inTUNE – Page 28 – Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra

Meet Erin Brophey

When did you join the SSO? September 2010

How did you become interested in music earlier in your life? My mother always cleaned to classical music. I still associate Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with vacuuming and lemon scent.

How did you pick your instrument? I really liked the name. Seriously. I didn’t know what it looked or sounded like until it arrived in the mail.

When and how did you learn to play your instrument? Do you have your own way of learning/practicing? I learned from the great oboe master, Jim Mason (former SSO prinicpal oboe ) primarily in Music School. I have to make reeds for my instrument to make sound…I spend most of my time reed-making!

What piece of music would you most like to play that you haven’t before? Mahler Symphony no. 1

What piece of music do you love so much you could play again and again? Anything by Brahms.

Who are your biggest influences in classical music? Jim Mason, Jeanne Baxtresser and Measha Bruggergrossman

What’s the best advice you ever received in your career? Always be prepared and make more reeds than you think you need.

What advice would you give to young people pursuing music? Only pursue music if it is the only thing you wish to do……..if you have another interest, do that. It’s a calling not a career.

If you could work with one musician/composer/conductor, living or dead, who would it be and why? Poulenc. Based on the music he wrote, I believe he must have had a terrific sense of humour. I betcha I’d enjoy dinner with him,

What’s the best thing about being a musician? The music. Always the music. I love being surrounded by it.

What is your favourite sound? My daughter’s spontaneous laugh.

Least favourite? (musical or not) My daughters doleful cry.

What’s one of your favourite memories of playing with the SSO? I love remembering playing in the SSO with my daughter in my belly. She would dance inside me every time the timpani played.

What is your hope for the future of classical music in Saskatoon? I hope that the classical music continues to serve this community by providing a unique experience of temporal musical beauty that transcends our the mundanity of every day lives.

Gilliland’s Oboe Concerto

SSO audience’s got their first dose of Allan Gilliland’s amazing work last season when he orchestrated an entire show for us to perform with Eileen Laverty. Though born in England, Allan calls Edmonton home…and its easy to see where his adopted homeland has seeped into his musical styles.

His Oboe Concerto was the perfect fit for an SSO Baroque concert, and it gives us a chance to feature our own Principal Oboist Erin Brophey.

From the composer about the work:

This piece was commissioned by the Alberta Baroque Ensemble to celebrate their 25th. The idea of composing a piece of new music for an ensemble that specializes in music of the Baroque era provided some interesting challenges. Do you write a 21st century piece of music, do you write a work that is in the Baroque style, or do you write a piece that reflects the textures and gestures of that era but still is rooted in the present? I decided on all three.

I began by listening to a considerable number of oboe concerti from the Baroque period, specifically the works of Tomaso Albinoni. This resulted in a principal theme for the 1st movement that was very much in the Baroque style. I originally thought of developing it in a 21st century language but this proved unsuccessful and I decided to compose a 1st movement that is firmly rooted in the sound of the Baroque (hence the subtitle Albinology).

The theme for the 2nd movement was originally written as a wedding processional for one of my closest friends. This movement is more romantic in tone and the subtitle, Go Deeply Now Everlasting, is derived from the couple’s initials.

The 3rd movement is subtitled with perpetual motion to reflect the constant 1/8th note that lasts throughout. This movement sounds the most “modern” of the three but still reflects a textures common to the Baroque. After completing the work I realized that the over-arching form is the movement from the Baroque to the 21st century.

Take a listen…

Composer – Emily Doolittle

Canadian-born, Scotland-based composer Emily Doolittle grew up in Halifax Nova Scotia and was educated at Dalhousie University, the Koninklijk Conservatorium in the Hague, Indiana University and Princeton University. From 2008-2015 she was Assistant/Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Cornish College of the Arts. She now lives in Glasgow, UK, where she is an Athenaeum Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

She has written for such ensembles as Orchestre Métropolitain (Montreal), Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (Toronto), Symphony Nova Scotia, the Vancouver Island Symphony, Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal, the Motion Ensemble and Paragon, and such soloists as sopranos Suzie LeBlanc, Janice Jackson, Patricia Green and Helen Pridmore, pianist Rachel Iwaasa, violinist Annette-Barbara Vogel, viola d’amorist Thomas Georgi and viola da gambist Karin Preslmayr.

Emily Doolittle has an ongoing research interest in zoomusicology, the study of the relationship between human music and animal songs. She recently spent 3 months as composer-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany. Other interests include the traditional music of various cultures, community music-making, and music as a vehicle for social change.

She was awarded a 2016 Opera America Discovery Grant, as well as funding from the Hinrichsen Foundation and the Canada Council of the Arts, for the development of her chamber opera Jan Tait and the Bear, which was premiered by Ensemble Thing, with Alan McHugh, Catherine Backhouse, and Brian McBride, conducted by Tom Butler and directed by Stasi Schaeffer, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. Upcoming projects include commissions from the Cherry Street Duo and the Fair Trade String Trio, research on grey seal vocalizations at St Andrews University and a new seal-inspired piece for the St Andrews New Music Ensemble conducted by Bede Williams, and a set of new spring wassailing songs written and researched with the support of a Canada Council for the Arts Grant to Professionals.

Hear her work Sapling live March 25th, 2017 with violinist Carissa Klopoushak.

Stravinsky’s Firebird 1919

In 1910, Stravinsky premiered The Firebird ballet with the Ballet Russe, and it became an international success. The new collaboration between Sergei Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and the brilliant dancer Nijinsky brought together what must be considered the most extraordinary minds in ballet history.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born in 1882 in Russia, became a French citizen by 1934, and then a naturalized American in 1945. He died in New York in 1971. His early musical training was inconsequential (though his father was a respected Russian Basso) and thus he studied law. It was not until he joined with the great Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov that Stravinsky’s musical talents became ignited. Impresario Sergei Diaghilev heard Stravinsky’s music in 1908, and with continued encouragement Stravinsky wrote his first full length orchestral work, The Firebird, which made him famous and provided the genesis for two more ballets, Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring.

History recalls these first seasons of remarkable performances of the Ballet Russe as “Everything that could strike the imagination, intoxicate, enchant, and win one over seemed to have been assembled on that stage …”.

Stravinsky was asked to write the music to this folk tale just months before its premiere. Previously it had been handed to the Russian composer Liadov (one of the Mighty Handful of Russian composers), but he procrastinated. Thus 27 year-old Stravinsky, unknown outside of Russia, was asked. His Firebird is considered one of his masterpieces.

The Firebird illustrates a popular Russian folk tale, summarized below:

(Introduction) The czar’s son, Prince Ivan, has an unexpected meeting with “a fabulous bird with plumage of fire” during a hunting excursion. In exchange for not being hunted down by Ivan, the fabulous Firebird bargains her freedom by giving Ivan a magic feather (The Firebird and Her Dance). Later, Ivan chances upon an enchanted castle with a courtyard full of lovely maidens (Round Dance of the Princesses). They warn Ivan of the evil Kastchei in the castle who, for his own amusement, turns travelers into stone. Ivan, undaunted, enters the castle, and is faced by the evil Kastchei. The magic feather shields him from harm, and the Firebird appears, sending Kastchei and his ogres into a mad dance (Infernal Dance of King Kastchei). The evil ones are left exhausted and eventually destroyed by the Firebird (Berceuse). Kastchei’s victims are freed from their stone spells, and Ivan wins the hand of a lovely Princess (Finale)

Meet Erin Brophey

Gilliland’s Oboe Concerto

Composer – Emily Doolittle

Stravinsky’s Firebird 1919

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