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When the National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) and Orchestre symphonique de Québec join forces to take the Roy Thomson Hall stage on March 2nd, their performance will be a celebration of Canadian musical excellence, highlighting the homegrown talent of performers and composers alike.
The concert, part of a tour that also goes to Québec City and Ottawa, will be conducted by NACO Music Director Alexander Shelley and will feature the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and rising star Kevin Chen, an 18-year-old pianist from Calgary who has recently taken home first prize at major international piano competitions including the Arthur Rubinstein Competition and the Concours de Genève. On the program is a recent NACO commission by Ottawa-based composer Kelly-Marie Murphy entitled Dark Stars, Bright Nights, Vast Universe, Saint-Saëns’s dramatic and glittering Piano Concerto No. 2, and Jacques Hétu’s Symphony No. 5, premiered by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) in 2010.
For Alexander Shelley, preparing to conduct a large-scale concert like this, which will feature more than 200 musicians onstage, is no different than preparing a quartet. Step one is to know the music so well that he is “deep, deep, deep inside of it.” However, the real work begins beyond the notes. “Whether it’s a small group or a large group, what they require from you as a conductor in rehearsal is efficiency, but also to immediately, and most importantly, place the entire group in the right headspace [through]the way you gesture, the musical impulses, even the feel of the room.” He continues, “You have an obligation to take the musicians out of the everyday, into the dream, magic and wonder of the piece. That’s the primary role of the conductor.”
Alexander Shelley conducts the NACO (Photo by Andre Ringuette/Freestyle Photography)
Conjuring the atmosphere required for Hétu’s fifth and final symphony is no small task. This monumental work depicts the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War, with the final movement including the addition of a choir (in the tradition of Beethoven’s ninth symphony), which sings a soaring setting of Paul Éluard’s poem “Liberté,” a crescendoing ode to liberty. Thousands of copies of the poem were dropped over Paris by Royal Air Force planes in 1942 to see the French people through a period of unthinkable hardship.
NACO’s plans to program the symphony, which Shelley describes as an “iconic contemporary Canadian work,” were first laid soon after the pandemic began, when its themes of equality and freedom felt particularly resonant. The relevance of a work that deals explicitly with war and a yearning for “liberté” remains clear in 2024. “We need these pieces of work that allow us to, in that ultimate safe space of the concert hall, explore all the nooks and crannies and dark corners of humanity, as well as the beautiful, radiant parts of humanity,” says Shelley.
The British-born conductor bashfully admits that Jacques Hétu was one of only a few Canadian composers with whom he was familiar when he took up his post at NACO in 2015. Over the last decade, it has been “one of the great pleasures and privileges of [his]life” to get to know Canada’s classical music community and repertoire. Indeed, Shelley has become a champion for Canadian works and performers, collaborating with Canadian soloists, taking NACO on tour internationally, and commissioning countless new compositions.
Kelly-Marie Murphy’s tone poem Dark Stars, Bright Nights, Vast Universe is a prime example of one such commission. NACO requested that it be written as a companion piece to Richard Strauss’ Don Juan, but Murphy was given free reign in terms of what form her response would take – be it a critique, a parody, or a celebration of the famous orchestral work. In the end, she found inspiration in events that took place while Strauss was composing in 1888: Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 painting Starry Night, and the work of Williamina Fleming, a Harvard astronomer who discovered the Horsehead Nebula in 1888. The result is a turbulent, twinkling musical tribute to discovery, perseverance, and the firmament.
According to Shelley, mixing the old and new – whether that is by commissioning works like Murphy’s that are inspired by ‘standard’ repertoire, or conceiving of programs like this one that integrate both familiar pieces and newer sound worlds – is a way to help audiences better “decode” what they are hearing, and to reinforce a lost notion that music must speak to its own cultural moment. “The beauty of all art – whether it is literature or visual arts or music – is that it is almost unendingly connected with other art that came before and after it,” he says. “I think that these kinds of connections – storytelling, relationships between pieces and between composers – help to build that network of connectivity, so that people don’t feel that new music is completely separate from old music.”
Alexander Shelley conducts the NACO (Photo by Curtis Perry)
This concert will continue strengthening that ‘network of connectivity.’ It will unite two orchestras across provincial borders, embraced by a third orchestra, the TSO, as their hosts in Toronto, all in a “gesture of solidarity” between arts organizations that was devised during the uncertain days of the pandemic. It will also showcase accomplished Canadian composers of the past and present, and introduce audiences to Kevin Chen, a harbinger of Canada’s bright future on the classical music scene. Shelley’s admiration for this music, and this country, is evident, “people think of Canada as a sporting nation,” he says, “they think of its nature. But this country punches so far above its weight culturally. It’s extraordinary.”
The Toronto Symphony Orchestra presents NACO + OSQ: Two Orchestras, One Symphony on Saturday, March 2, 2024 at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto: https://www.tso.ca/concerts-and-events/events/naco-osq-two-orchestras-one-symphony/
Other tour dates include February 28, 2024 at the Grand théâtre de Québec in Québec City and March 7 and 8 at Southam Hall in Ottawa: https://www.osq.org/concerts/deux-orchestres-pour-une-symphonie/ ; https://arts.nac-cna.ca/en/production/329
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