The 5 Top SSO Stocking Stuffers

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…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz_f9B4pPtg]

And Ellington and Strayhorn created this little ditty….

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FweWVFcVO00]

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.

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.

Conductor Alexander Shelley’s impact on the National Arts Centre Orchestra is already being heard.  

The 38 year old British conductor took the position of Music Director of Canada’s national orchestra in 2015 and since then the orchestra has embarked on some remarkably ambitious projects.  Shelley’s first move was to commission four new works for the program Life Reflected.

NACO’s visit to Saskatoon marks Shelley’s first visit and performance to Saskatchewan.

Alexander Shelley succeeded Pinchas Zukerman as Music Director of Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra in September 2015. The ensemble has since been praised by the Ottawa Citizen as “an orchestra transformed […] hungry, bold, and unleashed” and Shelley’s programming credited by Maclean’s Magazine for turning the orchestra “almost overnight […] into one of the more audacious orchestras in North America.”

Born in London in October 1979, Shelley, the son of celebrated concert pianists, studied cello and conducting in Germany and first gained widespread attention when he was unanimously awarded first prize at the 2005 Leeds Conductors Competition, with the press describing him as “the most exciting and gifted young conductor to have taken this highly prestigious award. His conducting technique is immaculate, everything crystal clear and a tool to his inborn musicality.” He has been Chief Conductor of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra since September 2009 where he is credited with transforming the orchestra’s playing, education work and touring activities. These have included concerts in Italy, Belgium, China and a re-invitation to the Musikverein in Vienna.

In January 2015 he assumed the role of Principal Associate Conductor of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with whom he curates an annual series of concerts at Cadogan Hall and tours both nationally and internationally.

Described as “a natural communicator both on and off the podium” (Daily Telegraph) Shelley works regularly with the leading orchestras of Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia. This season sees him returning twice to Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra, as well as to the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, DSO Berlin, Hong Kong Philharmonic and the Frankfurt Radio, Gothenburg, Melbourne and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras. Forthcoming debuts include Bergen, Helsinki and Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestras and the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra.

In January 2017 he again leads Germany’s National Youth Orchestra on an extensive national tour, with performances in the Philharmonic Halls of Berlin (broadcast live on Digital Hall), Cologne and Essen, as well as Hamburg Opera and the Semperoper Dresden. This follows a similar tour in 2014, which included a collaborative concert at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival with Sir Simon Rattle and members of the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Shelley’s operatic engagements have included The Merry Widow and Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet (Royal Danish Opera); La Bohème (Opera Lyra / National Arts Centre), Iolanta (Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen), Cosi fan tutte (Montpellier) and The Marriage of Figaro (Opera North) in 2015. In 2017 he leads a co-production of Harry Somers’ Louis Riel with the NACO and Canadian Opera Company.

Possessing an “uncanny gift for looking past but not indiscriminately discarding accumulated traditions and forming his own interpretations of familiar pieces” (Voix des Arts) Shelley’s first recording for Deutsche Grammophon, an album with Daniel Hope and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, was released in September 2014. Shelley’s second recording for Deutsche Grammophon, “Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood” is a brand-new adaptation of the Prokofiev children’s classic recorded with the Bundesjungendorchester. Available as both an album and app, it also features in DG’s ground-breaking interactive digital storytelling project, developed with the celebrated New York production company Giants Are Small.

Shelley enjoys a close relationship with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, with whom he performs regularly both in their subscription concerts and around Germany. In 2013 he led the orchestra on tour to Italy with a signature programme of Strauss, Wagner and Brahms. He is Artistic Director of their Zukunftslabor project – an ECHO and Deutsche Gründerpreis winning series which aims to build a lasting relationship between the orchestra and a new generation of concert-goers through grass-roots engagement and which uses music as a source for social cohesion and integration.

Through his work as Founder and Artistic Director of the Schumann Camerata and their ground-breaking “440Hz” series in Düsseldorf during his studies and through his leadership of outreach projects in Nuremberg, Bremen and Ottawa, inspiring future generations of classical musicians and listeners has always been central to Shelley’s work. He regularly gives informed and passionate pre- and post-concert talks on his programmes, interviews and podcasts on the role of classical music in society and has a wealth of experience conducting and presenting major open-air events. In Nuremberg alone he has, over the course of eight years, hosted more than half a million people at the annual Klassik Open Air concerts – Europe’s largest classical music event.

Don’t miss Alexander Shelley and the National Arts Centre Orchestra on October 23rd at TCU Place.
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