February 28, 2007 -

Ottawa (Canada) -- The National Arts Centre Orchestra’s first annual eX-pressions new music festival will be headed by one of the leading new music figures in the world today – British composer/conductor Oliver Knussen. The two free concerts feature music of the 21st century juxtaposed with acclaimed works of the 20th century. The first concert features the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Southam Hall on Wednesday, March 7 at 20:00 with soprano Elizabeth Keusch as soloist. The second features ensembles of the NAC Orchestra as well as the famed American new music ensemble eighth blackbird and soprano Lucy Shelton in Dominion-Chalmers Church at 355 Cooper (corner of Metcalfe) on Saturday, March 10 at 20:00.

Tickets for both eX-pressions concerts are free and may be picked up in person at the NAC Box Office. For the March 10 concert at Dominion-Chalmers Church, they can also be picked up at the door, one hour before the concert.

NAC Orchestra audiences know Oliver Knussen from his appearances with the NAC Orchestra in 2001 when he conducted his own Second Symphony, and from 2004 when he conducted the Canadian premiere of his Violin Concerto with its dedicatee Pinchas Zukerman as soloist. Last year, Knussen won the $100,000 Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Musical Composition from the Northwestern University School of Music in Illinois. He was cited by the selection committee for “his uniquely focused, vibrantly varied music and his total embrace – as a profoundly influential composer, conductor and educator – of today’s musical culture.”

The centrepiece of both programmes will be Oliver Knussen’s most recent composition Songs for Sue which premiered in April 2006 in Chicago. It will be performed by the radiant young American soprano Elizabeth Keusch, a champion of new music who is rapidly emerging as an artist to watch. Knussen wrote the song cycle as “an act of public mourning” for his wife Sue, who died in 2003. It is set to poetry by Emily Dickinson, Antonio Machado, W. H. Auden and Rainer Maria Rilke.

The March 7 concert opens with another work by Knussen – Two organa, a pair of miniatures composed in 1994 using the organum procedure – the oldest form of polyphonic music (two or more voice parts) – which flourished from the ninth to twelfth centuries.

The programme also features Piccola musica notturna (A little night music), a serenely contemplative piece composed in 1954 by Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola, who is widely regarded as the most significant Italian composer of his generation – the one who, more than any other, firmly established twelve-tone writing in his country.

The March 7 concert concludes with Schoenberg’s Music to Accompany a Film Scene, a brief but intense score that invites the listener to imagine a film about “Threatening Danger – Fear – Catastrophe” (the score’s subtitle) unfolding to the music.

The March 10 concert also includes Knussen’s Songs for Sue, this time performed at Dominion-Chalmers Church. The concert opens with Corrente composed in 1992 by Magnus Lindberg, one of the leading lights on the contemporary scene in Finland. It is a fifteen-minute work of rhythmic energy full of rushing, pulsing motion punctuated by wind chorales.

Geheimer Raum (Secret Room), by German composer Detlef Glanert, premiered in 2002 in London conducted by Oliver Knussen. The four sections of the score, described as “a fabulously beguiling work” by The Times (London), represent the walls of the room, each employing a faster speed and increasing in nervous tension.

The concert closes with a classic of early 20th century music: Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, one of the first manifestations of the composer’s atonal period. It was written in 1912 upon request from a Viennese actress who wanted a composition that would allow her to recite a text against a background of instrumental music. What Schoenberg wrote for her introduced a whole new style of vocal declamation, its eerie vocalism perfectly in accord with the exaggerated world of Expressionism that was sweeping early twentieth-century Europe.

Pierrot lunaire will be performed by American soprano Lucy Shelton, an internationally recognized exponent of 20th- and 21st- Century repertoire, who is the winner of two Walter W. Naumburg Awards, for chamber music and solo singing. She will perform it with eighth blackbird, hailed as “friendly, unpretentious, idealistic and highly skilled” by the New Yorker. The six-member ensemble is widely lauded for its unusual performing style – often playing from memory with virtuosic and theatrical flair – and its efforts to make new music accessible to wide audiences.

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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