Strauss's Don Juan

Nodoka Okisawa, conductor
Kerson Leong, violin

Fidor Yakimenko: Nocturne in D major for Strings
(1876-1945)

Serge Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 19
(1891-1953)

     I. Allegro

     II. Scherzo: Vivacissimo

     III. Modernato

     Kerson Leong, violin

Samy Moussa: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, “Adrano”
(b. 1984)

     Kerson Leong, violin

Richard Strauss: Don Juan, Op. 20
(1864-1949)

Pre-Concert Performance

Faustin et Maurice Jeanjean: Quatuor pour saxophones
(1900-1979, 1897-1968)

     I. Gaieté villageoise

     II. Doux paysage

     III. Papillons

     IV. Concert sur la place

     University of Manitoba Saxophone Quartet

Nodoka Okisawa, conductor

Kerson Leong, violin

Nocturne in D Major
Fidor Yakimenko
b: Pisky, Ukraine / September 20, 1876
d: Paris / January 8, 1945
Composed: 1910
First WSO performance

Fidor Yakimenko was Stravinsky’s first harmony tutor. A St. Petersburg Conservatory alumnus, Yakimenko later moved to Paris, composing diverse music, and later embraced Ukrainian themes. Nocturne in D major is a pastoral with warmly shifting tonal centres.

The chief claim to fame of Fidor Yakimenko (Fyodor Akimenko) is that he was Igor Stravinsky’s first harmony teacher at the secondary school Stravinsky attended in 1899. It was a short period of 14 lessons, as Stravinsky found the orthodox Akimenko “insensitive.” Akimenko had studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Rimsky-Korsakov and Liadov, and himself became a professor there from 1919 until 1923, after which he moved to Paris.

Stravinsky would make his name supplying music for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It’s interesting to note that Diaghilev admired Yakimenko’s talent, considering the ballet The Ice House, with score by Yakimenko, worthy of a Paris production while the company was preparing Daphnis and Chloe with music by Ravel.

Yakimenko composed an opera, several orchestral works, songs and characterful piano pieces. His late work was strongly marked by Ukrainian themes, featuring works such as Ukrainian Suite and Ukrainian Pictures, Christmas carols and choral arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs.

Yakimenko’s brief Nocturne in D major is a pastoral song-without-words whose chromatic, warmly shifting tonal centres certainly belie anything straitlaced. It is ironic that the forgotten Yakimenko composed his Nocturne during the debut year of The Firebird ballet, which brought Stravinsky immediate acclaim as Russia’s most promising young nationalistic composer.

Music

Igor Stravsinky, The Firebird
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 9

Art

La Danse, Henri Matisse

Literature

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Howard’s End, E. M. Forster

History

The Royal Canadian Navy is founded
The Mexican Revolution begins

Violin Concerto No. 1
Serge Prokofiev
b: Sontsovka, Ukraine / April 23, 1891
d: Moscow / March 5, 1953
Composed: 1915-1917
First performance: October 18, 1923 (Paris) with Marcel Darrieux as soloist
Last WSO performance: 2013; Alexander Mickelthwate, conductor; Karl Stobbe, violin

Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, though unexpected, turned out to be one of the composer’s most lyrical offerings. Its mix of fairy tale-like innocence and boldness offers ethereal themes, lively contrasts, and a finale the echoes its dreamy start.

As a brash young composer, Prokofiev vowed that expecting the unexpected would be central to his music. Juggling simultaneous projects in different styles – whether lyrical, modern, neo-classical or other – the ‘kind’ of composer he was perceived as proved elusive, no more so than in his Violin Concerto No. 1 whose anticipation of something spiky and modern at the premiere surprised everyone, turning out to be one of the composer’s most lyrical offerings.

The premiere was not particularly successful, and it wasn’t until violinist Joseph Szigeti played the Concerto worldwide in 1935 that the work gained acceptance, saying that he was fascinated by “its mixture of fairytale naiveté and daring savagery.’’

The rapturous opening theme gives way to a vigorous contrasting second theme, both of which are developed. The movement closes ethereally with the main theme returning among the sounds of harp and winds under the solo.

The second movement is a driving rondo-scherzo, reversing the traditional procedure of having the slow movement at this point. Two episodes of Prokofiev’s mocking side separate the theme’s reappearances, the second episode sul ponticello (bow near the bridge).

The finale recalls the dreamy opening movement, though more animated at the centre. The closing bars of the coda are identical to those of the opening movement.

Music

Arnold Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht (string orchestra version)
Maurice Ravel, Le tombeau de Couperin

Art

The Jack Pine, Tom Thomson

Literature

The State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin
His Last Bow, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

History

Vimy Ridge stormed by Canadian troops
Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari is executed by firing squad

Violin Concerto
Samy Moussa
b: Montreal / June 1, 1984
Composed: 2019
First Performance: November 28, 2019 (Montreal) Kent Nagano, conductor with Andrew Wan as soloist
First WSO performance

Samy Moussa is a composer and conductor, trained in Montreal and Munich. For his Violin Concerto he drew inspiration from Sicily’s ancient town of Adrano. Its four movements evoke a ritualistic narrative, summoning Adranus, the god of fire. Prominent in the work is the contrabassoon, capable of producing the orchestra’s deepest notes.

Composer and conductor Samy Moussa completed his undergraduate degree at the Université de Montréal before undertaking graduate studies in composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich with Matthias Pintscher and Pascal Dusapin, and participating in conducting master classes with Pierre Boulez. Moussa became music director of the INDEX Ensemble in Munich in 2010, and has since conducted leading ensembles and orchestras in Europe and Canada. As a composer, Moussa has received many commissions from the orchestras of Dallas, Brussels, Berlin, Munich, Montreal and Toronto and has written two operas.

Adranus, a god of fire believed to live beneath Mount Etna, was worshipped by the ancient peoples of eastern Sicily. They established a town in his honour at the eastern base of the volcano – Adrano – around 400 B.C.E. After a visit to Adrano, Moussa was inspired by the town and the legend, around which he composed his Violin Concerto in 2019.

The 15-minute Concerto is in four brief movements, The first three are played without pause and suggest an almost ritualistic narrative.

The subterranean god Adranus is invoked by a lone worshiper in the opening movement (contrabassoon, capable of producing the orchestra’s deepest notes, is prominent in the orchestration) and stirs to life in a climax near its end. The second movement is an accompanied Cadenza (senza misura – “without meter”) that is quiet and apprehensive, a wariness answered by the fiery movement that follows. The finale is quiet again, perhaps even awed, with muted trumpets echoing the opening notes of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, which was famously used in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to evoke nature’s ineffable primal forces.

Music

Philip Glass, Symphony No. 12 (‘Lodger,’ after David Bowie)
Ellen Reid, p r I s m

Art

Flay (James Madison), Titus Kaphar

Literature

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood
The Institute, Stephen King

History

First-ever photo of a black hole announced
Notre Dame Cathedral catches fire

Don Juan
Richard Strauss
b: Munich, Germany / June 11, 1864
d: Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany / September 8, 1949
Composed: 1888
First performance: November 11, 1889 (Weimar) conducted by the composer
Last WSO performance: 2012, Alexander Mickelthwate, conductor

Strauss’s masterpiece Don Juan was born from Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina’s character, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, his own passion, and Hungarian poet Nicolaus Lenau’s narrative. It intertwines love, idealism, and disillusionment, showcasing passionate orchestral brilliance. The work includes a swaggering opening, a horn theme, a ravishing oboe, strategic silence, a jarring trumpet note, and a quiet end.

From its roots in the 1630 drama El Burlador de Sevilla (The Seducer of Seville) by Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina, the fantastic character of Don Juan has inspired many literary and musical representations. It was Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni that piqued Richard Strauss’s curiosity to set the Spanish lothario’s exploits to music.

When Strauss saw Paul Heyse’s play Don Juans Ende in 1885, while at the same time encountering the music of Wagner and Liszt, the young composer knew he had his material. Based on Liszt’s one-movement tone poem model, Don Juan became Strauss’s first certifiable masterpiece and a brilliant success at its premiere in 1889.

Shortly after beginning his sketches in 1887, Strauss fell in love with and married the fiery singer Pauline de Ahna. The impassioned love themes in Don Juan were clearly the result of this romance, but it was a poetic drama by the nineteenth-century Hungarian poet Nicolaus Lenau that gave Strauss his narrative.

Lenau’s Don Juan is more an idealist than a rakish seducer. He pursues a vision of the “ideal woman’’ incarnate from all women on Earth, yet without success among his so-called conquests. Disillusioned but resigned to his fate, he dies in a swordfight. With dazzling skill piloting all available orchestral resources, Strauss digs into the passions of the human psyche contained in Lenau’s feverish narrative. Soon after the premiere. the 25-year-old composer became world famous.

Strauss knew he would get more publicity by avoiding a specific program for Don Juan. Nonetheless, the swaggering opening material and the horn theme in the middle clearly belong to Don Juan. The women and his memories of them follow in various guises, the ravishing oboe theme reflecting both Pauline and her imagined ideal. The silence in the closing pages sets up the final sword thrust, a jarring trumpet note, followed by a quiet, willing death.

Music

Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade

Art

The Night Café, Vincent van Gogh

Literature

The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Oscar Wilde
Le Rêve, Émile Zola

History

Vincent van Gogh cuts off his left ear
George Eastman patents the first roll-film camera and registers the brand name “Kodak”

MUSICIANS

FIRST VIOLINS

Gwen Hoebig,
  Concertmaster
The Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté Memorial Chair, endowed by the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation
Karl Stobbe,
  Associate Concertmaster
Jeff Dydra,
  Assistant Principal
Mona Coarda
Tara Fensom
Hong Tian Jia
Mary Lawton
Sonia Lazar
Julie Savard
Jun Shao
Rebecca Weger**
Momoko Matsumura (guest)
Erika Sloos (guest)

SECOND VIOLINS

Chris Anstey,
  Principal
Elation Pauls,
  Assistant Principal
Karen Bauch
Kristina Bauch,
Elizabeth Dyer
Bokyung Hwang
Rodica Jeffrey
Susan McCallum
Takayo Noguchi
Jane Radomski
Liudmyla Prysiazhniuk (guest)

VIOLAS

Elise Lavallée,
  Acting Principal
Dmytro Kreshchenskyi,**
  Acting Assistant Principal
Marie-Elyse Badeau
Laszlo Baroczi
Richard Bauch
Greg Hay
Michael Scholz
Michaela Kleer (guest)

CELLOS

Yuri Hooker,
  Principal
Robyn Neidhold,
  Assistant Principal
Ethan Allers
Arlene Dahl
Alyssa Ramsay*
Sean Taubner
Emma Quackenbush
Grace An (guest)
Samuel Nadurak (guest)

BASSES

Meredith Johnson,
  Principal
Daniel Perry,
  Assistant Principal
James McMillan
Eric Timperman*
Emily Krajewski
Taras Pivniak**

FLUTES

Jan Kocman,
  Principal
  Supported by Gordon & Audrey Fogg
Alex Conway
Laurel Ridd (guest)

PICCOLO FLUTE

Alex Conway,
  Principal

OBOES

Beverly Wang,
  Principal
Robin MacMillan
Caitlin Broms-Jacobs (guest)
Kelsey Nordstrom (guest)

CLARINETS

Micah Heilbrunn,
  Principal
Alex Whitehead

BASSOONS

Kathryn Brooks,
  Principal
Elizabeth Mee
Allen Harrington (guest)

HORNS

Patricia Evans,
  Principal
Ken MacDonald,
  Associate Principal
  The Hilda Schelberger Memorial Chair
Aiden Kleer
Caroline Oberheu
Michiko Singh

TRUMPETS

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

TROMBONES

Steven Dyer,*
  Principal
Keith Dyrda,
  Acting Principal
Kyle Orlando**

TUBA

Justin Gruber,
  Principal

PERCUSSION

Andrew Johnson,
  Principal
Caroline Bucher (guest)
Brendan Thompson (guest)

TIMPANI

Andrew Nazer (guest)

HARP

To be determined
  Endowed by W.H. & S.E. Loewen
Alanna Ellison (guest)

PERSONNEL MANAGER

Isaac Pulford

MUSIC LIBRARIAN

Michaela Kleer

ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN

Aiden Kleer

* On Leave
** One-year appointment