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Symphonic Pride

July 30, 2021 7:00 PM

Andrew Crust, Associate Conductor

Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野,Soprano

Beth Orson, English Horn

Larry Knopp, Trumpet

Vancouver Symphony Orchestra

and with

Rodney Sharman, Composer

Dave Davie Decarlo, Fashion Designer

Kai Cheng Thom, Spoken Word Artist

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Waltz (from Serenade for Strings)
Rodney Sharman: Pronoun Symphony
Aaron Copland: Quiet City (for Trumpet, English horn and Strings)
Dame Ethel Smyth: Finale (from String Quintet, Op. 1)
John Corigliano: Voyage for Strings
Franz Schubert: Gretchen am Spinnrade / An Sylvia / Erlkönig
Kai Cheng Thom: Diaspora Babies
Jennifer Higdon: String (from Concerto for Orchestra)

In partnership with Vancouver Pride Society, the VSO is thrilled to present Symphonic Pride, a celebration of diverse queer stories told through live and filmed spoken word performances featuring prominent members of the Vancouver LGBTQAI2S+ community and special musical guest, Teiya Kasahara 笠原 貞野.

There are stories of celebration, history, struggle, pride—representing the broad range of queer experience and a diverse lineup of contributors. In tandem, we will tell the stories of pioneering queer classical composers of the past and today, with a focus on symphonic music written by exclusively queer composers. Musical selections to be featured are by Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Dame Ethel Smyth, Jennifer Higdon, Rodney Sharman, John Corigliano and Aaron Copland.

Presented by Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Vancouver Pride Society Sponsored by TD 

Andrew Crust, Associate Conductor

Andrew Crust has developed a versatile international career as a conductor of orchestral, opera, ballet and pops programs. Currently serving as the Associate Conductor of the Vancouver Symphony in Canada, Andrew conducts a large number of subscription, pops, educational and contemporary concerts with the VSO each season. Andrew is the newly-appointed Music Director of the Lima Symphony Orchestra beginning in the 20/21, where he programs and conducts the Grand Classics, Pops and Educational series, featuring such soloists as Awadagin Pratt, Amit Peled and Katherine Jolly. 

In the current and upcoming seasons Andrew will debut with the Arkansas and Vermont Symphonies as Music Director finalist, and with the San Diego Symphony and Calgary Philharmonic as a guest conductor. Other recent engagements include performances with the Winnipeg Symphony, Memphis Symphony, Hartford Symphony, Bozeman Symphony and l’Orchestre de la Francophonie in Québec.

Andrew is a 2020 winner of the Solti Foundation US Career Assistance Award. In 2017 he was awarded first prize at the Accademia Chigiana by Daniele Gatti, receiving a scholarship and an invitation to guest conduct the Orchestra di Sanremo in Italy. He was a semi-finalist for the Nestlé/Salzburg Festival’s Young Conductors Award competition, and was selected by members of the Vienna Philharmonic as a winner of the Ansbacher Fellowship, with full access to all rehearsals and performances of the Salzburg Festival.

Andrew is equally at ease in the pit, having conducted ballet with Ballet Memphis and the New Ballet Ensemble, and opera with Opera McGill, College Light Opera Company, Boulder Opera Company, and others. As a Pops conductor, Andrew has collaborated with such artists as Rufus Wainwright, Steven Page, Michael Bolton, Cirque de la Symphonie, and the United States Jazz Ambassadors. Andrew has also established himself as a conductor of films with orchestra.

Andrew served as Assistant Conductor of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra from 2017-2019 where he conducted around forty concerts each season. He stepped in last minute for a successful subscription performance featuring Bernstein’s Serenade with violinist Charles Yang. Andrew also served as Conductor of the Memphis Youth Symphony Program. As the Assistant Conductor of the Portland Symphony Orchestra in Maine from 2016-2018, he conducted a variety of concert series, helped coordinate the orchestra’s extensive educational programs, and helped lead a program for concertgoers under 40 called “Symphony and Spirits”.

Crust was the Assistant Conductor of the National Youth Orchestra of the USA (NYO-USA) in the summers of 2017 and 2018, assisting Michael Tilson Thomas on an Asian tour, as well as Giancarlo Guerrero, Marin Alsop and James Ross at Carnegie Hall and in a side-by-side performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has also served as Cover Conductor of the Kansas City Symphony, San Diego Symphony and Nashville Symphony, Assistant/Cover Conductor of the Boulder Philharmonic and Assistant Conductor of Opera McGill.

Abroad, he has led concerts with the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana in Italy, Hamburger Symphoniker at the Mendelssohn Festival in Germany, the Moravian Philharmonic in the Czech Republic and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Chile in Santiago.

As an arranger/orchestrator, Andrew is currently working with Schirmer to make orchestrations of a set of Florence Price’s art songs, has orchestrated works by Alma Mahler and Prokofiev, as well as many pops and educational selections.

Andrew is dedicated to exploring new ways of bringing the classical music experience into the 21st century through innovative programming and marketing, creating community-oriented and socially-sensitive concert experiences, and utilizing social media and unique venues. Andrew is a firm believer in meaningful music education, having produced and written a number of original educational programs with orchestras.

 

Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野

Nikkei-Canadian settler Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野 (they/them) is a queer, trans non-binary, interdisciplinary performer-creator based in Tkarón:to. Heralded as “an artist with extraordinary things to say” (The Globe and Mail), Teiya comes from a background of over a decade of singing both traditional and contemporary operatic roles across North America and Europe and explores the intersections of identity through opera, theatre, electronics, and taiko within their artistic practice (THE QUEEN IN ME; 夜 YORU; THE BUTTERFLY PROJECT). Teiya, a co-founder of Amplified Opera, is currently the Disruptor-in-Residence at the Canadian Opera Company.

 

Beth Orson, Assistant Principal Oboe, English Horn

Chair in Memory of John S. Hodge

Beth Orson has played Assistant Principal Oboe and English Horn with the Vancouver Symphony since 1990. Adjunct faculty at the UBC School of Music since 1993, she was appointed Oboe Coach for the National Youth Orchestra of Canada in 2008.

As a chamber musician, Ms. Orson appears regularly with the VSO Chamber Players, on the Noon-Hour recital series at UBC, and at NYO. Principal Oboe of the NY Symphonic Ensemble from 1988-2005, she completed nineteen tours to Japan with the NYSE, performing in every major concert hall in Japan, often as oboe soloist. Ms.Orson’s solo English horn performances include the world premiere of Bramwell Tovey’s “The Progress of Vanity” for English horn and small orchestra at the 2012 International Double Reed Society Conference and again with the VSO in 2014. Other English horn solo performances include Rodney Sharman’s “Songs Without Words,” James MacMillan’s “The World’s Ransoming,” Brian Cherney’s “In the Stillness of September 1942” and Sibelius’s “The Swan of Tuonela” all with the VSO as well as the solo English horn part to Dan Seguin’s Leo Award-winning score for the CBC feature film “Murder Unveiled” and on Christopher Nickel’s album, “Rain.”

Ms.Orson can be heard playing both solo oboe and English horn on composer Jeffrey Ryan’s new album, “My Soul Upon My Lips” to be released in October 2020 by Redshift Records.

A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory and winner of the Oberlin Concerto Competition, Ms. Orson’s principal teachers were Laurence Thorstenberg, James Caldwell, and Elaine Douvas.

 

Larry Knopp, Principal Trumpet

Larry Knopp began his career as Acting Principal Trumpet of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra at the age of 20. He has also held positions as Principal Trumpet with Orchestra London, the Hamilton Philharmonic, the CBC Radio Orchestra, as well as the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, and is currently Principal Trumpet of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Larry has performed and recorded with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, as well as the three tenors.

Larry completed his Master’s degree at Northwestern University, where he played in the Chicago Civic Orchestra, and studied with Vincent Cichowicz. He has finished the academic work for his Doctoral degree at the Eastman School of Music where he studied with Barbara Butler.

As an educator and conductor with a Bachelor of Education Degree, Larry has directed ensembles from junior high to university levels, and has recently finished appointments as visiting Professor of trumpet at the Eastman School of Music and the Northwestern University School of Music. Larry is active as a clinician throughout North America, Australia and Asia. As a faculty member at many summer festivals, Larry attracts numerous students to Vancouver, teaching at the University of British Columbia.

Larry has performed as a soloist and recitalist on television as well as CBC local and national radio, including solo performances with the Edmonton Symphony, Orchestra London, the Hamilton Philharmonic, the Vancouver Symphony, the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, and the Malaysia Philharmonic Orchestra.

Larry is a Yamaha artist.

 

Vancouver Symphony Orchestra

Founded in 1919, the Grammy and Juno-award winning Vancouver Symphony Orchestra is the third largest orchestra in Canada, the largest arts organization in Western Canada, and one of the few orchestras in the world to have its own music school.

Led by Music Director Otto Tausk since 2018, the VSO performs more than 150 concerts each year, throughout Vancouver and the province of British Columbia, reaching over 270,000 people annually. On tour the VSO has performed in the United States, China, Korea and across Canada.

The orchestra presents passionate, high-quality performances of classical, popular and culturally diverse music, creating meaningful engagement with audiences of all ages and backgrounds.

Recent guest artists include Daniil Trifonov, Dawn Upshaw, James Ehnes, Adrianne Pieczonka, Gidon Kremer, Renée Fleming, Yefim Bronfman, Itzhak Perlman, Bernadette Peters, Tan Dun, and more.

For the 2020-21 season the VSO has created the innovative streaming service TheConcertHall.ca, a virtual home for a virtual season, where more than forty performances will be released throughout the year.

 

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

b. May 7, 1840 / Votkinsk, Russia
d. November 6, 1893 / Saint Petersburg, Russia

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is undoubtably the best-known and most-loved Russian composer. Born in the Ural mountains, his family moved to the capital city of St. Petersburg when he was just eight years old. While he loved music, his Plan B was to study law and prepare for a career as a civil servant. Fortunately, his musical interests prevailed. Still, he was 25 before the first public performance of one of his works took place.

Despite many popular successes and accolades, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and periods of depression. He was separated from his mother to attend boarding school, and when he was 14, her early death from cholera delivered another blow. His homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a source of his struggles. His ill-informed marriage to a young music student lasted just weeks. The one enduring relationship of his adult life was a 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck, who was his patron even though they never actually met each other.

Waltz (from Serenade for Strings)

Two of Tchaikovsky's best-known works were composed pretty much side by side. In a letter to his patron, von Meck, he wrote, "My muse has been so kind that in a short time I have got through two long works: a big festival overture for the Exhibition, and a serenade for string orchestra in four movements. I am busy orchestrating them both." The first piece is, of course, the bombastic 1812 Overture, while the Serenade is its emotional opposite: elegant, refined, tasteful and poetic. Tchaikovsky's second-movement Valse is reminiscent of the best of his ballet music. Indeed, at the premiere performance it had to be immediately encored, and it is frequently excerpted to this day.

 

Rodney Sharman 

(b. May 24, 1958- / Biggar, Saskatchewan)

Rodney Sharman teaches composition at the VSO School of Music. He has been Composer-in-Residence of Early Music Vancouver’s “New Music for Old Instruments”, the Victoria Symphony, National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and Composer-Host of the Calgary Philharmonic’s New Music Festival, "Hear and Now". In addition to concert music, Sharman writes music for cabaret, opera and dance. He sings, conducts, plays recorders and flutes. He works regularly with choreographer James Kudelka, for whom he has written scores for Oregon Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet and Citadel & Compagnie (Toronto). His chamber opera, Elsewhereless, with text and direction by Atom Egoyan, was staged in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa, and performed in concert excerpts in Amsterdam, New York City, Montreal, Victoria, and Rome. Sharman was awarded First Prize in the 1984 CBC Competition for Young Composers, the 1990 Kranichsteiner Prize in Music (Darmstadt, Germany), the 2013 Dora Mavor Moore Award for outstanding sound design/composition (Toronto), and is the recipient of the 2017 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts.

 Pronoun Symphony

Rodney Sharman’s Pronoun Symphony uses as it launching point the melody of the second movement of Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony (No. 94 in G Major). As he explains in his introduction, he was inspired by the many non-binary students that he has taught, and he has created a musical meme that is as ear catching as it is clever.

 

Pronoun experts will advise

Not to trust an outward guise,

Ask what pronoun best applies

You can’t be decidin’.

 

Binary is so passé

Gender variations and gradations

Shades of grey

May need a singular of “They”,

As the spectrum widens….

 

 

Aaron Copland

b. November 14, 1900 / Brooklyn, NY, USA)
d. December 2, 1990 / North Tarrytown, NY, USA)

Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as "the Dean of American Composers". The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which the composer labeled his "vernacular" style. Works in this vein include the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, his Fanfare for the Common Man and Third Symphony. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera and film scores. 

Quiet City (for Trumpet, English horn and strings)

In 1939, Copland wrote incidental music for the play Quiet City by Irwin Shaw. He later worked some of it into a ten-minute composition designed to be performed independently of the play. The piece premiered on January 28, 1941, by conductor Daniel Saidenberg and his Saidenberg Little Symphony in New York City. According to Copland, the piece was "an attempt to mirror the troubled main character of Irwin Shaw's play", who had abandoned his Jewishness and his poetic aspirations in order to pursue material success by Anglicizing his name, marrying a rich socialite, and becoming the president of a department store. The man, however, was continually recalled to his conscience by the haunting sound of his brother's trumpet playing.” Continuing the assessment in his own autobiography, Copland observed that "Quiet City seems to have become a musical entity, superseding the original reasons for its composition," owing much of its success to its escape from the details of its dramatic context.

 

 

Dame Ethel Smyth

b. April 22, 1858 / Sidcup, England
d. May 8, 1944 / Woking, England

Ethel Mary Smyth, DBE was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works, and operas. Smyth tended to be marginalised as a ‘woman composer’, as though her work could not be accepted as mainstream. Yet when she produced more delicate compositions, they were criticized for not measuring up to the standard of her male competitors. Nevertheless, she was granted a damehood, the first female composer to be so honoured. 

Smyth was enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she studied composition with Carl Reinecke, and where she met Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. She left after a year, however, when she became disillusioned with the low standard of teaching. She continued her music studies privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg, who introduced her to Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Upon her return to England, she formed a supportive friendship with Arthur Sullivan in the last years of his life, who respected her and encouraged her work. Smyth's extensive body of work includes the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra and the Mass in D. Her opera The Wreckers is considered by some critics to be the "most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten." Another of her operas, Der Wald, mounted in 1903, was for more than a century the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at New York's Metropolitan Opera.

String Quintet in E Major, Mvt V. Finale - Allegro molto

Smyth's Quintet (written for 2 violins, viola, and 2 cellos) was published as her Opus 1, although it is hardly her first work. It dates from 1884, part of a series of important piano and chamber works that stemmed from her studies with Herzogenberg, a close friend of Brahms. It has been described has having the same "simple beauty of the ‘American’ works of Dvořák, while predating those works by a decade, and while still retaining something unique to Smyth." The fugue that opens the fifth movement quickly sheds any pretence of academic study as it evolves into a brisk and bouncy dance.

 

 

John Corigliano

b. February 16, 1938 / New York City, NY, USA

The American John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last forty years. Corigliano's numerous scores—including three symphonies and eight concerti among over one hundred chamber, vocal, choral, and orchestral works—have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Recent scores include Conjurer (2008), for percussion and string orchestra, commissioned for and introduced by Dame Evelyn Glennie; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: The Red Violin (2005), developed from the themes of the score to the François Girard’s film of the same name, which won Corigliano the Oscar in 1999; Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (2000) for orchestra and amplified soprano, the recording which won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition in 2008; Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus (2004), scored simultaneously for wind orchestra and a multitude of wind ensembles; and Symphony No. 2 (2001: Pulitzer Prize in Music.) Other important scores include String Quartet (1995: Grammy Award, Best Contemporary Composition); Symphony No. 1 (1991: Grawemeyer and Grammy Awards); the opera The Ghosts of Versailles (Metropolitan Opera commission, 1991, International Classical Music Award 1992); and the Clarinet Concerto (1977.) One of the few living composers to have a string quartet named for him, Corigliano serves on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music and holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York, which has established a scholarship in his name; for the past fourteen years he and his partner, the composer-librettist Mark Adamo, have divided their time between Manhattan and Kent Cliffs, New York.

 Voyage for Strings

Corigliano has provided the following note: “Voyage for string orchestra” (1976) is an instrumental version of a 1971 a cappella choral work that was a setting of Richard Wilbur's translation of Baudelaire's famous L'Invitation au voyage. Wilbur's poignant setting pictures a world of obsessive imagination — a drugged version of heaven full of sensual imagery. The music echoes the quality of the repeated refrain found in this lush translation: "There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, richness, quietness and pleasure."

 

 

Franz Schubert

b. January 31, 1797 / Himmelpfortgrund, Vienna, Austria
d. November 19, 1828 / Vienna, Austria

Franz Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works (mainly lieder, or art songs), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include the song "Erlkönig", "The Trout" Piano Quintet, the Symphonies No. 8 and 9 (the "Unfinished" and the "Great," respectively). Amongst his many other works are a String Quintet (D. 956), three last piano sonatas, and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.

Three Lieder

Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel)

An Sylvia (Who is Sylvia? - from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona)

Erlkönig (The Elf-King)

Among Schubert's treatments of the poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, his settings of "Gretchen am Spinnrade" (D. 118) and "Erlkönig" (D. 328) are particularly striking for their dramatic content, forward-looking uses of harmony, and their use of eloquent pictorial keyboard figurations, such as the depiction of the spinning wheel and treadle in the piano in "Gretchen" and the furious and ceaseless gallop in "Erlkönig". Also presented here is "An Sylvia" from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona. It is a musical tribute to Sylvia, the spirited daughter of the Duke of Milan, who is in love with Valentine.

 

 

Kai Cheng Thom

b. March 12, 1991 / Vancouver, BC

Kai Cheng Thom is an award-winning writer, performer, and community worker based in Toronto. She has written and practiced extensively in the areas of queer and trans community development, mental health, and trauma-informed adult education, and hold two master’s degrees from McGill University. Her book-length works include the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, the poetry collection a place called No Homeland, and the children’s book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea. Her most recent work is an essay collection titled I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE, on the intersection of transformative justice, social justice ethics, and community activism. Kai Cheng is the winner of the 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Writers and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her current interests include somatic approaches to community healing and cultural work, somatic sex education, and the creation of transformative justice frameworks of thought and praxis.

 Diaspora Babies

diaspora babies, we

are born of pregnant pauses/spilled

from unwanted wombs/squalling invisible-ink poems/written in the margins

of a map of a place

called No Homeland

 

old gong gong honoured uncle is the man i won’t become/

BBQ pork-scented sorrow and red

bean paste buns he sold on street corners in Chinatown/handing out sweetbread and stories

for seventy-five cents each/red meat and red hands stained

by the winter wind’s violence/as the Goddess of Mercy watched/pitying

from her curb-side altar

 

diaspora bodies, we

wrap lips around pregnant pauses/spill

salt fluids from unwanted bodies/squalling invisible-ink poetry/written in the margins

of a map of a place

called No Homeland

 

my boy makes me breakfast the morning after/he’s the air i breathe/love-

flavoured oxygen/i taste him everywhere/sun-dried orange peel candy/like the kind

my father used to bring on car trips/the colour of his skin/brown

salty-sweet/we gorge ourselves on love

not thinking about tomorrow/there’s never enough

time/to make you full/never enough flesh

to fill your skin/we open our mouths for stories/for sun-tinted histories

and swallow each other whole/here in this place

with no room for mercy

 

diaspora secrets, we

enclose in pregnant pauses/write on the walls

of unwanted wombs/invisible-ink poems in the margins

of bodies/living out a map of a place

called No Homeland

 

red’s the color of my mother’s scars/as though the Goddess of Mercy

went finger-painting across my mother’s face/a mask

made of Things We Don’t Talk About

there some stories that are never told/but known

nonetheless we bake them into bread/fill buns with secrets

like sweet lotus paste/ “what can’t be cured must be endured”/

“chinese families

don’t talk about our feelings”/“we wash them down

with pork”/ “do as you are told, child”/ “eat what’s in your bowl”

swallow it/bitter or sweet

some violence, we

keep inside our bodies/scar tissue/“what love?

the kind they show in guei lo films?

chinese women don’t speak

of love”/ “we know

that people will laugh at us”

some bodies can’t be touched/some poems

cannot be written/just felt

 

diaspora haunted, we

hunt for pregnant pauses/give birth

from unwanted yellow wombs/bodies

like invisible-ink poems/ghost children drawing maps in the margins/

of a place called No Homeland

 

 

Jennifer Higdon

b. December 31, 1962 / Brooklyn NY, USA

Jennifer Higdon is an American composer of contemporary classical music. She has received many awards, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Violin Concerto and three Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Percussion Concerto in 2010, Viola Concerto in 2018, and Harp Concerto in 2020. Elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019, she has been a professor of composition at the Curtis Institute of Music since 1994.

String (Movement 2 from Concerto for Orchestra)

Higdon’s Concerto for Orchestra is a work in five movements, commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra with contributions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Philadelphia Music Project, and Peter Benoliel. It was premiered at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia June 12, 2002, with conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch leading the Philadelphia Orchestra. According to Higdon, the second movement was “inspired by the string sound of The Philadelphia Orchestra. This movement is like a scherzo in character, written in a jaunty rhythm and tempo that celebrates the joyous sound of strings. The movement begins with everyone playing pizzicato and then slowly integrates an arco sound, first through soloists, and then with all of the players. It continues to romp through to the end, where a snap pizzicato closes out the movement.”

Series Performances

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A VSO Christmas Story
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Vivaldi's Four Seasons
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The Show Must Go On: Stories of Resilience
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The Pronoun Symphony
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Steven Page with the VSO
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Symphonic Pride
More series performances to be announced.
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Symphonic Pride

July 30, 2021 7:00 PM

Andrew Crust, Associate Conductor

Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野,Soprano

Beth Orson, English Horn

Larry Knopp, Trumpet

Vancouver Symphony Orchestra

and with

Rodney Sharman, Composer

Dave Davie Decarlo, Fashion Designer

Kai Cheng Thom, Spoken Word Artist

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Waltz (from Serenade for Strings)
Rodney Sharman: Pronoun Symphony
Aaron Copland: Quiet City (for Trumpet, English horn and Strings)
Dame Ethel Smyth: Finale (from String Quintet, Op. 1)
John Corigliano: Voyage for Strings
Franz Schubert: Gretchen am Spinnrade / An Sylvia / Erlkönig
Kai Cheng Thom: Diaspora Babies
Jennifer Higdon: String (from Concerto for Orchestra)

In partnership with Vancouver Pride Society, the VSO is thrilled to present Symphonic Pride, a celebration of diverse queer stories told through live and filmed spoken word performances featuring prominent members of the Vancouver LGBTQAI2S+ community and special musical guest, Teiya Kasahara 笠原 貞野.

There are stories of celebration, history, struggle, pride—representing the broad range of queer experience and a diverse lineup of contributors. In tandem, we will tell the stories of pioneering queer classical composers of the past and today, with a focus on symphonic music written by exclusively queer composers. Musical selections to be featured are by Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Dame Ethel Smyth, Jennifer Higdon, Rodney Sharman, John Corigliano and Aaron Copland.

Presented by Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Vancouver Pride Society Sponsored by TD 

Andrew Crust, Associate Conductor

Andrew Crust has developed a versatile international career as a conductor of orchestral, opera, ballet and pops programs. Currently serving as the Associate Conductor of the Vancouver Symphony in Canada, Andrew conducts a large number of subscription, pops, educational and contemporary concerts with the VSO each season. Andrew is the newly-appointed Music Director of the Lima Symphony Orchestra beginning in the 20/21, where he programs and conducts the Grand Classics, Pops and Educational series, featuring such soloists as Awadagin Pratt, Amit Peled and Katherine Jolly. 

In the current and upcoming seasons Andrew will debut with the Arkansas and Vermont Symphonies as Music Director finalist, and with the San Diego Symphony and Calgary Philharmonic as a guest conductor. Other recent engagements include performances with the Winnipeg Symphony, Memphis Symphony, Hartford Symphony, Bozeman Symphony and l’Orchestre de la Francophonie in Québec.

Andrew is a 2020 winner of the Solti Foundation US Career Assistance Award. In 2017 he was awarded first prize at the Accademia Chigiana by Daniele Gatti, receiving a scholarship and an invitation to guest conduct the Orchestra di Sanremo in Italy. He was a semi-finalist for the Nestlé/Salzburg Festival’s Young Conductors Award competition, and was selected by members of the Vienna Philharmonic as a winner of the Ansbacher Fellowship, with full access to all rehearsals and performances of the Salzburg Festival.

Andrew is equally at ease in the pit, having conducted ballet with Ballet Memphis and the New Ballet Ensemble, and opera with Opera McGill, College Light Opera Company, Boulder Opera Company, and others. As a Pops conductor, Andrew has collaborated with such artists as Rufus Wainwright, Steven Page, Michael Bolton, Cirque de la Symphonie, and the United States Jazz Ambassadors. Andrew has also established himself as a conductor of films with orchestra.

Andrew served as Assistant Conductor of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra from 2017-2019 where he conducted around forty concerts each season. He stepped in last minute for a successful subscription performance featuring Bernstein’s Serenade with violinist Charles Yang. Andrew also served as Conductor of the Memphis Youth Symphony Program. As the Assistant Conductor of the Portland Symphony Orchestra in Maine from 2016-2018, he conducted a variety of concert series, helped coordinate the orchestra’s extensive educational programs, and helped lead a program for concertgoers under 40 called “Symphony and Spirits”.

Crust was the Assistant Conductor of the National Youth Orchestra of the USA (NYO-USA) in the summers of 2017 and 2018, assisting Michael Tilson Thomas on an Asian tour, as well as Giancarlo Guerrero, Marin Alsop and James Ross at Carnegie Hall and in a side-by-side performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has also served as Cover Conductor of the Kansas City Symphony, San Diego Symphony and Nashville Symphony, Assistant/Cover Conductor of the Boulder Philharmonic and Assistant Conductor of Opera McGill.

Abroad, he has led concerts with the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana in Italy, Hamburger Symphoniker at the Mendelssohn Festival in Germany, the Moravian Philharmonic in the Czech Republic and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Chile in Santiago.

As an arranger/orchestrator, Andrew is currently working with Schirmer to make orchestrations of a set of Florence Price’s art songs, has orchestrated works by Alma Mahler and Prokofiev, as well as many pops and educational selections.

Andrew is dedicated to exploring new ways of bringing the classical music experience into the 21st century through innovative programming and marketing, creating community-oriented and socially-sensitive concert experiences, and utilizing social media and unique venues. Andrew is a firm believer in meaningful music education, having produced and written a number of original educational programs with orchestras.

 

Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野

Nikkei-Canadian settler Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野 (they/them) is a queer, trans non-binary, interdisciplinary performer-creator based in Tkarón:to. Heralded as “an artist with extraordinary things to say” (The Globe and Mail), Teiya comes from a background of over a decade of singing both traditional and contemporary operatic roles across North America and Europe and explores the intersections of identity through opera, theatre, electronics, and taiko within their artistic practice (THE QUEEN IN ME; 夜 YORU; THE BUTTERFLY PROJECT). Teiya, a co-founder of Amplified Opera, is currently the Disruptor-in-Residence at the Canadian Opera Company.

 

Beth Orson, Assistant Principal Oboe, English Horn

Chair in Memory of John S. Hodge

Beth Orson has played Assistant Principal Oboe and English Horn with the Vancouver Symphony since 1990. Adjunct faculty at the UBC School of Music since 1993, she was appointed Oboe Coach for the National Youth Orchestra of Canada in 2008.

As a chamber musician, Ms. Orson appears regularly with the VSO Chamber Players, on the Noon-Hour recital series at UBC, and at NYO. Principal Oboe of the NY Symphonic Ensemble from 1988-2005, she completed nineteen tours to Japan with the NYSE, performing in every major concert hall in Japan, often as oboe soloist. Ms.Orson’s solo English horn performances include the world premiere of Bramwell Tovey’s “The Progress of Vanity” for English horn and small orchestra at the 2012 International Double Reed Society Conference and again with the VSO in 2014. Other English horn solo performances include Rodney Sharman’s “Songs Without Words,” James MacMillan’s “The World’s Ransoming,” Brian Cherney’s “In the Stillness of September 1942” and Sibelius’s “The Swan of Tuonela” all with the VSO as well as the solo English horn part to Dan Seguin’s Leo Award-winning score for the CBC feature film “Murder Unveiled” and on Christopher Nickel’s album, “Rain.”

Ms.Orson can be heard playing both solo oboe and English horn on composer Jeffrey Ryan’s new album, “My Soul Upon My Lips” to be released in October 2020 by Redshift Records.

A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory and winner of the Oberlin Concerto Competition, Ms. Orson’s principal teachers were Laurence Thorstenberg, James Caldwell, and Elaine Douvas.

 

Larry Knopp, Principal Trumpet

Larry Knopp began his career as Acting Principal Trumpet of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra at the age of 20. He has also held positions as Principal Trumpet with Orchestra London, the Hamilton Philharmonic, the CBC Radio Orchestra, as well as the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, and is currently Principal Trumpet of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Larry has performed and recorded with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, as well as the three tenors.

Larry completed his Master’s degree at Northwestern University, where he played in the Chicago Civic Orchestra, and studied with Vincent Cichowicz. He has finished the academic work for his Doctoral degree at the Eastman School of Music where he studied with Barbara Butler.

As an educator and conductor with a Bachelor of Education Degree, Larry has directed ensembles from junior high to university levels, and has recently finished appointments as visiting Professor of trumpet at the Eastman School of Music and the Northwestern University School of Music. Larry is active as a clinician throughout North America, Australia and Asia. As a faculty member at many summer festivals, Larry attracts numerous students to Vancouver, teaching at the University of British Columbia.

Larry has performed as a soloist and recitalist on television as well as CBC local and national radio, including solo performances with the Edmonton Symphony, Orchestra London, the Hamilton Philharmonic, the Vancouver Symphony, the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, and the Malaysia Philharmonic Orchestra.

Larry is a Yamaha artist.

 

Vancouver Symphony Orchestra

Founded in 1919, the Grammy and Juno-award winning Vancouver Symphony Orchestra is the third largest orchestra in Canada, the largest arts organization in Western Canada, and one of the few orchestras in the world to have its own music school.

Led by Music Director Otto Tausk since 2018, the VSO performs more than 150 concerts each year, throughout Vancouver and the province of British Columbia, reaching over 270,000 people annually. On tour the VSO has performed in the United States, China, Korea and across Canada.

The orchestra presents passionate, high-quality performances of classical, popular and culturally diverse music, creating meaningful engagement with audiences of all ages and backgrounds.

Recent guest artists include Daniil Trifonov, Dawn Upshaw, James Ehnes, Adrianne Pieczonka, Gidon Kremer, Renée Fleming, Yefim Bronfman, Itzhak Perlman, Bernadette Peters, Tan Dun, and more.

For the 2020-21 season the VSO has created the innovative streaming service TheConcertHall.ca, a virtual home for a virtual season, where more than forty performances will be released throughout the year.

 

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

b. May 7, 1840 / Votkinsk, Russia
d. November 6, 1893 / Saint Petersburg, Russia

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is undoubtably the best-known and most-loved Russian composer. Born in the Ural mountains, his family moved to the capital city of St. Petersburg when he was just eight years old. While he loved music, his Plan B was to study law and prepare for a career as a civil servant. Fortunately, his musical interests prevailed. Still, he was 25 before the first public performance of one of his works took place.

Despite many popular successes and accolades, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and periods of depression. He was separated from his mother to attend boarding school, and when he was 14, her early death from cholera delivered another blow. His homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a source of his struggles. His ill-informed marriage to a young music student lasted just weeks. The one enduring relationship of his adult life was a 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck, who was his patron even though they never actually met each other.

Waltz (from Serenade for Strings)

Two of Tchaikovsky's best-known works were composed pretty much side by side. In a letter to his patron, von Meck, he wrote, "My muse has been so kind that in a short time I have got through two long works: a big festival overture for the Exhibition, and a serenade for string orchestra in four movements. I am busy orchestrating them both." The first piece is, of course, the bombastic 1812 Overture, while the Serenade is its emotional opposite: elegant, refined, tasteful and poetic. Tchaikovsky's second-movement Valse is reminiscent of the best of his ballet music. Indeed, at the premiere performance it had to be immediately encored, and it is frequently excerpted to this day.

 

Rodney Sharman 

(b. May 24, 1958- / Biggar, Saskatchewan)

Rodney Sharman teaches composition at the VSO School of Music. He has been Composer-in-Residence of Early Music Vancouver’s “New Music for Old Instruments”, the Victoria Symphony, National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and Composer-Host of the Calgary Philharmonic’s New Music Festival, "Hear and Now". In addition to concert music, Sharman writes music for cabaret, opera and dance. He sings, conducts, plays recorders and flutes. He works regularly with choreographer James Kudelka, for whom he has written scores for Oregon Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet and Citadel & Compagnie (Toronto). His chamber opera, Elsewhereless, with text and direction by Atom Egoyan, was staged in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa, and performed in concert excerpts in Amsterdam, New York City, Montreal, Victoria, and Rome. Sharman was awarded First Prize in the 1984 CBC Competition for Young Composers, the 1990 Kranichsteiner Prize in Music (Darmstadt, Germany), the 2013 Dora Mavor Moore Award for outstanding sound design/composition (Toronto), and is the recipient of the 2017 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts.

 Pronoun Symphony

Rodney Sharman’s Pronoun Symphony uses as it launching point the melody of the second movement of Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony (No. 94 in G Major). As he explains in his introduction, he was inspired by the many non-binary students that he has taught, and he has created a musical meme that is as ear catching as it is clever.

 

Pronoun experts will advise

Not to trust an outward guise,

Ask what pronoun best applies

You can’t be decidin’.

 

Binary is so passé

Gender variations and gradations

Shades of grey

May need a singular of “They”,

As the spectrum widens….

 

 

Aaron Copland

b. November 14, 1900 / Brooklyn, NY, USA)
d. December 2, 1990 / North Tarrytown, NY, USA)

Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as "the Dean of American Composers". The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which the composer labeled his "vernacular" style. Works in this vein include the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, his Fanfare for the Common Man and Third Symphony. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera and film scores. 

Quiet City (for Trumpet, English horn and strings)

In 1939, Copland wrote incidental music for the play Quiet City by Irwin Shaw. He later worked some of it into a ten-minute composition designed to be performed independently of the play. The piece premiered on January 28, 1941, by conductor Daniel Saidenberg and his Saidenberg Little Symphony in New York City. According to Copland, the piece was "an attempt to mirror the troubled main character of Irwin Shaw's play", who had abandoned his Jewishness and his poetic aspirations in order to pursue material success by Anglicizing his name, marrying a rich socialite, and becoming the president of a department store. The man, however, was continually recalled to his conscience by the haunting sound of his brother's trumpet playing.” Continuing the assessment in his own autobiography, Copland observed that "Quiet City seems to have become a musical entity, superseding the original reasons for its composition," owing much of its success to its escape from the details of its dramatic context.

 

 

Dame Ethel Smyth

b. April 22, 1858 / Sidcup, England
d. May 8, 1944 / Woking, England

Ethel Mary Smyth, DBE was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works, and operas. Smyth tended to be marginalised as a ‘woman composer’, as though her work could not be accepted as mainstream. Yet when she produced more delicate compositions, they were criticized for not measuring up to the standard of her male competitors. Nevertheless, she was granted a damehood, the first female composer to be so honoured. 

Smyth was enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she studied composition with Carl Reinecke, and where she met Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. She left after a year, however, when she became disillusioned with the low standard of teaching. She continued her music studies privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg, who introduced her to Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Upon her return to England, she formed a supportive friendship with Arthur Sullivan in the last years of his life, who respected her and encouraged her work. Smyth's extensive body of work includes the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra and the Mass in D. Her opera The Wreckers is considered by some critics to be the "most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten." Another of her operas, Der Wald, mounted in 1903, was for more than a century the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at New York's Metropolitan Opera.

String Quintet in E Major, Mvt V. Finale - Allegro molto

Smyth's Quintet (written for 2 violins, viola, and 2 cellos) was published as her Opus 1, although it is hardly her first work. It dates from 1884, part of a series of important piano and chamber works that stemmed from her studies with Herzogenberg, a close friend of Brahms. It has been described has having the same "simple beauty of the ‘American’ works of Dvořák, while predating those works by a decade, and while still retaining something unique to Smyth." The fugue that opens the fifth movement quickly sheds any pretence of academic study as it evolves into a brisk and bouncy dance.

 

 

John Corigliano

b. February 16, 1938 / New York City, NY, USA

The American John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last forty years. Corigliano's numerous scores—including three symphonies and eight concerti among over one hundred chamber, vocal, choral, and orchestral works—have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Recent scores include Conjurer (2008), for percussion and string orchestra, commissioned for and introduced by Dame Evelyn Glennie; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: The Red Violin (2005), developed from the themes of the score to the François Girard’s film of the same name, which won Corigliano the Oscar in 1999; Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (2000) for orchestra and amplified soprano, the recording which won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition in 2008; Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus (2004), scored simultaneously for wind orchestra and a multitude of wind ensembles; and Symphony No. 2 (2001: Pulitzer Prize in Music.) Other important scores include String Quartet (1995: Grammy Award, Best Contemporary Composition); Symphony No. 1 (1991: Grawemeyer and Grammy Awards); the opera The Ghosts of Versailles (Metropolitan Opera commission, 1991, International Classical Music Award 1992); and the Clarinet Concerto (1977.) One of the few living composers to have a string quartet named for him, Corigliano serves on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music and holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York, which has established a scholarship in his name; for the past fourteen years he and his partner, the composer-librettist Mark Adamo, have divided their time between Manhattan and Kent Cliffs, New York.

 Voyage for Strings

Corigliano has provided the following note: “Voyage for string orchestra” (1976) is an instrumental version of a 1971 a cappella choral work that was a setting of Richard Wilbur's translation of Baudelaire's famous L'Invitation au voyage. Wilbur's poignant setting pictures a world of obsessive imagination — a drugged version of heaven full of sensual imagery. The music echoes the quality of the repeated refrain found in this lush translation: "There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, richness, quietness and pleasure."

 

 

Franz Schubert

b. January 31, 1797 / Himmelpfortgrund, Vienna, Austria
d. November 19, 1828 / Vienna, Austria

Franz Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works (mainly lieder, or art songs), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include the song "Erlkönig", "The Trout" Piano Quintet, the Symphonies No. 8 and 9 (the "Unfinished" and the "Great," respectively). Amongst his many other works are a String Quintet (D. 956), three last piano sonatas, and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.

Three Lieder

Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel)

An Sylvia (Who is Sylvia? - from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona)

Erlkönig (The Elf-King)

Among Schubert's treatments of the poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, his settings of "Gretchen am Spinnrade" (D. 118) and "Erlkönig" (D. 328) are particularly striking for their dramatic content, forward-looking uses of harmony, and their use of eloquent pictorial keyboard figurations, such as the depiction of the spinning wheel and treadle in the piano in "Gretchen" and the furious and ceaseless gallop in "Erlkönig". Also presented here is "An Sylvia" from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona. It is a musical tribute to Sylvia, the spirited daughter of the Duke of Milan, who is in love with Valentine.

 

 

Kai Cheng Thom

b. March 12, 1991 / Vancouver, BC

Kai Cheng Thom is an award-winning writer, performer, and community worker based in Toronto. She has written and practiced extensively in the areas of queer and trans community development, mental health, and trauma-informed adult education, and hold two master’s degrees from McGill University. Her book-length works include the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, the poetry collection a place called No Homeland, and the children’s book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea. Her most recent work is an essay collection titled I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE, on the intersection of transformative justice, social justice ethics, and community activism. Kai Cheng is the winner of the 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Writers and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her current interests include somatic approaches to community healing and cultural work, somatic sex education, and the creation of transformative justice frameworks of thought and praxis.

 Diaspora Babies

diaspora babies, we

are born of pregnant pauses/spilled

from unwanted wombs/squalling invisible-ink poems/written in the margins

of a map of a place

called No Homeland

 

old gong gong honoured uncle is the man i won’t become/

BBQ pork-scented sorrow and red

bean paste buns he sold on street corners in Chinatown/handing out sweetbread and stories

for seventy-five cents each/red meat and red hands stained

by the winter wind’s violence/as the Goddess of Mercy watched/pitying

from her curb-side altar

 

diaspora bodies, we

wrap lips around pregnant pauses/spill

salt fluids from unwanted bodies/squalling invisible-ink poetry/written in the margins

of a map of a place

called No Homeland

 

my boy makes me breakfast the morning after/he’s the air i breathe/love-

flavoured oxygen/i taste him everywhere/sun-dried orange peel candy/like the kind

my father used to bring on car trips/the colour of his skin/brown

salty-sweet/we gorge ourselves on love

not thinking about tomorrow/there’s never enough

time/to make you full/never enough flesh

to fill your skin/we open our mouths for stories/for sun-tinted histories

and swallow each other whole/here in this place

with no room for mercy

 

diaspora secrets, we

enclose in pregnant pauses/write on the walls

of unwanted wombs/invisible-ink poems in the margins

of bodies/living out a map of a place

called No Homeland

 

red’s the color of my mother’s scars/as though the Goddess of Mercy

went finger-painting across my mother’s face/a mask

made of Things We Don’t Talk About

there some stories that are never told/but known

nonetheless we bake them into bread/fill buns with secrets

like sweet lotus paste/ “what can’t be cured must be endured”/

“chinese families

don’t talk about our feelings”/“we wash them down

with pork”/ “do as you are told, child”/ “eat what’s in your bowl”

swallow it/bitter or sweet

some violence, we

keep inside our bodies/scar tissue/“what love?

the kind they show in guei lo films?

chinese women don’t speak

of love”/ “we know

that people will laugh at us”

some bodies can’t be touched/some poems

cannot be written/just felt

 

diaspora haunted, we

hunt for pregnant pauses/give birth

from unwanted yellow wombs/bodies

like invisible-ink poems/ghost children drawing maps in the margins/

of a place called No Homeland

 

 

Jennifer Higdon

b. December 31, 1962 / Brooklyn NY, USA

Jennifer Higdon is an American composer of contemporary classical music. She has received many awards, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Violin Concerto and three Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Percussion Concerto in 2010, Viola Concerto in 2018, and Harp Concerto in 2020. Elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019, she has been a professor of composition at the Curtis Institute of Music since 1994.

String (Movement 2 from Concerto for Orchestra)

Higdon’s Concerto for Orchestra is a work in five movements, commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra with contributions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Philadelphia Music Project, and Peter Benoliel. It was premiered at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia June 12, 2002, with conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch leading the Philadelphia Orchestra. According to Higdon, the second movement was “inspired by the string sound of The Philadelphia Orchestra. This movement is like a scherzo in character, written in a jaunty rhythm and tempo that celebrates the joyous sound of strings. The movement begins with everyone playing pizzicato and then slowly integrates an arco sound, first through soloists, and then with all of the players. It continues to romp through to the end, where a snap pizzicato closes out the movement.”

Series Performances

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A VSO Christmas Story
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Vivaldi's Four Seasons
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The Show Must Go On: Stories of Resilience
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The Pronoun Symphony
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Steven Page with the VSO
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Symphonic Pride
More series performances to be announced.
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