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Several Manitoba-made sounds are receiving recognition as the Western Canadian Music Awards announced their slate of nominees for 2025.
The classical and jazz categories both featured prominent Manitoba ensembles with the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra earning a nod for Jazz Artist of the Year, while the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra received two nominations – one for Classical Artist or Ensemble of the Year, and the other alongside Winnipeg-based composer Glenn Buhr for his Violincello Concerto no. 2, which they recorded alongside cellist Ariel Barnes.
“I just approached the orchestra and asked them if they would be interested in recording it because they were performing it live anyway,” said Buhr in an interview on Morning Light, “and they were really delighted by the idea.”
Buhr and Barnes first collaborated together on another piece commissioned by the MCO in Vancouver in a concert with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (another ensemble that received a WCMA nomination) conducted at the time by the late Bramwell Tovey (whose conducting received a WCMA nod for Jeffrey Ryan’s Afghanistan: Requiem for a Generation). “[Barnes] said, ‘Could you please carry this forward into a larger work?’,” recounts Buhr, “and so one thing led to the other, and over the course of the years, I did pull off a concerto.”
Buhr, who usually collaborates with smaller, more improvisatory ensembles in his DreamPlay small concerts series in classical-jazz fusion, notes that the concerto’s inspiration initially came out of his songwriting work. “I was at a cottage that we were renting near Lake of the Woods in the summer,” he recounts, “and there was a kitschy kind of framed quote from Shakespeare on the wall about how beautiful it is to be in the woods, and I looked at it and I could hear the rhythms, the iambic pentameter. I could really hear it, really feel it, and I thought I would like to set those three lines of Shakespeare and turn it into a song.”
Although that song eventually lost its words, the rhythm of speech remained in Barnes’ cello line as Buhr composed variations on the melody.
“All musicians are singers whether they actually sing with their voice or not,” Buhr elaborates. “You can never lose the singing in music. If you lose the singing, that’s when you know the music is written by a robot.”
Former WSO composer-in-residence Vincent Ho, Northwest Territories composer Carmen Braden and Vancouver composer Nova Pon also received nominations in the Classical Composer of the Year category alongside Buhr and Ryan. Three British Columbia ensembles (the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Chamber Choir, and the Turning Point Ensemble) along with Alberta choir Luminous Voices join the MCO in the Classical Artist or Ensemble of the Year category. The Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra is nominated for Jazz Artist of the Year alongside Jon Bentley, Raagaverse, Peggy Lee & Cole Schmidt and Montuno West.
Click here to view the full list of Manitobans nominated in all genres.