October 07, 2005 -

OTTAWA, CANADA -- Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, featuring Music Director Pinchas Zukerman as conductor and violin soloist, will head to Alberta and Saskatchewan for a 13-day concert and education tour from November 7 to 19, 2005, presenting six concerts, three student matinees, a New Music Ensemble concert and 90 additional education events. The Tour in honour of the two provinces’ centennials will mark the NAC Orchestra’s first visit to Alberta and Saskatchewan since the 1999 Canada Tour.

The Alberta-Saskatchewan Tour will see the NAC Orchestra performing concerts led by Pinchas Zukerman in Saskatoon (Nov. 9), Regina (Nov. 10), Medicine Hat (Nov. 12), Grande Prairie (Nov. 13 – first-ever visit!), Calgary (Nov. 16) and Edmonton (Nov. 19) plus student matinees led by the NAC Orchestra’s Principal Youth and Family Conductor Boris Brott in Prince Albert (Nov. 8 – another first!) and Grande Prairie (Nov. 14 – two concerts) and a New Music Ensemble concert in Banff (Nov. 15).

The NAC Orchestra Tour is supported by Alberta Presenting Sponsor EPCOR, Saskatchewan Presenting Sponsor CN, with additional Major Support for Alberta by CN. The National Post is the Tour’s national media partner. 

As always when this Orchestra tours, education will play as important a role as the concerts themselves. The education events include visits by Pinchas Zukerman, Boris Brott, composers Gary Kulesha and Andrew Staniland, brass, wind and string ensembles, and individual musicians of the Orchestra to additional venues in the tour cities, as well as to Melville and Humboldt in Saskatchewan and to Red Deer, Spruce Grove, Stony Plain and Lethbridge in Alberta. They will assist with school music programs, perform for elementary school children, give lectures, and lead masterclasses for advanced music students, sectional rehearsals with youth orchestras, Q & A sessions for music students and sessions for teachers. The NAC’s latest teacher resource kit, Vivaldi and the Four Seasons, will be distributed to all 2,500 elementary schools in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The NAC will present youth choirs and orchestras in the lobby areas at all performance venues to showcase local talent. Two special projects will target Aboriginal school children with an introduction to recorder playing and the music of Vivaldi. One of these, Music Connexions III, will use Broadband videoconferencing to link children in three cities to share music and their cultural traditions. To date, 75 partners are engaged in helping to present these outreach activities. A number of the many education activities on tour will be accessible across Canada and internationally through the NAC’s education website at www.ArtsAlive.ca.

Peter Herrndorf, NAC President and CEO, said: “The National Arts Centre Orchestra is proud of its national role and takes great pride in working with local communities to create great music and promote music education to students of all ages and abilities. We are grateful that many corporate partners and donors are helping to make this performance and education tour possible.”

Pinchas Zukerman said: “It gives me great pleasure to share our national orchestra with communities across the country, not only as an ensemble from the concert stage, but individually in elementary schools, music rooms and community centres – sometimes off the beaten track. I am especially proud that the commitment of our superb education team is making it possible to further my long held dream of bringing more classical music to First Nations children.”

Concert Repertoire

Repertoire on tour includes the Beethoven Violin Concerto, featuring Pinchas Zukerman as violin soloist, and Dvorák’s Symphony No. 8 (to be performed in Saskatoon and Regina); Bach’s Violin Concerto with Zukerman as soloist, Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, and Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 (to be performed in Medicine Hat and Grande Prairie), Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 (to be performed with the Beethoven Concerto in Calgary), and a special gala programme for Edmonton (see below). All programmes apart from Edmonton also feature the NAC-commissioned work The Boughs of Music for trumpet and orchestra by Canadian composer Gary Kulesha. It will feature the NAC Orchestra’s Regina-born principal trumpet Karen Donnelly.

Gary Kulesha is one of three composers named as recipients of the National Arts Centre’s Composer Awards of $75,000 under the National Arts Centre New Music Programme launched in 2002. Kulesha will join the NAC Orchestra on tour leading composition lectures and masterclasses with university music students. Alberta-born composer Andrew Staniland, Kulesha’s former student and Affiliate Composer under the NAC Young Composers Programme, will have a commissioned work performed by school children accompanied by a professional septet at Edmonton’s City Hall on November 18.

The gala fundraising concert in Edmonton will feature two NAC Orchestra musicians originally from Edmonton: principal cello Amanda Forsyth performing the Juno Award-winning Electra Rising composed for her by her father, Edmonton composer Malcolm Forsyth – and violinist Jessica Linnebach performing the Bach Double Concerto with Pinchas Zukerman. The grand finale will see the NAC Orchestra and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra performing together on stage in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 – the first time the NAC Orchestra has ever performed jointly with another professional orchestra. For this special concert, the National Arts Centre is waiving its fee for the NAC Orchestra and soloists.

EDUCATION

All of the Tour’s education programs and in particular the following projects are supported by Education Sponsors ConocoPhillips in Alberta and SaskEnergy in Saskatchewan and True Energy Inc. as the Community Sponsor in Saskatchewan. Additional funding is provided by Education Donors CIBC and the National Arts Centre Friends – Alberta. The NAC also thanks the Interdepartmental Partnership with the Official-Language Communities (IPOLC). 

Student Matinees with Boris Brott

The NAC Orchestra will again bring its highly successful recipe for Student Matinees on tour to Alberta and Saskatchewan. The Orchestra’s Principal Youth and Family Conductor Boris Brott will conduct three student matinees focusing on the music of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The co-host with Brott will be Joseph Naytowhow, a Woodland Cree storyteller and singer/songwriter from Sturgeon Lake First Nation, Saskatchewan. John Jaques, a young classically trained musician of Aboriginal origin and member of the Saskatoon Youth Orchestra, will solo on double bass for the Matinee in Prince Albert. Meghan Nenninger and Maria van der Sloot, both young violinists from Calgary and graduates of the NAC Summer Music Institute’s Junior Strings Programme, will solo with NACO for the Matinees in Grande Prairie.Students attending these matinees will be invited to perform on recorders or sing a melody from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the NAC Orchestra.

The second of the two student matinees in Grande Prairie, Alberta, will be webcast live to schools in that province using Alberta SuperNet. This is the NAC Orchestra’s first live concert webcast. Bell is the Tour Technology Sponsor for Alberta. 

Teacher Resource Kit: Vivaldi and the Four Seasons

The NAC’s latest teacher resource kit, Vivaldi and the Four Seasons, will be distributed to every elementary school in Alberta and Saskatchewan in October 2005. The kitfeatures Aboriginal artwork, storytelling and other cultural references,and contains cross-curricular links to content-related topics such as Climate Change. It also includes a complimentary copy of the CBC Records Vivaldi: Four Seasons CD featuring Pinchas Zukerman and the NAC Orchestra. It will be used as the curriculum unit to help teachers prepare students for the Student Matinees in Grande Prairie and Prince Albert, as well as for two special projects in connection with the NACO Tour, both involving the participation of Aboriginal students. The teacher resource kit is sponsored by the Government of Canada’s One-Tonne Challenge. 

Music Ambassador Programme

A three-year Music Ambassador Programme to help sustain and enhance music education programs in classrooms across Alberta and Saskatchewan will be launched during the AB-SK Tour. This music outreach programme will reach thousands of students and teachers in up to 300 primarily rural schools in the two provinces. The NAC is hiring teaching artists (musicians) to visit these schools and work in collaboration with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra in Alberta, and the Regina Symphony Orchestra and the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra in Saskatchewan, to deliver a meaningful musical curriculum to help spark an interest in music generally and the symphony orchestra specifically. The NAC’s Vivaldi and the Four Seasons Teacher Resource Kit will be the primary resource used for developing the programme’s curriculum. Three hundred Vivaldi Kits and 10,000 Vivaldi student newspaper guides will be delivered to the participating schools ahead of each visit. Special funding for this programme was provided by Agrium, EPCOR, Marjorie Goodrich and RBC Financial Group.

Prince Albert Grand Council Recorder Project

The Prince Albert Grand Council (PAGC) Recorder Project is a sequel to the highly successful “Kispiox Music Project” that took place during the BC Tour 2004. After attending recorder clinics in Prince Albert, teachers will lead selected children over a six-week period in preparing a musical excerpt from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons to sing and play on recorder with eight brass players of the NAC Orchestra. The participants will also prepare a performance gift from their own cultural tradition. The PAGC Recorder Project will culminate in a music-sharing session on November 7 at the E.A. Rawlinson Centre for the Arts performed by the NACO brass octet and up to 65 children from three elementary schools within the Prince Albert Grand Council – a first nation tribal council in northern Saskatchewan. Participants will also perform on their recorders onstage with the NAC Orchestra at the Student Matinee Concert the following day.

“Music Connexions III”

The third edition of “Music Connexions” a special project involving elementary school children from four schools in four different provinces, will culminate in a public presentation led by Pinchas Zukerman on November 10 using Canada’s next-generation Internet, CA*net4 to link to three sites in Regina, Calgary and Ottawa.  Over a six-week period, the children will prepare for Pinchas Zukerman their own creative responses to the music of Vivaldi using a variety of artistic expressions from their own cultural traditions. And they will learn to sing or play on recorder a musical excerpt from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Over 70 mainly Aboriginal children will participate in this project from St. Augustine Community School in Regina SK, Chief Old Sun School (Siksika Nation) just east of Calgary AB, and the Kana:takon School in St. Regis (Akwesasne) QC and the Akwesasne Mohawk School on Cornwall Island (Awkesasne) ON.

Yamaha Canada and St John’s Music in Saskatoon, Calgary and Ottawa supported both of the above projects by supplying recorders, method books and partial funding for recorder clinics.

Alma Mater Programme (NACO musicians return to their roots)

When NAC Orchestra musicians from Alberta and Saskatchewan return to their hometowns, they will reconnect with their former teaching institutions. Medicine Hat cellist Leah Wyber will give chamber music coaching at the Medicine Hat College Conservatory; Regina violinist Brian Boychuk will lead a Q&A; session with music students at the Conservatory of the Performing Arts at the University of Regina; Regina trombonist Colin Traquair will lead a Q&A; session with music students at Campbell Collegiate. In addition, former NAC Affiliate Composer Andrew Staniland returns to Grant McEwan College in Edmonton where he first studied composition to lead a lecture and masterclass.  

Pinchas Zukerman and the National Arts Centre Orchestra

Pinchas Zukerman has for four decades been recognized internationally as one of the world’s greatest string players. His discography contains over 100 titles, and has earned him 21 Grammy nominations and two Grammy awards. Since his appointment as Music Director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in 1998, he has taken an interest in virtually every aspect of Ottawa’s artistic community while continuing his international career.

Pinchas Zukerman is world-renowned for his dedication to teaching and to the musical development of the next generation of young artists, and he passionately believes that every child should have access to a musical education. He is the driving force behind the national role the National Arts Centre plays in education and community outreach, and in the use of new technology to reach Canadians from coast to coast.

Touring is an important part of the mandate of the National Arts Centre Orchestra which has visited, in its 36-year history, 107 cities in Canada, and 122 cities internationally. The Alberta-Saskatchewan Tour is Pinchas Zukerman’s seventh tour with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and sixth since being appointed Music Director in 1998. In 1999 he led the coast-to-coast Canada Tour, followed by Tour 2000 to Israel and Europe, the Atlantic Tour 2002, the United States and Mexico Tour 2003, and the British Columbia Tour 2004. As guest conductor and soloist in 1990, Zukerman led the Orchestra on a European Tour.

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For more information please contact:
Jane Morris, Communications Officer,
National Arts Centre Orchestra
(613) 947-7000, ext. 335,
jmorris@nac-cna.ca