Tomorrow, at The Crescent Arts Centre, at 7:30pm, The Manitoba Chamber Orchestral is inviting audience members to sojourn in various places around the world. Places such as New York, Paris, The Netherlands, India, Brazil and even North Battleford, Saskatchewan.
Your companion during these sojourns will be the four-time Juno Award winning composer and renaissance man David Braid. As a musician, David Braid has travelled the world absorbing musical languages and sounds from ethnicities from various regions of the world. These travels and experiences help form the basis of tomorrow night’s concert.
Joining Braid, and the musicians of The Manitoba Chamber Orchestra on stage, will be the outstanding Canadian violinist Mark Fewer.
Currently on faculty at the University of Toronto, Fewer is also a Juno winner. He has performed as a soloist with the Vancouver, Toronto, and Edmonton Symphony Orchestras. He also performed for a few years with the renowned St. Lawrence String Quartet. Called intrepid, Fewer is a champion of contemporary music having premiered over 200 works, with more than 50 of these pieces being written specifically for him.
Tomorrow night's concert will feature music by Steve Reich, Nicole Lizée, Jesse Montgomery, and Bryce Dessner. The concert will also feature the Canadian premiere of David Braid’s Joya Concerto for Piano, Violin, and Orchestra. Described as a jubilant celebration of the many interconnections of world cultures, Braid’s Concerto is sure to be fantastic!
Braid’s Joya Concerto is an amalgamation of two incredibly extraordinary events in Braid’s life. As he explains, “the title references two things. The first, is that one of the first ensembles to inspire me to consider how non-European art music can integrate into European Art music was this great quartet from the Netherlands called Zapp. I was playing a concert with them in the Netherlands, and these guys were on that particular night...it was electrifying!....we finished the set...there was this one particular piece that made use of a pentatonic scale that I had not heard of...and one of the members of the quartet, Oune van Geel, came backstage and said ‘joy, joy, joy’. Something to do with the color of the harmony and the feeling of the concert just planted some energy in me.”
Years later, Braid was playing a concert in Saskatoon and met Jaya Hoy, an excellent pianist with a truly singular life story, based in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. She invited Braid to perform a house concert at her home. “I spent a lovely few hours at her house doing this house concert, and there was all this beautiful Hindu art. In addition, her father, who was a doctor, collected soap stone sculptures. Her home was like a museum. At the time I was composing this melody, which actually became the theme to this concerto, which used this pentatonic scale from this experience of these Dutch guys saying ‘joy, joy, joy’, and then meeting Jaya Hoy, thinking about her story, and seeing this artwork, and somehow all that information came together to form the melody that became the theme to this concerto.”
David Braid and Mark Fewer have been performing together for many years, and the ease at which the collaborative process happened was seamless. As Fewer says, “I wanted the piece to showcase our relationship, but have enough in it that it could have a future. And I really believe that is where it is right now. Because we have that relationship this entire process has been nothing but a joy.” (pun intended).
The Joya Concerto draws on influences ranging from jazz to Indian Classical music, to music from places such as Azerbaijan and Armenia. One of the things that emerges from a compositional standpoint is that the melodic lines in the Joya Concerto can be quite long, especially in the opening section. “In the piece, I have this long theme which I take quite a long time to deliver to the audience to make sure that they have learned the theme to the exposition,” says Braid.
Braid takes the long theme and uses it to contrast with a second musical section, which has shorter melodic ideas. What happens in the final third section of the piece is a metamorphosis you must hear to believe. The two previous sections act as musical pupa before the butterfly that is third section emerges. It is truly magical!
Elements of jazz are also heard in the piece, and there are sections where the performer is left to create on the spot. “Some of the cadenzas are improvised...and how amazing is it that Mark, in addition to being incredibly versatile, is also a great improvisor. In some of the piece I just deliver a mode to start with. I love how that captures the beauty of what can happen spontaneously in a concert, and how we can make that musical value. It also makes every performance unique.”
Sojourn with the MCO, David Braid, and Mark Fewer is sure to be a fantastic concert! Music from remarkable minds such as Steve Reich, Nicole Lizée, Jessie Montgomery, and Bryce Dessner, combined with the Canadian premiere of a work that is sure to take on a life of its own; Braid’s Joya Concerto. This is a concert worth seeing.
Sojourn with the MCO takes place tomorrow at The Crescent Arts Centre at 7:30pm.
