Sombre themes in soaring return of New Music Festival

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This article was published 28/01/2024 (671 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The opening night of the 2024 Winnipeg New Music Festival took 652 audience members through rites of passage as the event roared back to life for its 33rd annual celebration of contemporary music and culture.

Saturday’s Rites and Passages was led by Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra music director Daniel Raiskin, who co-curates the weeklong event with WSO composer-in-residence Haralabos (Harry) Stafylakis. The evening featured five orchestral works, including two penned by this year’s distinguished guest composer, American powerhouse Missy Mazzoli (in attendance).

In more recent years, the internationally renowned WNMF has taken a decidedly darker, heavier turn, often plumbing the grittier realities of life rather than inspiring wonder, or even (gasp) sparking joy as during its earlier glory days. This first bill proved no exception, with no fewer than three pieces dealing with the sobering aspect of death.

The art of programming concerts — or entire festivals — is always a magical, alchemical process in its own right, and while these things can boil down to a matter of taste, profundity can also come in less-than grim works. Even the ubiquitous standing ovations were (mostly) missing in action Saturday night; as an inescapable, real-time barometer of how performances ultimately connect to the hearts, minds, and souls of loyal listeners.

However this takes nothing away from one of the 105-minute evening’s most powerful works, Eugene Astapov’s Burial Rites, described from the stage by the Toronto-based composer as a heartfelt tribute to his late music student, Marcus Gibbons, who died tragically in 2020 at age 17 from a rare illness. Raiskin infused its three masterfully orchestrated untitled movements with dramatic intensity, launched by thunderous chords seemingly bellowing from the depths, in turn punctuated by insistent temple blocks. Its more rhythmically active finale highlighted Robin MacMillan’s plaintive English horn solo, with this mesmerizing piece equally celebrating Gibbons’ steadfast heroism and “life-loving” legacy.

Mazzoli’s Violin Concerto (Procession) showcased one of the WSO’s own: associate concertmaster Karl Stobbe who took centrestage for the roughly 20-minute work. With the piece based on medieval healing rituals, and composed in 2022 during the pandemic, the soloist leads the orchestra through five interconnected “spells,” as a “soothsayer, sorcerer, healer and pied piper-type character.”

Stobbe immediately took full ownership of this work with fierce concentration, displaying his rich palette of tonal colours matched by flawless intonation from its opening movement Procession in a Spiral through the finale, Procession Ascending. After navigating the treacherous St. Vitus, he cast his own luminous spell during the subsequent O My Soul, replete with woozy portamenti, before throwing sparks in Bone to Bone, Blood to Blood. Performance of the latter earned one of the night’s two standing ovations.

We were also treated to Mazzoli’s Orpheus Undone (2019), with the approximately 15-minute work exploring two brief moments in the Orpheus myth: when Eurydice dies and when Orpheus follows her into the Underworld.

Derived from her ballet score for Orpheus Alive, notably premièred in 2019 by The National Ballet of Canada, the composition effectively stretches time with a struck woodblock evoking both a beating heart and the “tick-tock” passing of seconds on a clock.

Raiskin held taut rein over the players throughout Mazzoli’s richly layered, highly textural soundscape, with its pulse surging at points like an adrenalin rush during first movement Behold the Machine (O Death), before We of Violent, We Endure ends not with a bang, but an ambiguous, trailing whimper.

The night’s sleeper hit was Anna Clyne’s Restless Oceans (2018), dedicated to renowned American conductor Marin Alsop and celebrating the power of women, with its tickle trunk of surprises having many of the musicians grinning like Cheshire cats. Kudos to all for stomping out syncopated rhythms while warbling along chorale-style with their own playing — their voices eerily wafting over their instrumental ranks — with the enthralled, newly re-energized audience members leaping to their feet at the end.

The evening opened with Dejan Lazic’s S.C.H.E.rzo, a clever homage to Beethoven’s scherzo movements inserted into many of his works as spirited, musical “jokes.” Packed full of ideas, the dizzying, kaleidoscopic work inadvertently lacked overall clarify and cohesion, despite Raiskin and his players’s gung-ho conviction in bringing it to life.

The WNMF continues at various venues through Friday. More at wnmf.ca.

holly.harris@shaw.ca