New Music Festival to bring the heat

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This article was published 06/11/2019 (2521 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The 29th Winnipeg New Music Festival is coming back in from the cold with a fiery lineup of contemporary music and multimedia art.

The weeklong festival takes place Jan. 25-31, with an opening concert titled Sun, Fire and Blood — an about-face from last January’s event, which opened with an outdoor concert on the frozen Assiniboine River with Norwegian ice percussionist Terje Isungset.

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s music director, Daniel Raiskin, is in his second year at the helm of the festival. Under his artistic direction, the goal has been to tie the annual events together thematically and musically.

“(We’ve worked on) creating these long-term connections in the programming between last year’s festival and this coming one and, as always, to advocate and promote the highest level of artistry that we can find,” said Harry Stafylakis, festival co-curator and the symphony’s composer-in-residence.

Featured guest composers Michael Daugherty and Sarah Kirkland Snider will perform original works Jan. 25 at the Centennial Concert Hall. Daugherty’s Fire and Blood features the return of Canadian violin virtuoso Alexandre Da Costa; Kirkland Snider’s Hiraeth is accompanied by a film by Mark DeChiazza.

Stafylakis will close out the evening with his piece Sun Exhaling Light, a musical response to mass shootings in the United States inspired by a poem by Richard Blanco. He created the work in 2016 after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., where 49 people died and 53 others were wounded.

“Gun control has become an increasingly controversial issue, defying logic, and as an immigrant to the United States, I find it shocking that this continues to be the case,” Stafylakis said.

Armenian metal-inspired jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan will make his Winnipeg New Music Festival debut with a show backed by the symphony and a full concert with his own band.

The 2020 lineup also includes a night of music from young Canadian composers, Winnipeg’s vocal ensemble Camerata Nova and work inspired by modern superhero stories.

A series of pop-up concerts will take groups like the Brandon University New Music Ensemble and the University of Manitoba Percussion Ensemble out of the concert hall and into public spaces around the city.

Early-bird festival passes are available for $79 until Nov. 15, after which the price goes up to $99. Single tickets are $25 and student passes are $59. Visit wnmf.ca for a full lineup.

eva.wasney@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @evawasney