repertoire and looking beyond the mainstream for his strikingly conceived programmes, Daniel Raiskin has been the music director for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra since the 2018/19 season.

Daniel grew up in St. Petersburg, the son of a prominent musicologist, where he attended the celebrated conservatory in his native city. He continued his studies in Amsterdam and Freiburg, first focusing on the viola but was later inspired to take up the conductor’s baton.  He studied with maestri such as Mariss Jansons, Neeme Järvi, Milan Horvat, Woldemar Nelson und Jorma Panula.

Along with the WSO, Daniel was appointed Chief Conductor of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra in 2020/21, and Principal Guest Conductor of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra in 2016/17.

Some recent and upcoming guest engagements include the Warsaw and Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestras, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife, Russian National Orchestra, Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra, Residentie Orchestra (Hague Philharmonic, NL), Naples Philharmonic Orchestra, Munich Symphony Orchestra and the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra.

During the 2021/22 season, Daniel took the Slovak Philharmonic and participated in a successful residency at at InClassica Festival in Dubai where they shared the stage with Rudolf Buchbinder, Gil Shaham, Daniel Hope and Andreas Ottensamer. The Philharmonic also toured Germany and Austria this past spring (2022) under Daniel’s leadership.

I AM JOHN DE LANCIE

If you were to ask Wikipedia, they would say I’m an American, actor, director, producer, writer, etc, but I would like to add some titles even more important to me; sailor, educator and father.

You might know me for my roles in countless TV shows; as Q in Star Trek; Discord in My Little Pony; or Donald Margolis in Breaking Bad. But you might not know me as someone who has sailed the Pacific Ocean to Tahiti and back or who has written, produced and directed numerous shows for symphony orchestras or directed operas. Or, better still, was the host of the children’s concerts at Disney Hall.

Soprano Andrea Lett has worked for companies across North America including San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Against the Grain Theater Company, Manitoba Opera, and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.

Highlights include receiving the the CBC Young Artist Prize and the Audience Choice Award at the Canadian Opera Company’s Centre Stage Competition, and singing as an ensemble member in Santa Fe Opera’s world premier of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs — a rewarding project that won a Grammy Award in 2019.

Ms. Lett happily calls Winnipeg “home” and looks forward to broadening her professional horizons as she finishes up her J.D. at Robson Hall.

Julie Lumsden is a proud member of the Manitoba Metis Federation, with Scottish and German settler ancestry. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Classical Voice Performance from the University of Manitoba Desautels Faculty of Music. She recently completed her 2nd season at The Shaw Festival, and has performed on such stages as: RMTC, PTE, MTYP, Rainbow Stage, Theatre Cercle Moliere, Magnus Theatre, and Neptune Theatre.

Canadian soprano, pianist, and composer Chloé Thiessen boasts an eclectic musical career spanning a wide range of instruments and genres, with a strong passion for choral music. Chloé can be found conducting community and session choirs, writing carillon tunes, and playing tuba, trombone, or piano in jazz bands.

Her skills as a soloist, choral singer, accompanist, and conductor have brought her across Canada, the United States, Europe, and East Asia, with tours to New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, New York, and Spain in her 2022-2023 season. She has collaborated with world-class ensembles including the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Manitoba Underground Opera, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Chamber Choir, Canadian Chamber Choir, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and several other professional and semi-professional ensembles from coast to coast.

Chloé currently fills her time performing with Winnipeg’s professional chamber choirs, teaching, writing, and pursuing her Masters in Voice Studies at the University of Manitoba.

Claire Wright is a soprano currently in her fourth year of a bachelor’s degree in vocal performance at the University of Manitoba’s Desautels Faculty of Music, studying with Donna Fletcher. Claire had the pleasure of singing with the University of Manitoba Singers in Handel’s Solomon with the WSO last season and is delighted to be back. Growing up Regina Saskatchewan, Claire studied voice at the Regina Conservatory of Performing Arts and was a member of DIWC Young People’s Theatre. She is the soprano soloist at Westworth United Church. Claire recently performed as a finalist in the Zita Bernstein German Lieder Competition. She received the Winnipeg Music Festival Gilbert and Sullivan Society Trophy in 2022 and was runner-up for the Rainbow Stage Trophy in 2021.

Alice Macgregor is a coloratura soprano from St. John’s, Newfoundland. She is currently in her fourth year of a Bachelor of Music in Voice Performance at the University of Manitoba with Canada’s leading coloratura soprano, Tracy Dahl. She was most recently awarded the first prize scholarship in the Zita Bernstein German Lieder Competition at the Desautels Faculty of Music. In 2021, she was awarded the Tudor Bowl, the Alice F. “Lal” Mills Memorial Trophy, and the Gilbert and Sullivan Society Trophy at the Winnipeg Music Festival.

She has played partial main roles with the University of Manitoba’s Opera Theatre ensemble as “Cupidon” in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, “Marie” in Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, “Zerlina” in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and “Ava” in Marie Clements’ and Brian Current’s Missing; a new chamber opera about missing and murdered indigenous women. Alice is immensely grateful for the endless support from friends, family and all mentors who helped her along the way.

The last three decades have brought the University of Manitoba Singers to prominence as a performing ensemble in Canada, known for their performances of both new and traditional choral repertoire. In addition to the University Singers’ extensive performance of new works, they regularly perform traditional choral repertoire and masterworks.

Recent concerts have included Handel’s Messiah, Weihnachtsoratorium by Bach, Mozart’s Requiem, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. The University Singers have placed first in the CBC Radio National Amateur Choir Competitions (Chamber Choir Category). They have toured extensively throughout the Americas and they have taken numerous concert tours to Europe, including Germany, Holland, Austria, Poland, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Ireland and England. In 2011 they toured Sweden and Finland, and represented Canada at the Vaasa International Choral Festival.

Described as “innovative, expressive, and dynamic,” Elroy Friesen is Director of Choral Studies at the University of Manitoba, where he conducts numerous choirs and teaches graduate conducting. He has been Artistic Director of Canzona, Winnipeg’s professional Baroque choral ensemble, and he actively researches Baroque performance practice.

Elroy has also published his research on the choral music of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara and pursues his passion of study and performance of new Nordic repertoire – especially new Canadian works. His award-winning ensembles tour nationally and internationally, and are frequently recorded and broadcasted by the CBC. They enjoy collaborating with many outstanding local and national arts organizations, including the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Canadian College of Organists, WSO New Music Festival, Soundstreams Canada, Groundswell, Vancouver Chamber Choir, MusikBarock Ensemble, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, and the Latvian Radio Choir.

Program Notes by James Manishen

Peer Gynt

Edvard Grieg

Edvard Grieg
B. Bergen, Norway / June 15, 1843
D. Bergen / September 4, 1907
Composed: 1874-1875
First performance: February 24, 1876 (Oslo)

Peer Gynt was Henrik Ibsen’s last play in verse, written in Italy during 1867.  Its subject comes from traditional Norwegian legend – a character whose narcissism rivals his imagination in such an electrifying way that he merely needs to imagine some fantastic exploit for it to become reality. Peer Gynt is as luckless as Voltaire’s Candide, a sinister pleasure-seeking rascal who seeks out adventures and returns four decades later to find his wife Solveig still faithful.

Ibsen’s characters are drawn in allegory to his view of the not always ideal “national character” of the Norwegian people. Ibsen maps out Peer Gynt’s life first as a boastful youth of peasant stock with dreams of power and wealth, then as a rich man who has made his fortune in the New World, and finally as an old man who at long last looks back on his life in redemption alongside the love of the faithful Solveig who has stood by him throughout his years of wantonness.

As a man with great potential at the start, Peer has squandered it in tragic choices until running out of time before he realizes what he’s done. At the end, he looks back with regret on an egomaniacal life, reflections made all the more potent through the constancy of Solveig’s love. Peer realizes a comeuppance – a Scrooge-like reckoning of trenchant procrastination in finding the values in life that really matter.

Henrik Ibsen

In 1874 Ibsen decided to revive Peer Gynt for presentation in Oslo and wrote to Grieg requesting incidental music for a shortened version of the four-hour five-act original. Despite not being attracted to the play’s moralistic fantasy, Grieg needed the money and accepted, thinking he would only have to supply a few selections.

But he misjudged contemporary Norwegian musical theatre taste, which demanded a generous supply of musical selections. Grieg took 18 months to write 26 movements for Peer Gynt. He worked slowly, weighed down by the inherent difficulties of the task. In his letters, Grieg expressed frustration with the work: “It is a terribly difficult play for which to write music … [Peer Gynt] hangs over me like a nightmare.” While the subject matter of Peer Gynt was challenging enough, Grieg was also referring to the inadequate resources of the theater orchestra, which necessitated artistic compromises.

Fortunately for the composer,  the two orchestral suites he extracted from it during subsequent productions won Grieg international fame and financial security. Today, Grieg’s music has completely overshadowed Ibsen’s masterpiece.

Grieg romanticizes the often unwieldy brutish tang of Ibsen’s play where the worst excesses of society are portrayed.  Grieg’s Gynt is more of an adventurer. The women are tempered by the music from the horrors of the play into graceful, expressive characters. The music is evocative and dramatically relevant, the story-messages resonating in no small measure through the power of Grieg’s memorable score.

Synopsis

Act I

The first act opens with a lively wedding prelude containing portrayals of Peer and Solveig plus two dances.  It’s the wedding of Ingrid, who Peer had once been attracted to. He meets Solveig and falls in love with her but as the festivities end, Peer abducts Ingrid and carries her off to the mountains.  Ingrid is soon discarded and her Lament forms the prelude to Act II.

Act II

Peer meets three feisty shepherd girls who are calling on their lost Troll lovers.  Peer thinks he’s macho enough to take on all three. As an outcast, he spends the rest of the act with the Trolls where he meets the daughter of the Mountain King, the “Woman in Green,” and seduces her promising marriage.

They ride off to the Royal Hall (on a pig!) where Peer encounters the King who is surrounded by Trolls and goblins. The Trolls are offended by Peer (the iconic “In the Hall of the Mountain King”), shouting “kill him, kill him!” Peer is hunted by the Trolls until he meets the Bøyg, a shapeless ogre-like being who serves as Peer’s conscience and tries to block every path of escape, the distant chorus representing the birds who support the threats of the  Bøyg. Still, Peer makes it through.

Act III

Peer is now in the forest where he builds a hut. He is joined by the faithful Solveig but haunted by visions of the Woman in Green. Peer feels unworthy of Solveig and leaves to visit his mother at the hut where he was born.  Finding her in poverty, the act ends with his mother’s death. “The Death of Åse” was the only music Grieg composed for this act and was intended to be heard twice as bookends to the act.

Act IV

The act opens with the familiar “Morning” depicting the sunrise in North Africa where Peer now lives as a prosperous middle-age figure. In the 20-year interim, Peer had asked Solveig to patient and  wait for him until he could “have some gold.”

A nearby Bedouin camp receives Peer as a great prophet, the atmosphere enlivened by Grieg’s “Arabian Dance.” Then follows a seductive dance by the Sheik’s daughter Anitra, who tricks Peer into giving her his valuables and then disappears into the desert.

The scene changes to Norway where Solveig is heard singing as she awaits Peer’s return.

Act V

Peer is now an old man. He begins his journey home in a stormy sea that culminates in a shipwreck.  He makes his way to the hut where Solveig is singing.  As he listens, he is overcome with shame and can’t bring himself to enter.

Musician Nucleus

FIRST VIOLINS
Gwen Hoebig, Concertmaster
Karl Stobbe, Associate Concertmaster
Tara Fensom
Hong Tian Jia
Mary Lawton
Sonia Lazar
Julie Savard
Jun Shao
Jeremy Buzash (guest)
Trevor Kirczenow (guest)
Jessie Ramsay (guest)

SECOND VIOLINS
Chris Anstey, Principal
Elation Pauls, Assistant Principal
Karen Bauch
Kristina Bauch,
Elizabeth Dyer
Bokyung Hwang*
Rodica Jeffrey
Momoko Matsumura **
Susan McCallum
Jane Radomski
Liudmyla Prysiazhniuk (guest)
Heather Stewart (guest)

VIOLAS
Elise Lavallée, Acting Principal
Dmytro Kreshchenskyi, Acting Assistant Principal **
Marie-Elyse Badeau
Laszlo Baroczi
Greg Hay
Michael Scholz
Alexander Moroz (guest)

CELLOS
Emma Quackenbush, Acting Assistant Principal
Grace An **
Arlene Dahl
Samuel Nadurak **

Alyssa Ramsay
Sean Taubner
Minna Chung (guest)

BASSES
Meredith Johnson, Principal
James McMillan
Daniel Perry
Eric Timperman
Taras Pivniak (guest)

FLUTES
Jan Kocman, Principal
Supported by Gordon & Audrey Fogg
Alex Conway
Laura MacDougall (guest)

OBOES
Robin MacMillan

CLARINETS
Micah Heilbrunn, Principal
Cathy Wood (guest)

BASSOONS
Kathryn Brooks, Principal *
Mark Kreshchenskyi, Acting Principal **
Elizabeth Mee **

HORNS
Ken MacDonald, Associate Principal
The Hilda Schelberger Memorial Chair
Aiden Kleer
Michiko Singh

TRUMPETS
Paul Jeffrey, Associate Principal
Isaac Pulford
The Patty Kirk Memorial Chair

TROMBONES
Keith Dyrda
Isabelle Lavoie**
Jason Kehler
Francois Godere (guest)

TUBA
Justin Gruber, Principal

PERCUSSION
Caroline Bucher (guest)
Ben Reimer (guest)
Brendan Thompson (guest)

ORGAN
Cary Denby (guest)

HARP
Richard Turner, Principal
Endowed by W.H. & S.E. Loewen

PERSONNEL MANAGER
Isaac Pulford

MUSIC LIBRARIAN
Michaela Kleer

ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN
Aiden Kleer

* On Leave
** 1 year appointment

SPECIAL THANKS:

Aidan Clarke –
Voice Of The Boyg
Emma Jorgensen –
Audio Cue Conductor
Michael Falk – Audio Design