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The Winnipeg New Music Festival officially gets underway on January 21, but music fans can get a taste of what to expect on January 18 at the Carol Shields Auditorium at the Millennium Library. That’s when students from Brandon University’s School of Music, in association with Virtuosi Concerts, will be performing an outreach concert as part of the WNMF's In the Community series.
“We’re so excited to have this opportunity to bring students from our performance program, undergraduate students and master’s students, to perform at the library,” said Leanne Zacharias, cello professor at Brandon University in conversation with Nolan Kehler on Morning Light.
The concert, entitled New Music Emerging features a diverse range of repertoire and instrumentation, with voice and cello students presenting 20th century innovators like Igor Stravinsky and Charles Ives, as well as living composers like Amy Brandon, whose works were featured in last year’s New Music Festival.
Then there’s a new collaboration that will be so new, the ink will have barely dried on Nic Bray’s score when Ariadna Ortega performs it on Saturday afternoon. Ortega, a master’s student in cello performance from Mexico City, studies with Zacharias and specializes in contemporary music performance.
“I love collaborating with composers,” explains Ortega about why she’s chosen to focus on contemporary works in her studies. “I love exploring extended techniques. I love working with electronics, and I’m trying to be more of an expert in that area right now.”
The piece Ortega will be sharing at New Music Emerging is something that she and Bray have been working closely on is an homage to another pioneer of the 20th century, Leonard Bernstein. Called "Teinsbern Deorlan" (at least, as of press time), the work is scored for solo cello and explores the influence that jazz music had on the famed composer and conductor.
“This is one of Nic’s first solo instrument works,” says Ortega. “We’ve known each other for two years now and we’ve seen each other working with each other’s music, and he wanted to do this for me, which is an honour.”
“It’s always a fine line being influenced by some of the greats... but also finding one’s own voice and one’s own unique language and style as a performer and as an interpreter,” adds Zacharias, who adds that balances between history and innovation and technique and interpretation are ones that she and other educators at Brandon University often have to strike.
This balance of technique was also instilled in Zacharias when she was a student studying with Paul Marleyn, the noted cellist and past president of the Agassiz Chamber Music Festival. “I remember him saying, ‘Every piece you play should develop your technique in a new way.’ And I still abide by that. It’s absolutely true.”
“We think of contemporary works as helping us develop next extended techniques. Prokofiev did that. And indeed, Bach did that. It’s always about technique and it’s always about interpretive voice no matter what era the repertoire is from.”
New Music Emerging takes the stage on Saturday, January 18 at 2 p.m. at the Millennium Library’s Carol Shields Auditorium. For tickets and more information about the Winnipeg New Music Festival, patrons are invited to visit the festival’s website.
