This Sunday, November 24th at 3pm at the Lutheran Church of the Cross, The Winnipeg Wind Ensemble will be holding a concert called Holidays and Holy Days.
Formed in the fall of 1985 by band directors and other professional musicians, The Winnipeg Wind Ensemble is dedicated to bringing wind band music of the highest quality to Winnipeg audiences. The ensemble is the premiere Wind Band in the Province.
On Sunday’s program there will be works by Strauss, Godfrey Ridout, Andrew Balfour and more; with some of the compositions on the program being arranged for wind ensemble.
Frequently, as part of the Winnipeg Wind Ensemble’s mandate to both educate and entertain, the ensemble welcomes student ensembles to the stage to perform. For this concert they will be welcoming the Oak Park Saxophone Quartet to the stage to perform a couple of selections.
The idea for the concert theme came as the result of a performance the Winnipeg Wind Ensemble had done earlier this fall. Virginia Helmer is the Artistic Director of the Winnipeg Wind Ensemble as she explains, “We performed on the Senior High Honor band concert on November the 2nd, so it seemed obvious to me that Allerseelen (All Souls Day by Richard Strauss) would be a good choice because that is [November 2nd] all souls day. And that got me thinking about what else we could do to fill out that program...and there a lot of holidays associated with this time of year in a lot of different cultures and so that is how I got started.”
In addition to Richard Strauss’s beautiful piece Allerseelen, the ensemble will also be performing Ron Nelson’s wonderful Morning Alleluias for the Winter Solstice. Commissioned by the legendary Wind Ensemble director and band icon Frederick Fennell, the piece is inspired by the early morning sunlight that Fennell saw coming through his hotel room window in Hiroshima and the resiliency of the people of the city after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. The piece is also inspired by, as the name suggests, by the solstice. As Helmer explains, “Ron Nelson was really interested in the winter solstice. He wrote a piece of music for the Winter solstice every year. Some of them were never published. He used a choir piece that he had written that was based on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Ring Out, Wild Bells and he rearranged it for wind ensemble and that is what the second half of Morning Alleluias for the Winter Solstice is.”
The ensemble will also be performing Roger Nixon’s boisterous Fiesta del Pacifico, which is inspired by a festival that happens in San Diego. As the program notes state:
Fiesta del Pacifico is one of several festivals held annually in various communities in California which celebrate the old Spanish days of the state. This particular festival is held in San Diego for 12 days in the summer and features a play on the history of the area with a cast of over 1,000, a parade, a rodeo, and street dances.
- Program Note from the publisher Boosey and Hawkes
The Winipeg Wind Ensemble will also be doing a couple of arrangements for wind band that have very definite Winnipeg connections.
They will be doing a transcription of Canadian composer Godfrey Ridout’s perennial favorite Fall Fair. The piece has been arranged for wind ensemble by U of M Desautels Faculty of Music Professor of music theory David Byrne. Byrne is also the ensemble’s bass clarinet player. As Helmer says, “There is an existing arrangement that has been played for many years for winds and we started out with that version actually... and then David approached me and said, ‘years ago I played this and I wanted to do my own arrangement that is more faithful to the original orchestral version.’ I looked at it, and it was a no-brainer. It is a great arrangement.”
The other Winnipeg connection is that the ensemble will be performing Juno nominated Winnipeg composer Andrew Balfour’s piece Vision Chant. Originally written for the Winnipeg choir Camerata Nova (now known as Dead of Winter) the piece has been arranged for band by the Dr. Mark Hopkins, who is a Professor of conducting and music education at Acadia University. As Helmer says of the piece, “It is evocative of the story of the windigo in indigenous legend. It’s partially intended to promote the indigenous perspective of not taking more than you should and being careful with resources and taking care of things.”
The Winnipeg Wind Ensemble has many band directors as members, and one of the group's mandates is to not only perform but also educate and give students an opportunity to play for larger audiences.
For the Holidays and Holy Days concert, the ensemble will be welcoming to the stage the Oak Park Saxophone Quartet. They will be performing music by Mozart, as well as a Christmas selection that has been arranged by their band director Matt Neufeld.
This is going to be an outstanding concert, performed by some of Winnipeg’s best musicians. A truly excellent way to enjoy a Sunday afternoon!
Holidays and Holy Days with the Winnipeg Wind Ensemble takes place this Sunday, November 24th at 3pm at the Lutheran Church of the Cross.