Drumming up interest

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This article was published 20/03/2025 (233 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Classical music’s “three Rs” are said to be Ravel, Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov.

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s newly unveiled 2025-26 season features the first two, and might swap in “rock star” or “wrestler” where the third is concerned.

Stewart Copeland, former drummer of the Police, and Winnipeg Pro Wrestling’s crew will both grace or strut the WSO’s stages in a season that also features many of classical music’s mega-hits and leading soloists, including pianist Alexei Volodin, who opens the new season in September with a bang.

That bang being Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with its sweeping arpeggios on the piano thundering above the orchestra.

“He’s an audience darling,” says Daniel Raiskin, the other important R next season — and for the previous seven — as WSO music director since 2018. This is Volodin’s third WSO performance in the past few years.

“It’s nothing short of remarkable — Volodin’s calibre and his always being so generous with his time.”

Another notable soloist next season is none other than Raiskin’s son, jazz drummer and composer Ilia Rayskin, who performs Copeland’s Tyrant’s Crush concerto March 26.

Copeland, who moved towards composition after the British rock trio band disbanded in 1986 — scoring soundtracks for movies such as Wall Street and video games such as Spyro — apparently wrote Tyrant’s Crush as a chance to get behind his sprawling drum kit again.

The piece is structured as a quasi-dialogue between drummer and the orchestra’s percussionist, demonstrating, as Polyarts puts it, that “the distance between rock drummer and timpani virtuoso is not as far as one may think.”

But in this case Copeland — whom Rolling Stone placed among its top 10 drummers in the world — hangs back, letting Rayskin take the starring role.

It’s a slightly nerve-racking chance for the young New York-based virtuoso to wow an iconic drummer, whom his father says he idolized from a young age. (Copeland is in town to perform orchestral arrangements of Police songs the following two nights.)

The concert will be the first time Raiskin shares the stage with his offspring, and says wryly, “You might get a raised eyebrow, you know, promoting your own son.”

In this, Raiskin participates in a time-honoured tradition of classical musicians performing alongside their children — from cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his daughter Emily Ma back to J.S. Bach and his many prodigious sons.

The WSO’s Russian-born music director — who lives part-time in Europe and is in demand all over the world as a conductor — comes back to the concert hall’s podium for masterworks in series such as Saturday Classics (which includes Bernstein & Rachmaninoff featuring violinist Kevin Zhu Feb. 14-15; Nordic Horizons, conducted by Norwegian maestro Rune Bergmann March 7-8; and Mozart & Shostakovich, with clarinetist Boris Allakhverdyan May 9-10) and Untuxed, a lunch-hour dress-rehearsal series that includes programs of Dvorak & Tchaikovsky (Oct. 16) and Farrenc & Poulenc (Nov. 13).

He’ll also be in town for the New Music Festival in January, conducting the première of WSO composer-in-residence Harry Stafylakis’s Symphony No. 3, among other works.

This still leaves the WSO’s other more pop- and family-oriented series, such as BMO Live at the Movies and Live at the WSO Matinees, for which the orchestra draws on its roster of noted guest, associate and assistant conductors.

Julian Pellicano, former WSO associate conductor, will be at the podium for the season’s inevitable Harry Potter outing (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 Oct. 3-4).

WSO assistant conductor Monica Chen will conduct several shows, including Music of Studio Ghibli on Jan. 18, an exploration of the Japanese animation studio and its remarkable soundtracks.

Among the WSO’s “esteemed guest conductors of a high calibre,” to borrow Raiskin’s words, are Robert Moody, Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser and several others, over the WSO’s 40-plus concert season.

Bartholomew-Poyser, one of Canada’s most recognizable conductors, is at the podium for Brawl at the Hall in February, when Winnipeg Pro Wrestling lands a lighthearted low-blow to the concert hall’s highbrow vibes on Feb. 4.

Making its debut in 2018 in local dive bars before moving its way up to established venues such as the Burt and the West End Cultural Centres, Winnipeg Pro Wrestling’s sweaty soap operas have attracted a devoted, eclectic fanbase to its plucky DIY energy and diverse cast of heroes and heels.

The idea of that cast piling and pile-driving on the concert hall’s stage while a 70-piece orchestra shreds Flight of the Bumblebees or maybe Limp Bizkit’s Rolling is the sort of chaos that’s fun to imagine — but what are the logistics?

“It’s all about fun and it’s really quite cheeky,” says Raiskin. “But, you know, I’m not going to say more because otherwise I might kill the curiosity!”

For the full WSO 2020-26 season, visit wso.ca.

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca