≈ 90 minutes · No intermission
Repertoire
Coincident Dances for orchestra
Acclaimed American composer Jessie Montgomery (b.1981) is also a violinist and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Since 1999, she has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African American and Latinx string players and has served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the Organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble. A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and a former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Jessie holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. She is Professor of violin and composition at The New School. In May 2021, she began her three-year appointment as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
According to her biography, Jessie’s music, which includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral pieces, “interweaves Western classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st century American sound and experience.” The Washington Post has described her works as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life”—words which, in fact, wholly apply to her orchestral piece, Coincident Dances. Commissioned by the Chicago Sinfonietta in 2017, it is a vibrant sonic street party that Jessie explains “is inspired by the sounds found in New York’s various cultures, capturing the frenetic energy and multicultural aural palette one hears even in a short walk through a New York City neighbourhood.”
Beginning with a rhapsodic double-bass solo, the work then moves through several different sound worlds, fusing music as varied as English consort, samba, mbira dance music from Ghana, sing, and techno. “My reason for choosing these styles,” Jessie notes, “sometimes stemmed from an actual experience of accidentally hearing a pair simultaneously, which happens most days of the week walking down the streets of New York, or one time when I heard a parked car playing Latin jazz while I had rhythm and blues in my headphones. Some of the pairings are merely experiments. Working in this mode, the orchestra takes on the role of a DJ of a multicultural dance track.”
Trombone Concerto (Hillary Simms, trombone)
Verdala (Canadian premiere)
Affairs of the Heart (Duncan McDougall, violin)
Sinfonietta
I. Andantino ma energico
II. Larghetto piacevole
III. Allegro molto con brio
Canadian composer Violet Archer relished writing music for orchestra. Although trained as a pianist and organist, she spent nearly eight years (1940–1947) as the percussionist for the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra, playing all percussion instruments except the timpani. She credits the experience for her interest in—and understanding of—writing for the orchestral medium. “Being in that orchestra was a great learning experience in the ‘inside’ of orchestra sound,” she said in an autobiographical essay. “It also made me conscious of the importance of the dynamic value of percussion instruments in the orchestral fabric.”
Archer’s Sinfonietta from 1968, originally commissioned by the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra, is a fine display of her signature style and craft in writing for large instrumental ensemble. In each of its three movements, groups of instruments are assigned various melodic motifs, which they present, develop, and recombine in dialogue with each other. With the textures being relatively spare rather than dense, the distinctive timbres of the instruments—as well as the artistry of the orchestra’s musicians—are allowed to shine.
The energetic first movement has a somewhat grand, ceremonial quality about it with its trumpet fanfares and the ratatat of the snare drum throughout. It progresses, first by individually highlighting in turn three main sections of the orchestra and their respective motifs—strings, then dialoguing woodwinds, and later, the brass with bold proclamations. In between, there are episodes of playful counterpoint. As the motifs develop, the sections gradually combine, building intensity and volume of sound to culminate in a boisterous final shout.
The second movement is a tender serenade, with a lyrical melody whose phrases are passed from instrument to instruments. Silvery touches of triangle evoke a dreamy nighttime atmosphere. In the middle, the strings introduce a haunting chant-like motif that they take to an impassioned peak. Afterwards, the serenade resumes, the triangle now more prominent, before fading out with the flute at the close.
Lighthearted and full of humorous touches, the finale includes a scampering tune, a quirky motif of alternating notes, and a majestic phrase of repeated sustained notes against vigorous tremolo. A rather ominous climax is reached that stops the orchestra in its tracks, giving space for a solo clarinet cadenza. But the violins soon interrupt the clarinet’s rhapsody with a reprise of the scampering tune, ultimately leading to a bold ending on the motif of alternating notes.
Artists
Hillary Simms, Trombone
Hillary Simms is a young dynamic trombonist from Torbay, Newfoundland and Labrador. Praised as “one of the rising stars in the trombone world for her stellar playing, infectious personality and deep musicianship” (Jens Lindemann), Ms. Simms started the year 2020 by being named Stratford Symphony’s 2020 Emerging Artist and by being a co-founder of The Canadian Trombone Quartet: Canada’s first professional all female trombone quartet who had their inaugural performance this past January.
Hillary was a performing artist in the first ever Canadian Women’s Brass Conference held in Toronto and a featured guest artist at the Memorial University of Newfoundland’s “Paddi-versary Extravaganza” Trombone Event. Her accomplishments include winning the Division II Solo Competition at the American Trombone Workshop, receiving second place prize for brass at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal Concours Manuvie, being a finalist in the Latzsch Trombone Festival Solo Competition and The International Trombone Festival Robert Marstellar Solo Competition as well as being named a recipient of the Sylva Gelber Music Foundation Award.
Hillary has recently played with the Canadian Opera Company, The Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra and the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and can be heard playing lead trombone on the CD “Then is Now” recorded at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity with Jens Lindemann and Matt Catingub released January 21st, 2020.
Hillary holds a Bachelors in Music Performance from McGill University, a Masters in Music Performance from Yale University and has recently completed an Artist Diploma from the Glenn Gould School, studying with Gordon Wolfe. Hillary intends to start her Doctorate of Musical Arts from Northwestern University in the fall of 2020.
Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).
Jessie was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s during a time when the neighborhood was at a major turning point in its history. Artists gravitated to the hotbed of artistic experimentation and community development. Her parents – her father a musician, her mother a theater artist and storyteller – were engaged in the activities of the neighborhood and regularly brought Jessie to rallies, performances, and parties where neighbors, activists, and artists gathered to celebrate and support the movements of the time. It is from this unique experience that Jessie has created a life that merges composing, performance, education, and advocacy.
Since 1999, Jessie has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African-American and Latinx string players. She currently serves as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, their Organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble. She was a two-time laureate of the annual Sphinx Competition and was awarded their highest honor, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence. She has received additional grants and awards from the ASCAP Foundation, Chamber Music America, American Composers Orchestra, the Joyce Foundation, and the Sorel Organization.
The New York Philharmonic has selected Jessie as a featured composers for their Project 19, which marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting equal voting rights in the United States to women. Other forthcoming works include a nonet inspired by the Great Migration, told from the perspective of Montgomery’s great-grandfather William McCauley and to be performed by Imani Winds and the Catalyst Quartet; a cello concerto for Thomas Mesa jointly commissioned by Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, and The Sphinx Organization; and a new orchestral work for the National Symphony.
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Henri Tomasi (1901-1971)
Henri Tomasi was born in Marseilles on 17 August 1901 of Corsican parents. His Mediterranean roots were the distinctive trait of both the man and the work.
In 1927 he won a Premier Second Grand Prix de Rome and a unanimous First Prize for conducting. He at once started a career as a conductor with the Concerts du Journal and also for one of France’s first radio stations, Radio-Colonial (1931). He became a member in 1932 of the contemporary music group TRITON, the Honorary Committee of which included Ravel, Roussel, Schmitt, Stravinsky, Bartok, Enesco, de Falla, Schönberg, and Richard Strauss. He abandoned his conducting career in about 1956 on account of the deafness that darkened the whole of his latter years and in order to be able to devote himself totally to composition. On 13 January 1971, while completing an a cappella arrangement of his Chants populaires de l’Ile de Corse, he died in Paris, a city that had always been a place of exile for him.
His output – about 120 opus numbers – is as abundant and diverse in the operatic and stage genres as in the symphonic domain. It was crowned, in 1952, with the Grand Prix de la Musique Française, and by the Grand Prix Musical de la Ville de Paris in 1960.
A “protean musician” according to Emile Vuillermoz, Henri Tomasi developed a language inseparable from Mediterranean civilization: sensorial, multi-coloured, a fabric of light and shade, vibrant with melodic warmth, extolling in turn the flesh and the spirit.
Hannah Kendall (born 1984)
Born in London in 1984, Hannah is currently based in New York City as a Doctoral Fellow in composition at Columbia University.
Described as “…intricately and skillfully wrought” by The Sunday Times, Hannah’s music has attracted the attentions of some of the UK’s finest groups.
Hannah's works have been broadcast on BBC Radio, on the programs 'Composer of the Week' in March 2015 and 'Hear and Now' in October 2016. In 2015, Hannah won the Women of the Future Award for Arts and Culture.
Her recent projects include a one-man chamber opera, The Knife of Dawn, which premiered at London's Roundhouse in October 2016. Based on the Guyanese/Caribbean political activist and poet Martin Carter, set to a new libretto by award-winning author Tessa McWatt, and directed by John Walton, it was described as being “dramatically intense and atmospheric, a powerful snapshot of a poet incarcerated in British Guyana” by The Stage. The Spark Catchers, an orchestral piece for Chineke! Orchestra, was premiered at the Royal Albert Hall in August 2017 as part of the BBC Proms, was described as “imaginatively intricate” by the Financial Times. Verdala for London Sinfonietta, conducted by George Benjamin at the 2018 Proms, was described as having a “strikingly original form” by the Daily Telegraph; and also Disillusioned Dreamer written for the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, was described by the San Fransisco Chronicle as “...teem[ing] with passages of brilliant instrumental colors...and harmonies boast[ing] surprising edges and a rich inner life…”.
Hannah is deeply committed to contemporary culture as a whole and often works collaboratively with artists from other art forms.
Gorizia, Italy | b. 1948
The Canadian composer, Marjan Mozetich, was born of Slovenian parentage in Gorizia, Italy in 1948 and emigrated to Canada in 1952.
He co-founded and was artistic director (1977-79) of the contemporary ensemble, ARRAYMUSIC. His works were performed by prominent new music ensembles across Canada and abroad, and have received several awards.
Stylistically he has evolved over the years from avant-garde expressionism, to minimalism, to a post-modern romanticism. Throughout, his music has remained accessible while still retaining an artistic individuality and integrity. Paradoxically, since the late 80’s he has achieved an overtly ‘traditional’ and yet distinctively modern voice: a blend of the traditional, popular and the modern which has been enthusiastically received by the musical public. His works have been performed and broadcast throughout Canada and abroad, even on Canadian Airline’s ‘in flight’ music programs.
In 1996 his lush romantic work, The Passion of Angels for 2 harps & orchestra, received its world premier with the Edmonton Symphony, and Postcards from the Sky was premiered by the Thirteen Strings in Ottawa. His violin concerto, Affairs of the Heart, received a standing ovation at the premiere with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra in 1997. When CBC Radio broadcast the concert performance of Mozetich’s 1997 violin concerto, Affairs of the Heart, the switchboards lit up from coast to coast. There were numerous reports of what those who work in radio sometimes call “the driveway experience”. This is where listeners are so captivated by what they are hearing that they remain in their cars listening to the end even though they've long since arrived home.
Mozetich has been teaching composition since 1991 at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario where he resides. One of his most recent commissions was a cello concerto for Amanda Forsyth and the NAC Orchestra.
Duncan McDougall, Violin
Duncan McDougall is an 18-year-old violinist from Uxbridge, Ontario, Canada. He was the recipient of the Mary Jean Potter Scholarship to attend The Phil and Eli Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists, where he studied with Kelly Parkins-Lindstrom and Jonathan Crow. Duncan recently began his undergraduate degree in violin performance with Martin Beaver at the Colburn Conservatory in Los Angeles, California.
As a soloist, Duncan has performed with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, the Canadian Sinfonietta, the Oakville Chamber Orchestra, the Cathedral Bluffs Symphony Orchestra, and the Greater Toronto Philharmonic Orchestra. He has served as concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Morningside Music Bridge String Orchestra, and the Taylor Academy’s conductorless ensemble, the Academy Chamber Orchestra. In 2019, he had the opportunity to perform a solo recital at the Toronto Summer Music Festival as a part of their Shuffle Hour series.
A frequent award winner, most recently Duncan was chosen by CBC Music as one of Canada’s top 30 classical musicians under the age of 30. Duncan was a Grand Prize winner and the recipient of the Canimex Group Scholarship at the 2019 Canadian Music Competition, and a semifinalist at the 2019 OSM Manulife Competition, where he received the Orford Music Prize. Also in 2019, he was awarded the Geringas Memorial Scholarship and the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra Stingray Music Rising Star Award. In 2017, he was a winner of the TSYO Concerto Competition, performing as a soloist with the TSO.
As a chamber musician, Duncan’s string duo was a first prize winner at the 2019 Canadian Music Competition. He has performed in the 5 At The First Chamber Music Series, and with members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He attended the Szekely-Rolston Young Musician’s Program at the 2016 Banff International String Quartet Competition, working with former Juilliard String Quartet member Joel Krosnick.
Duncan has attended summer programs such as Morningside Music Bridge, Orford Music, and the Domaine Forget International Music Academy. He has performed in master classes for Miriam Fried, Andres Cardenes, Ilya Kaler, Almita Vamos, Rachel Barton Pine, Ian Swensen, William van der Sloot, Nikki Chooi, and Martin Chalifour, among others. He currently plays on a 2018 Mark Schnurr violin. In his spare time, Duncan enjoys trail running, canoeing, camping, and downhill skiing.
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Violet Archer (1913-2000)
Violet Louise Archer, CM, was born in Montréal. She was a composer, teacher, pianist, organist, and percussionist. Violet Archer was widely recognized for her command of both traditional and contemporary music techniques, and for her large and diverse body of work. She composed more than 330 compositions, many of which have been performed in over 30 countries. Her Piano Concerto (1956) is considered one of the finest Canadian concertos. She was respected internationally for her dedication to bringing 20th century classical music to young audiences and for being a leader among women composers. A Member of the Order of Canada, she received the Alberta Life Achievement Award, the Canadian Music Council’s Composer of the Year Award, the Canada 125 Award and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal.
Since its debut in 1969, the National Arts Centre Orchestra has been praised for the passion and clarity of its performances, its visionary educational programs, and its prominent role in nurturing Canadian creativity. Under the leadership of Music Director Alexander Shelley, the Orchestra performs a full series of subscription concerts at the National Arts Centre each season, featuring world-class artists such as James Ehnes, Angela Hewitt, Joshua Bell, Xian Zhang, Gabriela Montero, Stewart Goodyear, Jan Lisiecki, and Principal Guest Conductor John Storgårds.
Alexander Shelley began his tenure as Music Director in 2015, following Pinchas Zukerman’s 16 seasons at the helm. Principal Associate Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and former Chief Conductor of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra (2009 - 2017), he has been in demand around the world, conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic, DSO Berlin, Leipzig Gewandhaus, and Stockholm Philharmonic, among others, and maintains a regular relationship with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and the German National Youth Orchestra.
National and international tours have been a hallmark of the National Arts Centre Orchestra from the very beginning. The Orchestra has toured 95 times since its inauguration in 1969, visiting 120 cities in Canada, as well as 20 countries and 138 cities internationally. In recent years, the orchestra has undertaken performance and education tours across Canada, as well as the U.K. and China. In 2019, the Orchestra marked its 50th anniversary with a seven-city European tour that included performances and education events in England, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, and that showcased the work of six Canadian composers.
The NAC Orchestra has recorded many of the more than 80 new works commissioned since its inception, for radio and on over 40 commercial recordings. These include Angela Hewitt’s 2015 JUNO Award-winning album of Mozart Piano Concertos; the groundbreaking Life Reflected, which includes My Name is Amanda Todd by Jocelyn Morlock, winner of the 2018 JUNO for Classical Composition of the Year; and from the 2019 JUNO nominated New Worlds, Ana Sokolović’s Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes, 2019 JUNO Winner for Classical Composition of the Year.
The NAC Orchestra reaches a national and international audience through touring, recordings, and extensive educational outreach. The Orchestra performed on Parliament Hill for the 2019 Canada Day noon concert in a live broadcast for CBC Television.
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Alexander Shelley succeeded Pinchas Zukerman as Music Director of Canada’s NAC Orchestra in September 2015. The ensemble has since been praised as being “transformed... hungry, bold, and unleashed” (Ottawa Citizen) and Shelley’s programming credited for turning the orchestra into “one of the more audacious in North America” (Maclean’s).
Shelley is a champion of Canadian creation; recent hallmarks include the multimedia projects Life Reflected and UNDISRUPTED,and three major new ballets in partnership with NAC Dance for Encount3rs. He is passionate about arts education and nurturing the next generation of musicians. He is an Ambassador for Ottawa’s OrKidstra, a charitable social development program that teaches children life skills through making music together.
Alexander Shelley is also the Principal Associate Conductor of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and, starting with the 2024–2025 season, Artistic and Music Director of Artis-Naples and the Naples Philharmonic in Florida, USA. In the spring of 2019, he led the NAC Orchestra on its critically acclaimed 50th Anniversary European tour, and in 2017, he led the Orchestra in a tour across Canada, celebrating Canada’s 150th anniversary. Most recently, he led the Orchestra in its first performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 30 years.
He has made eight recordings with the NAC Orchestra, including the JUNO-nominated New Worlds, Life Reflected, ENCOUNT3RS, The Bounds of Our Dreams, and the acclaimed Clara, Robert, Johannes four-album series, all with Canadian label Analekta.
The Music Director role is supported by Elinor Gill Ratcliffe, C.M., O.N.L., LL.D. (hc)
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