PARADE – Opening night
Vivian Fung: Parade (West Coast Premiere)
Helen Grime: Violin Concerto (Leila Josefowicz, violin) (West Coast Premiere)
Nina Young: Tread Softly (West Coast Premiere)
Karim Al-Zand: Al Hakawati (Miriam Khalil, soprano) (World Premiere | Festival Co-commission)
The 62nd season kicks off with Maestro Măcelaru leading the Festival Orchestra in works by Vivian Fung, Helen Grime, Nina Young, and Karim Al-Zand.
Beginning our season, Berkeley-based, JUNO Award-winning, Canadian composer Vivian Fung‘s West Coast premiere of Parade captures the essence of community amid solitude, reflecting on the journey from isolation to togetherness experienced during the pandemic. Inspired by the San Francisco Lunar New Year parade, Fung intertwines chaos and melancholy with empathy and gratitude, echoing the spirit of celebration amidst adversity.
The West Coast premiere of Helen Grime‘s Violin Concerto, featuring the virtuosic talents of Leila Josefowicz, embarks on a mesmerizing experience of contrasts. Composed as one continuous movement, the Violin Concerto falls into three main sections connected by dreamlike interlinking passages. Violent, virtuosic music covering the whole range of the violin is contrasted with more delicate and reflective material.
Nina Young’s Tread Softly, receiving its West Coast premiere, was created for the centennial of the 19th Amendment, reflecting on the Women’s Suffrage movement and ongoing struggle for gender equality and representation. This work considers the cycles of progress and backlash in women’s fight for suffrage, with patterns of melodies that continue to build and dissipate.
Tunisian-born, Canadian-American composer Karim Al-Zand’s world premiere of Al Hakawati, featuring the captivating soprano Miriam Khalil, is a journey into the essence of storytelling. Translated as “the Storyteller”, it is an enchanting exploration of “the stories we tell, and why we tell them.” This work is based on scenes from an opera in progress–a project that will start at Cabrillo Festival and then move throughout the world.
The evening begins with an outdoor Pre-Concert Talk by Music Director/ Conductor Cristi Măcelaru and Executive Director D. Riley Nicholson. A special alfresco dinner will be prepared by Sunny’s Catering and served outside the Civic Auditorium; advance tickets required.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Leila Josefowicz, Violin
Leila Josefowicz’s passionate advocacy of contemporary music for the violin is reflected in her diverse programmes and enthusiasm for performing new works. A favourite of living composers, Josefowicz has premiered many concertos, including those by Colin Matthews, Luca Francesconi, John Adams and Esa-Pekka Salonen, all written specially for her.
Highlights of recent seasons include appearances with Berliner Philharmoniker; Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich; Royal Concertgebouworkest; Konzerthausorchester Berlin; Dresden Philharmonie, Oslo, Helsinki and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras; NDR Elbphilharmonie; the Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, The Cleveland, and The Philadelphia orchestras, where she worked with conductors at the highest level, including Matthias Pintscher, John Storgårds, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Louis Langrée, Hannu Lintu and John Adams.
Josefowicz enjoyed a close working relationship with the late Oliver Knussen, performing various concerti, including his violin concerto, together over 30 times. Other premieres have included Matthias Pintscher’s Assonanza with Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, John Adams’ Scheherazade.2 with New York Philharmonic, Luca Francesconi’s Duende – The Dark Notes with Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Steven Mackey’s Beautiful Passing with BBC Philharmonic.
Together with John Novacek, with whom she has enjoyed a close collaboration since 1985, Josefowicz has performed recitals at world-renowned venues such as New York’s Zankel Hall and Park Avenue Armory, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center and Library of Congress and London’s Wigmore Hall, as well as in Reykjavik, Trento, Bilbao and Chicago.
In recognition of her outstanding achievement and excellence in music, she won the 2018 Avery Fisher Prize and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, joining prominent scientists, writers and musicians who have made unique contributions to contemporary life.
Miriam Khalil, Soprano
A two-time Juno nominated artist, Miriam Khalil has established herself as one of Canada’s most versatile and expressive performers. Sought after for her interpretation of the works of Golijov, this season saw her return to Pacific Opera Victoria for the opera Ainadamar and Edmonton Opera for his song cycle Ayre. Other engagements this season included the world premiere of Kouyoumdjian’s Adoration with Beth Morrison Project’s Prototype Festival and with Symphony Nova Scotia for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Thew 2022/23 season saw Miriam debut with Vancouver Opera, Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, Edmonton Symphony, Symphony of Northwest Arkansas, and Vancouver’s Music in the Morning, for repertoire including Leila in Bizet’s Pearl Fishers, Handel’s Messiah, Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Ravel’s Shéhérazade, and more. Miriam also appeared in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, singing Donna Elvira with the National Arts Centre Orchestra under the baton of Alexander Shelley.
She has sung on numerous opera stages across North American and the U.K., including a stint at the renowned Glyndebourne Festival Opera (GFO) in the United Kingdom. Notable roles include Mimì in La Bohème (Canadian Opera Company, Minnesota Opera, Opera Hamilton, Calgary Opera, Edmonton Opera, and Against the Grain Theatre (AtG)); Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni (Opera Tampa and AtG/The Banff Centre/Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival); Mélisande in Pelléas et Mélisande (AtG); the Governess in The Turn of the Screw (AtG); Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare (GFO); Almirena in Rinaldo (GFO); Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro (Pacific Opera Victoria, Opera Lyra Ottawa, and AtG), Alcina (Fargo Moorhead Opera), Marzelline in Fidelio (Pacific Opera Victoria) and Mamah Cheney in Hagen’s Shining Brow (Urban Arias) among others.
COMPOSERS
Vivian Fung
JUNO Award-winning composer Vivian Fung has a unique talent for combining idiosyncratic textures and styles into large-scale works, reflecting her multicultural background. NPR calls her “one of today’s most eclectic composers” and The Philadelphia Inquirer praises her “stunningly original compositional voice.”
Current and upcoming collaborations include the creation of Fung’s first opera, My Family // Cambodia, 1975, in collaboration with librettist Royce Vavrek. Fung and Vavrek received a Canada Council grant to support research travels to Cambodia in the Fall of 2023, and the opera will be workshopped with the Canadian Opera Company in February 2025. Fung is collaborating with Vavrek on an additional song cycle for Andrea Núñez, as part of a residency at National Sawdust in Spring 2025. Fung is also working with the Del Sol Quartet to bring to life a new work for string quartet based on the poetry of San Francisco-based Jenny Lim.
Fung’s 2023/24 season began with the world premiere of Down and Dirty for piano and clarinet at the Cape Cod Chamber Music Society, followed by the premiere of White on Black, a work commissioned by the Metropolis Ensemble and pianist Han Chen for the “Ligeti Etudes meets 18 Composers” project, celebrating the centenary of composer György Ligeti. Mary Elizabeth Bowden performed the world premiere of Fung’s piano reduction of her Trumpet Concerto, and the L’ Arc Trio finally had the chance to perform Ominous Machine after a two-year delay. Down and Dirty received its West Coast premiere at the San José Chamber Orchestra’s New Year’s Eve Celebration concert. Parade saw its Canadian premiere at the Open Waters Festival in Halifax and will have its West Coast premiere at the Cabrillo Festival summer 2024. Beibei Wang and Tangram included The Ice is Talking in their program at LSO St. Luke’s in England. Spring 2024 brought three new world premieres, with an expanded version of (Un)Wandering Souls for percussion quartet performed by Sandbox Percussion, a new work for the Grossman Ensemble, and “Songs for the Next Generation,” a song cycle composed in collaboration with the Jasper String Quartet, tenor Nicholas Phan, and pianist Myra Huang.
She currently lives in California with her husband Charles Boudreau and their son Julian.
Helen Grime
The music of Helen Grime has been performed by leading orchestras around the world, among them the London Symphony Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Conductors who have championed her music include Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Mark Elder, Pierre Boulez, Kent Nagano, Oliver Knussen, George Benjamin, Daniel Harding, Marin Alsop and Thomas Dausgaard. Her music frequently draws inspiration from related artforms such as painting (Two Eardley Pictures, Three Whistler Miniatures), sculpture (Woven Space) and literature (A Cold Spring, Near Midnight, Limina) and has won praise in equal measure for the craftsmanship of its construction and the urgency of its telling.
Born in 1981, Grime attended St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh and, following studies at the Royal College of Music in London, was awarded a Leonard Bernstein Fellowship to attend Tanglewood Music Center in 2008. Between 2011 and 2015 she was Associate Composer to the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester and in 2016 was appointed Composer in Residence at Wigmore Hall in London. She was Lecturer in Composition at Royal Holloway, University of London, between 2010 and 2017 and is currently Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She was appointed MBE in the 2020 New Year Honours List for services to music.
Nina Young
The music of composer Nina C. Young (b.1984) is characterized by an acute sensitivity to tone color, manifested in aural images of vibrant, arresting immediacy. Her musical voice blurs together elements of spectralism, minimalism, electronic music, popular idioms, and her love of the orchestral tradition. Her projects, ranging from concert pieces to interactive media installations, strive to create unique sonic environments that explore aural architectures, resonance, timbre, and ephemera.
Young’s works have been presented by Carnegie Hall, the National Gallery, the Whitney Museum, LA Phil’s Next on Grand, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series. Her music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the American Composers Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Phoenix Symphony, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Aizuri Quartet, the JACK Quartet, Matt Haimovitz, and wild Up. Winner of the 2015-16 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Young has also received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Commission, the Aaron Copland Bogliasco Fellowship in Music, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Award, Aspen Music Festival’s Jacob Druckman Prize, and honors from BMI, IAWM, and ASCAP/SEAMUS.
Young’s current interests are collaborative, multidisciplinary works that touch on issues of sustainability, historical narratives, experiences with contemporary technologies, and women’s rights. In 2023, the American Composers Orchestra with vocalist Sidney Outlaw premiered the Carnegie Hall commissioned Out of whose womb came the ice with the American Composers Orchestra: a monodrama for baritone, orchestra, electronics, and generative video, commenting on the ill-fated Ernest Shackleton Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914-17. Other recent projects include Tread softly that opened the NY Philharmonic’s Project 19, Violin Concerto: Traces for Jennifer Koh from the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, to hear the things we cannot see for Hub New Music featuring the poetry of Rosie Stockton, and Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light – an immersive audio-visual installation experience commissioned by EMPAC (The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer) that showcases their High-Resolution Wave Field Synthesis Loudspeaker Array and recordings by the American Brass Quintet. Upcoming projects include new works for the Grossman Ensemble and Decoda.
A graduate of MIT and McGill University, Young completed her DMA at Columbia University. This coming season she will join the faculty of the Juilliard School. She previously taught at the USC Thornton School of Music and UT Austin’s Butler School of Music. She serves as Co-Artistic Director of New York’s Ensemble Échappé. Her music is published by Peermusic Classical.
Karim Al-Zand
The music of Canadian-American composer Karim Al-Zand (b.1970) has been called “strong and startlingly lovely” (Boston Globe). In a wide-ranging catalogue of solo, chamber, vocal and orchestral compositions, his music embraces a variety of interests, issues and influences. It explores connections between music and other media, and draws inspiration from graphic art, myths and fables, folk music of the world, film, spoken word, jazz, and his own Middle Eastern heritage. From scores for dance, to compositions for young people, to multi-disciplinary and collaborative works, Al-Zand’s music is diverse in both its subject matter and its audience. His compositions have enjoyed success in the US, Canada and abroad, and he is the recipient of several national awards, including the “Arts and Letters Award in Music” from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Al-Zand is a founding and artistic board member of Musiqa, Houston’s premier contemporary music group. In his scholarly work, he has pursued several diverse areas of music theory, including topics in jazz, counterpoint, and improvisation. Al-Zand was born in Tunis, Tunisia, raised in Ottawa, Canada and educated in Montreal (McGill University) and Cambridge (Harvard University). Since 2000 he has taught composition and music theory in Houston at the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University.
Program Notes
Parade (2023)
Vivian Fung (b.1975)
[West Coast Premiere]
Parade is a celebration of community, but also explores the journey from solitude to togetherness. Like so many others, I was feeling quite isolated from human contact during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, I had the opportunity in 2022 to attend the San Francisco Lunar New Year parade as my then 6-year-old son was marching as part of a group of students representing his school in the parade. I was deeply moved by the festivities as masses of people came together to celebrate the occasion, and I wanted to express conflicting feelings of chaos and melancholy, at the same time as empathy and gratitude, in this new orchestral work.
The work starts softly in a dream-like state and slowly quotes the first line from a Hildegard von Bingen chant, O Ignee Spiritus (O Fiery Spirit, Praise to You). Just as the dream-like state reaches a climax, the parade begins and has an Ives-ian chaos to it, as different groups enter, playing the same music but out of time with one another (the tune alludes to a Chinese military song). The scene transitions to a more raucous, dance-inspired affair. As the dance disappears, the dream-like state returns, interspersed with fragments of previous melodies, and then builds to a triumphant climax, bringing the work to a roaring and euphoric close.
– Vivian Fung
Violin Concerto (2016)
Helen Grime (b.1981)
[West Coast Premiere]
My Violin Concerto came about after several collaborations with Malin Broman and many years of gestation. We first worked together with Malin’s piano trio (Kungsbacka Trio), but I also had a chance to work with the orchestra conducted by Daniel Harding, with Malin leading in 2010. I was immediately struck by the ferocity, power, and passion in her playing. She is equally at home playing with a sort of wild abandon but also with great tenderness, sensitivity, and many different colors. I knew when we started talking about the piece some years back, that I wanted to highlight and showcase these striking, opposing qualities. Violent, virtuosic music covering the whole range of the violin is contrasted with more delicate and reflective filigree material that features oscillating natural harmonic passages and searching melodies.
Towards the beginning of the writing process, I sent Malin various fragments of material and many of these are used in the concerto. These initial sketches actually became the basis for the piece’s central section and everything else sprung from this. In one continuous movement, the piece falls into three main sections but features extensive dreamlike interlinking passages that connect them.
– Helen Grime
Tread Softly (2022)
Nina Young (b.1984)
[West Coast Premiere]
Had I heaven’s embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light;
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.
The Cloths of Heaven
W.B. Yeats
100 years after the 19th Amendment was ratified, it still seems radical that I can have a voice, that women can be heard, and taken seriously as equal weavers of the tapestry of American culture. Ideas fly rapidly through my head and paint a dreamscape that, despite all language of equality, always risks being thwarted too soon, edited, erased. We protect ourselves, or we acquiesce, and our pedestal becomes a cage.
In 2020, the New York Philharmonic introduced Project 19 — a multi-season initiative to commission and premiere 19 new works by 19 women composers — the largest women-only commissioning initiative in history. And so I ask you, as we spread our sounds into your minds, tread softly, because you tread on our dreams.
— Nina Young
Al Hakawati (2016)
Karim Al-Zand (b.1981)
[World Premiere / Festival Co-commission]
Al Hakawati (The Storyteller) presents fragments from an opera-in-progress entitled The Book of Tales. The opera is inspired by a recent discovery about one of the most beloved story collections, the so-called “Arabian Nights.” The exact provenance of these medieval Arabic tales, properly known as ʾAlf Laylah wa-Laylah (One Thousand and One Nights), has always been something of a mystery. That all changed when a forgotten 18th-century Arabic manuscript was found in the Vatican Library in 1993. It was a travel memoir written by a 75-year-old Syrian storyteller named Hanna Diyab. In 1707, the young Diyab had embarked on an extraordinary, years-long journey to Europe. His incredible adventures culminated in a meeting with the Sun King, King Louis XIV, in the halls of Versailles. Diyab told his entrancing stories to everyone he met in his travels, including to Antoine Galland, a translator and archaeologist in Paris. It was Galland who, in 1710, first introduced Western readers to the stories of Ali Baba and Aladdin in Les Mille et une Nuits—though Galland makes no mention of the storyteller. Diyab returned to Syria in 1709 and eventually became a successful cloth merchant in Aleppo. He seems to have had no idea how far his captivating stories had traveled.
The opera connects stories and storytellers across time and place: from the present day, to the Ancien Régime of France, to the imaginary world of Scheherazade. The fragments in Al Hakawati comprise four “scenes” that feature the opera’s three principal female characters.
- I shiver, I tremble
The famed storyteller Scheherazade contemplates her precarious circumstances: each night, she tells stories to the murderous Shahryar to postpone her execution.
- He sleeps, this one
Shahryar is finally asleep. Consumed with fury, Scheherazade prepares to set his bed alight.
- Dance of the seven swords(orchestra)
Murjana dances for her husband, Ali Baba, and a visiting merchant. She alone has discerned their guest’s true intent: he plans to kill her witless husband, who has foolishly stolen treasure from a band of thieves. At the dance’s climax she dispatches the villain.
- For all I know
Tarina Safar*, a modern-day scholar of medieval Arabic, has discovered Hanna Diyab’s manuscript in the Vatican Library. She marvels at the power of stories and of storytellers.
[*Safar’s character is fictional, but she is inspired by the American scholar of Islam, Nabia Abbott (1897–1981), the first female professor at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Abbott discovered some of the earliest known fragments from the Thousand and One Nights.]
– Karim Al-Zand