Fjord focus

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This article was published 22/10/2014 (3472 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Still flying high after last year’s successful Tchaikovsky Festival, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra kicks off the Nordic Festival with a series of nightly concerts beginning Friday, Oct. 24.

“We’ve tried to be a little more out of the box this year,” says WSO music director Alexander Mickelthwate. “I think audiences will experience a real eye-opener with all this amazing music.”

The week-long extravaganza celebrates music and film from five Nordic countries — Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden — at a variety of local venues. A pair of WSO Masterworks concerts that bookend the entire festival showcase two of Iceland’s most exciting current classical artists, led by the German-born maestro.

First up is award-winning violinist and concertmaster Sigrún Eðvaldsdòttir of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, who marks her WSO debut with Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D minor in the aptly titled Sigrún Plays Sibelius: Nordic Festival Opener on Friday, Oct. 24, and Saturday, Oct. 25, at 8 p.m.

I’m totally thrilled to have her,” says Mickelthwate, who will also conduct the Finnish composer’s intensely nationalistic Finlandia and the searing Credo by Iceland’s Kjartan Sveinsson, former keyboardist with Sigur Ròs, with local choir Prairie Voices (Vic Pankratz, director) that night.

“When we played this absolutely, beautifully harmonic choral piece during the 2012 New Music Festival, many in the audience were crying,” he recounts. “Suddenly there was a real connection between music and the soul.”

Another highlight will be dynamo pianist Vkingur ìlafsson performing Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, in Vikingur Plays Grieg: Nordic Festival Finale on Friday, Oct. 31, and Saturday, Nov. 1, at 8 p.m. The rising star inaugurated Reykjavk’s architecturally stunning Harpa concert hall, which opened in May 2011, sharing the stage with renowned Russian-born conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, who has both Icelandic and Swiss citizenship. The show repeats at Brandon’s Western Manitoba Centennial Auditorium on Sunday, Nov. 2, at 3 p.m.

The program includes the world première of Icelandic-Manitoban composer Kenley Kristofferson’s Morgun. The eight-minute tone poem commissioned to mark the 125th anniversary of the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba, Islendingadagurinn, pays homage to the scores of immigrants who settled in “New Iceland” (the Gimli region), which still remains home to the world’s largest concentration of people of Icelandic ancestry outside the motherland.

Choral lovers will not be disappointed, as Nordic countries are fabled for their rich vocal traditions. The venerable Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir led by Yuri Klaz — who hails from northern Europe’s Karelia region, which is closely tied to Finland — teams with Winnipeg’s Icelandic Choir, Sólskríkjan Kór (Kerrine Wilson, director) at Westminster United Church on Sunday, Oct. 26, at 3 p.m.

The polyglot program, which will be sung in five languages, features acclaimed Winnipeg-based coloratura soprano Tracy Dahl singing works by Grieg, Sibelius, Sigvaldi Kaldalóns and Sigfús Einarsson, as well as tenor/Icelandic scholar P.J. Buchan, who performs double duty as the show’s MC.

Currently on faculty with the University of Manitoba’s Icelandic department, Buchan credits lady luck for ultimately giving him his life’s work. After applying to study for one year in Reykjavik in 1993, the popular city musician fell in love with the culture and stayed another four. He now shares his passion for all things Icelandic, assisting the “Phil” with text pronunciation during rehearsals and inspiring with his astonishing breadth of Icelandic history and lore.

“Iceland has always maintained an unashamed appreciation of the esthetic quality of music, so you still have this beauty and love for melody, even in their more modern compositions,” Buchan explains over the phone. So fervent are the natives for choral music, he adds, that his choirmates — he sang in seven vocal groups during his stay — were often asked to spontaneously warble in complex, four-part harmony while pub-crawling after choir practice.

“Everyone sings over there, so it doesn’t have that kind of nerdy feeling that a lot of people seem to have here,” he says, laughing. “They sing for the joy of it and don’t particularly worry what it sounds like.”

For those who prefer their music up close and personal, the Winnipeg Chamber Music Society presents Nordic Chamber Music Masterpieces on Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m. at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. The intimate program performed by WCMS members: David Moroz, piano/artistic director; Gwen Hoebig, violin, Karl Stobbe, violin; Daniel Scholz, viola, and Yuri Hooker, cello includes company premières of Niels Gade’s Piano Trio in F major, and Rautavaara’s Summer Thoughts as well as Grieg’s String Quartet in G minor, last heard in 2009.

“One reason why I think audiences find Nordic music appealing is that composers treat traditional ensemble groupings in a more visceral way than their European counterparts,” Moroz says via email. “There is a certain concentrated approach to music that listeners appreciate at the most intuitive and instinctive levels.”

The University of Manitoba Orchestra, led by WSO resident conductor Julian Pellicano, performs a trio of works at Westworth United Church on Monday, Oct. 27, at 7:30 p.m., including Wilhelm Stenhammar’s magnum opus, Symphony No. 2 and Sibelius’s Karelia Suite. ñrjan Sandred, the Marcel A. Desautels Faculty of Music’s Swedish-born composition professor, provides his Mechanica for the bill as well.

For film buffs, there’s a screening of The Hunt (Jagten), billed as an “intelligent and disturbing dissection of Danish society” at Cinematheque on Thursday, Oct. 30, at 7 p.m.

Last but not least, Mickelthwate co-hosts a free roundtable discussion with WSO artistic operations associate James Manishen at McNally Robinson Booksellers on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 7:30 p.m. to discuss the unique beauty of Nordic music with its “calm, meditative and ambient” ethos he encountered first-hand after travelling to Iceland with New Music Festival artistic associate Matthew Patton in May 2011. That experience sparked the upcoming festival, as well as playing a significant role in the 2012 NMF.

He is keenly aware of Winnipeg’s simpatico relationship — as an internationally recognized Winter City — with its sisterlands of ice and snow, citing Sibelius’s seventh symphony as one that audiences will easily relate to.

“There are times when you can imagine the turning point of a long, cold and dark winter — when the air suddenly starts to change and becomes sweeter,” he says of the composer’s unusually scored, one-movement work completed in 1924.

“It’s like he captured that singular moment in the music — and that one only really knows if you’ve lived it.”

Individual tickets and festival passes (starting at $125) are available at the WSO box office, or at the door. For more information, call 204-949-3999 or visit www.wso.ca.

holly.harris@shaw.ca