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How does an orchestra become an orchestra in the first place?
That’s the question that the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra will be answering this weekend with the help of guest artists. Together, they will trace the history of the orchestra’s development and growth over the centuries in a concert called How to Grow an Orchestra with a healthy dose of comedy to boot.
According to the concert’s host, Winnipeg comedy veteran Lara Rae, the comedic nature of the concert helps to make orchestral music approachable for everyone. “The kind of classist notion of classical music and stuff being on some high plateau based on cost and ticket prices and so on is relatively new,” she explained in an interview on Morning Light.
“The people that made this music that were making music to entertain people of the time had no interest or even imagination of posterity or just working harder like us.”
To underscore the idea of orchestra as entertainment, the first instrument that the audience will encounter is a single conch shell played by a member of the orchestra’s horn section. From there, the orchestra will add instrumentalists as they journey through the centuries up to scores from Jurassic Park and World of Warcraft.
“The music is going to get a little bit more complex, more modernized, and you’ll really be able to see the orchestra grow before your eyes,” explains Armand Birk, the conductor for How to Grow an Orchestra. “You might look at this program like, ‘Why is Copland’s "Hoedown" and "Entrance of the Queen of Sheba" and Jurassic Park on the same program?’ It might not make any sense that way, but when you look at it and go through it, realizing how music has changed, how it’s gotten bigger, to me, it’s the perfect concert to get into classical music or classical repertory.”
With the wide range of music on the program, Birk acknowledges the challenge for musicians to navigate their way through several different performance styles. “It’s about finding a way to sort of migrate your style and playing throughout,” he says, “because, you know... how they’re going to approach phrasing style, even general articulation is going to be vastly different than how they’re to approach it Tchaikovsky or in Copland.”
“Part of it is being able to stay engaged in the narrative the entire concert has and how can we progress in our music-making and our style throughout all of those periods.”
How to Grow an Orchestra takes the Centennial Concert Hall stage at 2 p.m. on March 23. Tickets and more information can be found at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s website.