Concert Season
Past Concerts
Concert Season
Awakenings
APRIL 5TH | KELOWNA | 8.00 PM
APRIL 6TH | VERNON | 7.00 PM
Spring awakes us from our winter doldrums with a primal explosion of drums. A soul awakens and, like a lark, ascends to heaven in sweet and lazy spirals. People of the earth celebrate the sun's return in rustic dance. A flower blooms and we listen as each petal opens. A stream, awakening as a mere trickle,
crescendos into the mighty river Moldau as it reaches the sea.
Join the Okanagan Symphony in Kelowna or Vernon as they make music by turns thunderous and sweet, music of the countryside and of the rushing, melting snows.
The AWAKENINGS concert opens with "From the Drum Comes a Thundering Beat" – a piece rich with percussion, its call and answer pattern set up on both sides of the Okanagan Valley's stages. "The players," says composer Kelly-Marie Murphy, "bring energy and substance with drum-beats to this
fundamental form of music." Solos enhance the piece: oboe, cello, flute – all punched up by the exuberant entrances and exits of the drums.
From this remarkable opening, the orchestra changes pace with Ralph Vaughan Williams "The Lark Ascending", in which the OSO's Assistant Concertmaster, Susan Schaffer, takes the solo violin role. In this piece, written at the beginning of WWI, there is 'idyllic' musical expression – almost no conflict, no
opposition of orchestral themes, no sense of doom. The especial English beauty of the countryside shines throughout the piece with deceptive simplicity, and is an homage to the folksong tradition of the previous century.
Edward Elgar's "Three Bavarian Dances" were composed after a trip taken in 1894. Songs written to texts by Elgar's wife Alice display his remarkable ability to produce music that is English in character and elegiac
melancholy, again celebrating the countryside in this concert celebrating the awakening of springtime.
Mahler's "Blumine" (flowers) is heard in this concert as a stand-alone piece; originally part of his First Symphony, the movement was removed by Mahler in 1884, and was lost until 1959 and not performed until 1967. Audiences will hear a young Mahler, mid-stride, without the large forces he later became known for. Mahler himself describes "Blumine" as "a moonlight serenade on a trumpet blown across the Rhine."
The concert closes with the much-loved "Moldau" by Bedrich Smetana. The piece is named "Vltava" celebrating the river called 'The Moldau' in German. The composer began work in 1874, when he was
suffering from debilitating deafness. The "Moldau" celebrates one of Bohemia's great rivers. Smetana wrote, "The piece describes the starting from two small springs, joining into a single current, coursing through woods and meadows, passing by mermaids and dancers. The river flows toward Prague, finally vanishing into the distance, ending at the Elbe."
Soloist Susan Schaffer studied music in Alberta and British Columbia, was Principal Violist with the Kamloops Symphony, and has been Assistant Concertmaster with the Okanagan Symphony since 1992. .
"I am honoured to be performing "The Lark Ascending" in Rosemary Thomson's inaugural season as our Music Director. To have the opportunity to play this truly exquisite tone poem with the orchestra that has been my musical family for the past 16 years is a dream come true. This is a piece that I think our
audiences will fully enjoy, especially Okanagan nature lovers, since it so aptly depicts the English countryside through folk melodies and birdsong in soaring violin cadenzas," says Schaffer.
Leonard Camplin, Conductor Laureate
PO Box 20238, Kelowna, BC V1Y 9H2
Tel: 250.763.7544 Fax: 250.763.3553
