Evaluate: CPO kicks off season with crowd-pleasing live performance

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The opening of the CPO’s new live performance season introduced a full home to Calgary’s Jack Singer Live performance Corridor. To provide the live performance some musical zip, this system featured not solely Mussorgsky’s vibrant Photos at an Exhibition, but additionally a newly commissioned choral work by Alberta composer John Estacio.

This system started with Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, at all times a crowd pleaser, which was carried out cleanly and crisply, and with a commanding surge of vitality on the conclusion. Rune Bergmann, the orchestra’s music director led the best way, pacing the music effectively and avoiding the temptation to hurry the thrilling ending. The string taking part in was particularly stunning right here, with the phrases gracefully formed and a wealthy, full string tone.

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The Beethoven overture was adopted by the newly commissioned choral piece by John Estacio. Estacio selected the poem Excessive Flight by the 19-year-old Second World Warfare coaching pilot John Gillespie Magee as his textual content. The poem expresses in effulgent language the expertise of flying, the sonnet’s photographs additionally serving metaphorically to convey the comfortable feelings surrounding the 60^th anniversary of the CPO’s Refrain, the event for the fee of the work.

Appropriate to the emotions of the textual content, Estacio’s new work is full of exultation and pleasure, the elevated phrases of the textual content conveyed with daring, declamatory writing for the refrain leavened with vivid orchestral colors and rhythms. It is a work that wants a big refrain for its full impact, one that may make daring, hanging statements for the harmonies, generally intense, generally blended to make their mark. The refrain, responding effectively to the brand new work and (for them) a brand new fashion, delivered the products, displaying why the refrain has developed its fame for nice choral performances.

Estacio’s music at all times has a robust sense of harmonic development, driving ahead to convey a way of cumulation on the finish of the musical paragraphs. This high quality was a lot in proof right here, as was the sturdy melodic traces that underscore particular photographs and phrases. A lot loved by the viewers, this new work strengthened the impression of Estacio as considered one of Canada’s most profitable and proficient composers. And he’s an Albertan in addition.

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The title work for this system, occupying greater than half the time, was Mussorgsky’s much-loved Photos at an Exhibition. Heard within the acquainted Ravel orchestration, that is grateful music for the orchestra to play, with many solo spots, together with one for the saxophone. It concludes with a splashy, noisy end.

Tucking into music it clearly likes to play, the CPO gave a strongly centered, well-executed account of the music, Bergmann evidently having fun with himself on the podium. The applause on the conclusion was loud and lengthy. Taking part in to the vitality of the viewers, Bergmann, the Norwegian Albertan now sporting a cowboy hat, supplied the Hoe-down motion from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo as an encore, the viewers responding to the western motif with rhythmic clapping and hoots from the ground.

The live performance, half conventional classical, half homespun, walked the tightrope between classical and pop types, suggesting that the CPO serves a variety of listeners with totally different tastes in music. The season as complete affords a remarkably big selection of occasions and types, starting from Serene Ryder’s and Brett Kissel’s appearances over the following two months, to the primary Calgary efficiency of the very fashionable Piano Concerto by Witold Lutoslawski’s with pianist Ramon Rabinovich, to Mahler’s monumental Third Symphony in November. The CPO’s advertising and marketing message couldn’t be clearer: Come one, come all.

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