2017-2018 Season

Mezzo soprano Lisa Hornung is likely the SSO’s most featured artist – a regular on our stage for 30 seasons!  

Aside from her wonderful text-driven oratorio performances, Lisa is a renowned teacher and hosts a vocal school each summer in her hometown, North Battleford.  Summer School for the Solo Voice recently celebrated its 20th season.

She returns for our performance of Handel’s Messiah – so we grabbed some of her time to ask her a few questions!

How did you discover you wanted to be a singer?

I always sang. Sing songs in my family were a regular occurrence.  Both sides of my family, grandparents and parents, aunts and uncles, were always singing, humming, playing music.  It wasn’t until I was 12 and my aunt told me to take lessons (which I was initially devastated by thinking she meant I was horrid) that I even realized singing lessons was ‘a thing’

What draws you to Handel’s Messiah?

It is my favorite work.  I love the text, the incredible variety in style, tempi, texture and mood.  It isn’t a work you have to ‘come to appreciate or acquire a taste for’. It is immediately accessible and thrilling to the ear, mind and soul.

What’s your favourite part of Messiah? (your own part, and a part you don’t get to sing!)

When the choir is hot and spot on- makes me smile, and sometimes giggle, whether I want to or not.  The choral arts, the collaboration, is magnificent. My own part- the return to the A section in He was despised.  I love how settled and warm the orchestra always is and the pathos of ornamentation the second time ‘round.

When was the first time you saw Messiah?

Hmmm, as I think about it, I have not seen a Messiah I was not singing in.  The first time I heard and learned the music was in university in Greystone Singers….as a soprano!  :). Since them I have sung in a Messiah as alto soloist somewhere every season that I was not sick or singing something else.

What do you find most challenging about singing Handel’s music? 

Keeping my nerves, worry and ego at bay to let the full intent and expression of the text shine.  The music is  difficult and technically very demanding so it is easy to get caught up worrying about what people will think about me instead of how Handel will make them think. 

Who were your biggest musical influences?

Bernadette Fanner,  Christa Ludwig, Richard Best.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve received in your career?

Don’t go out there to see if you can sing, go out there because you can sing, then,  sing to express, not to impress – Richard Best

Do you get nervous before your performances?

Oh Lord, yes :). I remind myself this is not about me but about honoring the composer and serving the audience. Then putting on make-up, a gown and baubles is a big help as I am almost always in jeans, plaid and a ponytail. It’s like stepping into a braver person’s skin for awhile.

How do you prepare for a performance with an orchestra?

Learning and being at home with the orchestral part is important for me.  Trying to understand how the composer used the instrumentation, tempi, and orchestration to uplift the text.  I spend a great deal of time securing rhythm and tempo so flexibility is an easy option depending the conductor’s ideas.  Once I have learned a work I listen to several different recordings of it to hear others’ ideas and interpretations. 

Do you have special warm ups that you always use before performing?

No.  Kind of depends on the day, how I am feeling and what I feel like singing.  Often I make stuff up and mess around with new warm up ideas on performance days. 

How would you convince someone to come to Messiah for the first time?

If you hate it I will give you the price of your ticket :). I am that confident in this incredible work.  There is such an astonishing variety of mood, voicing, style, story, text- truly something for everyone.  And honestly, it’s Handel, what’s not to love?

 See and hear SSO favorite Lisa Hornung in our upcoming performances of Handel’s Messiah, December 15th and 16th.

Soprano Chelsea Mahan has been a staple of the SSO’s programming of the last few seasons – she’s regularly featured in oratorio works with the orchestra and has become an audience favorite!

She is a home-grown talent, and we’re thrilled to have her back with the SSO again this season!

We took some time with each of our Messiah soloists for a quick Q&A.

When did you make your SSO debut?

In December of 2013 with Maestro Victor Sawa… singing  the Messiah, of course!

How did you discover you wanted to be a singer?

My family – growing up with 6 sisters we sang all the time. I wanted to be an actor first, but when I realized singing was acting, went that route!

What’s your favourite part of Messiah? (your own part, and a part you don’t get to sing!)

Ooo. That’s a toughy… Well, my favorite part in the soprano solo is in the recit, when you hear the angels descend in the orchestra and I come in with “and suddenly, there was with the angels a multitude of the Heavenly host…” You can hear everything in the orchestra – the angel wings flapping, the stars twinkling…followed by the chorus, who are the angels –  it always excites me!

I also love But who may abide… in the Refiner’s Fire, with the low voice, you really feel the fire burn in the coloratura and it gets pretty toasty.

When was the first time you saw Messiah?

I actually never saw the Messiah until after I performed it with the Greystone Singers a couple of times. (Once with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet!) I guess the first time I saw it was from within the choir.

What do you find challenging about singing Handel’s music?

I suppose the fact that it’s in (older) English. You take for granted that it’s your native language, thus less time goes into “text work.” And everything is easier to sing when you are super connected with the text, inside and out.

Who were your biggest musical influences?

As a kid, Rogers and Hammerstein and Abba…(seriously). They taught me how to tell a story with song.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve received in your career?

Be prepared. Be the colleague you would want to work with and for. Be genuine and kind to others and to yourself.

Do you get nervous before your performances? If so, how do you calm your nerves?

I usually get a healthy dose of nerves that I don’t really want to calm, cause I find them beneficial.
On the odd chance I get bad nerves, I say the first line of my text over and over and trust the rest is so ingrained it will follow.

How do you prepare for a performance with an orchestra?

I like a big early supper, doing my hair, warming up, looking over my score at the venue, followed by sips of water and lipstick!

Do you have special warm ups that you always use before performing?

Lip trills *surprise* …I also like to channel the effortlessness and simplicity of singers I have met in the past -that type of backstage rapport and warming up lets me relax into the confidence of my preparation.

If you had to convince someone who’s never seen Handel’s Messiah before to come to your performance, what would you say to convince them.

The music is so special (perhaps the reason this has been a tradition for hundreds of years…) It is full of light and life and story. If you let go of preconceived notions and let it transport you, I guarantee you will leave uplifted!

See Chelsea as the soprano soloist with the SSO on December 15th and 16th.
Visit www.chelseamahan.com for more information!

The SSO is excited to team up with the Saskatoon Jazz Orchestra to bring you not one, but two Nutcracker Suites!

Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet has proven to be one of the most timeless holiday traditions.  The composer capitalized on his incredible ballet to create one of the most fun and festive pieces in the orchestral repertoire.  Alongside Handel’s Messiah, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker is  the musical signaling of the holiday season.

The Suite features dances from the ballet’s second act, and the melodies have gone on to become some of the most loved ever written.

At Christmas 1960, the composing duo managed something truly extraordinary: a successful reimagining of The Nutcracker Suite. This suite was first composed as a ballet score by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1892. It wasn’t until 68 years later that Ellington and Strayhorn released their own version, refocused through the lens of big band jazz.

In his original liner notes for the Ellington-Strayhorn Nutcracker Suite, record producer Irving Townsend included the fantastic fiction that Ellington met Tchaikovsky while Ellington’s orchestra was performing at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. Knowing that the Russian died in 1893, a full six years before the American was born, this meeting never could have happened in the literal sense. However, listening to the jazzed-up Nutcracker, one could imagine the work as a meeting place for

Ellington and Strayhorn did not simply place jazz rhythms over Tchaikovsky’s music. Instead, they picked up the notes, recast the beats, communed with the themes, and recreated the work, turning it into something that was at once completely their own and completely Tchaikovsky’s. In doing so, they showed that while music may be the universal language, it is spoken with many accents (and therein lies the fun).

So what can you expect at our Nutcracker Meets Duke Ellington concert?  Here’s an example…

Tchaikovsky wrote this…

And Ellington and Strayhorn created this little ditty….

Co-commissioned by the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra and Symphony Nova Scotia with a grant from the Ontario Arts Council, Thunder Drum is a work for small orchestra and audio playback. (The audio playback is delivered from a MIDI keyboard.) Although the music of the outer movements is reminiscent of Western European 19th Century music and of more recent epic film sountracks, the underlying theme is informed by a vision of human prehistory expounded by the American mystic Edgar Cayce related to the shifting fortunes of what has been traditionally known as the “red race”, the native inhabitants of the north and central regions of the American continent. A great and lasting influence in my thinking and artistic imagination, Edgar Cayce (1877 – 1945) had mentioned in several of his trance utterances that the antediluvian world we know through legend as “Atlantis” was an advanced civilization dominated by the “red race” which had reached knowledge and technological heights comparable to our own. It fell spectacularly, having pushed its unquenchable thirst for ever increasing energy and power to ecological havoc, as our current civilization too is in danger of reaching with an exponentially increasing likelihood.

 Elegy for a Lost World, the first movement of Thunder Drum, is a musical meditation on this loss, which is traumatically felt by our collective psyche as deep seated memory, in spite of the absence of any external evidence for the existence and loss of such an advanced civilization in our collective past. Beginning and developing along 19th Century European common harmonic and melodic practice (another vanishing world), the music is a vague reminiscence of a two-theme classical sonata form. Rising and then falling, the first lament-like theme is occasionally succeeded by another of serene reminiscence whose infrequent appearance only serves to highlight the sense of loss represented by the first theme. This melodic/harmonic discourse is gradually overtaken by denser chromaticism and accompanying musical tension, exacerbated by the technological “fly by” sound effects of the playback audio which are becoming ever more prominent. The movement concludes with a Beethovenesque tragic cadence.

 Games, the second movement, is a great leap to the present moment. The industrial like “quantized” loops in the playback audio with their unexpected twists and turns are combined with pre-recorded samples by Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, one of the world’s best known Inuit artists, (used by permission from a recording session with Tanya for our collaboration on the ballet Going Home Star: Truth and Reconciliation). This sonic background constantly challenges an agile orchestra to technically rise to its unpredictable rhythmic demands, a task increasingly frustrated by metric modulations and other devices of rhythmic complexity. Fiendishly challenging for the conductor to keep the orchestra and the playback together, this erratic and increasingly aggressive movement ends with a series of short modal melodic gestures, which are rather foreign to the otherwise consistent sonic world of this movement but presages the thematic material of the third movement

Without any pause, Reconstitution, the third movement, begins quietly with a timid thematic development of the aggressive modal gestures that concluded the previous movement. They are in quintuple meter, the number five being a numerological indicator of human strife and aggression (pentagon, pentagram, etc.). The music once more picks up pace and energy and, this time around, it ends in an epic, triumphant but also hollow ending with the opening theme of Thunder Drum modulating to an altered major-like mode. In the aftermath of this triumphant conclusion, however, the two modes, the major and the minor are constantly alternating, suggesting an ambivalence and incompleteness that needs to be mediated upon in a future compositional essay. As history teaches us repeatedly, the phenomenon of the oppressed rising to power and dominance only creates a new imbalance of oppressors and oppressed with roles simply reversed, unless a deeper understanding of human purpose is learned through this macro-historical exercise. While rising to dominance may look and sound like historical justice, it does not address humanity’s deeper challenges and aspirations: of each and every one of us becoming our “brother’s keeper”; of treating others as we would have them treat us—the deeper (and perhaps only) Christian message.

While the name Vivaldi is a household classical name, its easy to forget that until the early 20th century his music had been completely forgotten.

By 1926, nearly all of Vivaldi’s work had been lost. So when Turin University musicologist Alberto Gentili was presented with a box of incomplete, unsorted pages from hundreds of Vivaldi’s compositions, he began a ten-year investigation to hunt down the remaining pages and place them in their original order. The end result: 319 complete Antonio Vivaldi compositions that had been lost to the world for nearly two centuries.

The explosion of new work from Vivaldi—a relatively obscure musician whose influence had been long-acknowledged, but whose music had all but disappeared—gave his work a new public debut. It was as if Vivaldi had been born a second time, and had a very short, implausibly prolific career. By the 1950s, his music held a unique place in the canon: Antonio Vivaldi was acknowledged by scholars as one of the greatest and most influential classical musicians in history, but he was also seen by the listening public as fresh, mysterious, and unfamiliar. No other composer of similar prominence has experienced that kind of rebirth, and it’s unlikely that any ever will.

The SSO explore two incredible Vivaldi works this week with violinist Pascale Giguere for our first Baroque Series concert of the year.

The SSO is thrilled to bring one of Canada’s finest violinists as soloist and guest concertmaster for our first Baroque Series event of the year – there’s a good reason why her Vivaldi and Piazzolla are not to be missed!

Pascale Giguère has been a member of Les Violons du Roy since 1995. She was co-concertmaster from 2000 to 2013, and has been concertmaster since 2014. She has performed with the ensemble in some of the world’s leading venues, including the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and Carnegie Hall in New York, and at leading festivals in Canada, the United States and Europe. Pascale Giguère has also taken part in recordings with Les Violons for the labels Dorian, Atma and Virgin Classics.

In recent years, Pascale Giguère has appeared as a soloist with Les Violons du Roy, in particular in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons; the latter work was recorded by Atma and received a Juno award. She has also performed with the Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, Orchestre symphonique de Laval and Orchestre des Grands Ballets Canadiens, with which she played Stravinsky’s Concerto in D, an experience she repeated in December 2006 with the Orchestre symphonique de Québec conducted by Yoav Talmi. In recent seasons she has appeared as a guest soloist at the Domaine Forget international festival and the Parry Sound Festival.

Pascale Giguère studied at the Montréal Conservatory with Raymond Dessaints, obtaining Premier Prix diplomas in violin and chamber music. She has also won several important prizes, including Grand Prize at the CIBC National Music Festival, First Prize at the Orchestre symphonique de Québec competition, and the prestigious Prix d’Europe award in 1993, which allowed her to continue her studies at Boston University with Roman Totenberg, Peter Zazovski and the Muir Quartet.

Pascale leads the SSO on November 4th as guest concertmaster and soloist in Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.