This Sunday, October 6 at 3 p.m. at the Wag-Qaumajug's Muriel Richardson Auditorium, The Women’s Musical Club of Winnipeg in Collaboration with Jazz Winnipeg with partial sponsorship provided by Asdel Structural Engineers will be presenting a concert that features one of Canada's bright lights of composition and cross-cultural musical melding.
Polymath, educator, philosopher, composer, conductor, and pianist Dinuk Wijeratne has been entertaining and enlightening audiences from Coast to Coast to Coast.
Born in Sir Lanka, raised in Dubai, and musically educated at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England and at the Julliard School, Wijeratne has taken the cultural and musical ingredients he has gathered along the way and made use of them to compose works that are wonderfully unforgettable and excellent.
In the process he won a Juno Award in 2016, has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Centre, The Kennedy Centre; he has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and composed works for the likes of The Gryphon Trio, James Ehnes, Ed Thigpen, David Jalbert and Suzie LeBlanc and has had many of his compositions performed by all of Canada’s major Orchestras, including our own Manitoba Chamber Orchestra.
For Sunday’s show, Dinuk Wijeratne will be joined by East Coast musicians percussionist Nick Halley, and Bassist Tom Easley.
The collaborative effort involved to bring Wijeratne to Winnipeg was started by the Women’s Music Club of Winnipeg. As he explains, “they happened to be at my second concert with the MCO ... people from the Women’s Musical Club approached me and they talked about the collaboration. We are really looking forward to bringing a different kind of program to Winnipeg.”
Wijeratne will be joined on stage by two of his favourite musicians to perform with, percussionist Nick Halley and bassist Tom Easley. Both musicians are very familiar with Wijeratne’s compositional style and understand what he is going for in his compositions.
Regarding Halley, Wijeratne says, “Nick is a fantastic musician. He’s fluent in a lot of Brazilian hand percussion. He knows about the Indian traditions; he knows about the Middle Eastern traditions. He is one of those musicians you just want to write for. He can in a semi-improvised context, take sometimes just a skeleton of material, but understanding your intent he can really bring it to life in a very personal and wonderful way.”
Wijeratne met bassist Tom Easley when he was living on the East Coast. “He was one of the bass players that everyone talked about on the East Coast. It's just great to play with him. It is a real treat.”
Having these two excellent musicians playing alongside Wijeratne is very important. Wijeratne draws on musical styles from the Middle East and South Asia in his compositions, and the understanding of these rhythmic and the musical traditions is crucial in order to successfully get across musical ideas to the audience.
Taking these musical influences from other cultures and letting the musicians improvise and explore themes in that context is something that Wijeratne is very much looking forward to in Sunday’s performance. “Improvisation is one of the greatest musical joys...I suppose what we are trying to do is blur the line between the composed and the improvised. There is a whole bunch of influences... and perhaps the experimentation with a lot of classical structures is there as well.”
The throughline of the concert is the idea of home and what home means to each of us. As Wijeratne explains, “There is this meeting of cultures aspect to it [the concert] but along the way this question of ‘how do we define home in an increasingly globalized world when so many of us have multi-faceted identities.’ We travel around...we sometimes feel at home in different places, and we don’t know why...so I hope the music will be able to pose some questions to the audience.”
This is going to be an amazing show! The concert takes place this Sunday, October 6, at 3 p.m. at the Wag-Qaumajug's Muriel Richardson Auditorium.
For more details on the concert and how to get tickets to Sunday's concert with the Dinuk Wijeratne Trio click here