Volume 23 Issue 9 - June / July / August 2018

Andrew Staniland he

Andrew Staniland he completed the full orchestration of his North Country Suite. Somers returned to Paris in 1960 on a Canada Council fellowship, seemingly a fully formed, mature composer. He began supporting himself on his commissions, writing major orchestral compositions, such as his Lyric (1960) for the Koussevitzky Foundation in New York and Stereophony (1963) for the Toronto Symphony (TSO). The point of this is that the support he received as an emerging composer set him up to make that transition to maturity. A comparable path can be traced for Alberta-born Andrew Staniland (b. 1977), who at age 23 moved east to pursue his graduate degrees in composition at the Faculty of Music of the University of Toronto. Staniland began winning composition prizes immediately and steadily. Following two SOCAN prizes in 2002, he then won the second Karen Kieser Prize in Canadian Music ever awarded in 2003, as well as the Toronto Emerging Composer Award in 2004. Staniland went on to win the Pierre Mercure Award in 2005 and the Hugh Le Caine Award in Electroacoustic Music in 2006. He received appointments as associate composer to both the National Arts Centre Orchestra (2002-2004) and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (2006- 2009) and earned a residency at the Centre du Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis in Paris in 2005. In 2007, CBC Radio presented his TSO-commissioned orchestral work Gaia at the International Rostrum of Composers (IRC) in Paris, resulting in numerous international broadcasts. At the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s (WSO) New Music Festival, Staniland won the Prairie Emerging Composer Award in 2008, and in 2009 he was not only Grand Prize winner of the CBC/ Radio-Canada Evolution Composers competition, but also received the Prix de l’Orchestre de la Francophonie in the same competition. In 2010, Staniland joined the faculty of the School of Music at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, where he teaches composition and directs the group he created, the Memorial ElectroAcoustic Research Lab (MERL) and its cross-disciplinary research team. By the time Staniland was 35 years of age, in 2012, he had composed 50 works, including his JUNO-nominated Dark Star Requiem (with poet Jill Battson), nine orchestral compositions, the large song cycle Peter Quince at the Clavier on poetry by Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), commissioned by American Opera Projects, and The River is Within Us, winner of this year’s Classical Composition of the Year at the East Coast Music Awards. In the six years since then, his creative output has kept pace. Certainly, if ever there was a Abigail Richardson-Schulte Canadian composer since Harry Somers for whom there was evident cause for support from an early point, it would be Andrew Staniland. On Canada Day in St. John’s, NL, Staniland’s major new work for five choirs from across Canada, On the Surface of Water, will receive its world premiere. The piece uses the writings of Leonardo da Vinci and was commissioned by Podium, the national choral conference and festival that has been held by Choral Canada every second year since 1982. Podium 2018 will be the first time this national conference and festival has been held in Newfoundland and Labrador, with daily concerts from June 29 to July 3. The choirs featured in Staniland’s On the Surface of Water are the Oakville Choir for Children and Youth, the Elektra Women’s Choir, Ullugiagâtsuk Choir (a student choir from Nunatsiavut, Labrador), the Choeur de chambre du Québec, and the Newman Sound Men’s Choir. Several weeks later on July 28, the Toronto Summer Music Festival will offer the world premiere of a new string quartet with a historical program: The Corner House, by Abigail Richardson-Schulte. Whereas Andrew Staniland was the second winner of U of T’s Karen Kieser Prize in Canadian Music, Richardson-Schulte was the first, in 2002. Her winning work, a trio, titled dissolve, was broadcast on CBC Radio Two, and then submitted by CBC Radio Music to the IRC in Paris, where it was selected as the best work by a composer under 30 years of age. This resulted in broadcasts in 35 countries around the world. In addition, her selection won her a commission from Radio France: her second string quartet, titled Scintilla. Richardson-Schulte is currently composer-in-residence with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra (HPO), serves as artistic director of the HPO’s What Next Festival, hosts community events, and teaches composition for the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. These composers didn’t just wake up one morning ready to give us the new works that will contribute to our contemporary point of view. Their emergence needed support. Richardson-Schulte thinks of her new work as a sort of tone poem for string quartet. It’s a programmatic piece, based on the experiences of Ernest MacMillan during his internment in the Ruhleben prison camp during WWI. MacMillan had been in Bayreuth, Bavaria, when Canada declared war on Germany in 1914, and he spent five years interned, along with over 4,000 men of English, American, Australian and Canadian descent who just happened to be in Germany when war broke out. The title of the piece, The Corner House, is taken from the name of the arts club MacMillan was a member of at the camp. The three movements depict the contrasting moods and atmospheres representing the many formative experiences he had while he was there. When I spoke with Richardson-Schulte, she revealed that, though details have not yet been made public by TSM, the concert will be a part of this year’s TSM Academy, where TSM artistic director Jonathan Crow will be featured as first violin in the work alongside three Academy Fellows. The Corner House was commissioned by TSM, with the financial assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. The performance will take place at Walter Hall, University of Toronto at 7:30pm on July 28. Investment in support for these composers during their formative years has made it possible to have these new works this summer. Richardson-Schulte, Rolfe and Staniland didn’t just wake up one morning as seasoned composers, ready to give us the new works that will contribute to our contemporary point of view. One cannot look past the innate talents and creative work that brought them forward in their careers, but their emergence needed support, as with all creative endeavours. David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto. 14 | June | July | August 2018 thewholenote.com

FEATURE FOR THIS FLUTE ENSEMBLE FIVE’S THE CHARM DAVID PERLMAN For flutist Terry Lim, the path towards founding a professional chamber ensemble started with the realities of life as an orchestral musician. “The other members and I knew each other from doing the rounds of orchestral auditions, bumping into each other all the time,” he says. “And then we all ended up here in Toronto.” Those other members were four other flutists – Kaili Maimets, Laura Chambers, Sarah Yunji Moon and Amelia Lyon – and the group that they formed was a flute quintet called Charm of Finches, that, with a perfect blend of playfulness and professionalism (flutes are often compared to birds, and a group of finches is called a “charm”), has since established itself firmly in the Toronto chamber music scene. Sitting down with me at The WholeNote office, Lim talked about the first impromptu Finches performance, and how right from the outset, he knew they had found something special. “In 2015, there was a Canadian Flute Association convention here in Toronto, and we wanted to play something together for it, just for fun. We didn’t think it would go any further than that. In the first rehearsal, we played an arrangement of Daphnis and Chloe for five flutes and, right away, I thought – oh. This could go somewhere.” And it did, with concerts and festival appearances over the next three years in Toronto and across southern Ontario. Since that first rehearsal they’ve switched out two members, with Tristan Durie and Katherine Watson replacing Moon and Maimets in the ensemble’s current iteration. “They both won full-time jobs with orchestras,” Lim explains. For him, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. “Each year, we’ve had to find a new person because of everyone’s job situations, that sort of thing,” he says. “And each year, it sounds different depending on who’s playing with us. It just brings in different musical qualities all the time – which for me is fascinating.” The reason for getting together to chat at this particular moment is the Finches’ upcoming concert, “Circle of Sound,” on June 17 in the Hart House East Common Room in the University of Toronto. True to form, that program promises to bridge the orchestral and chamber worlds, with an arrangement of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a premiere of a new flute quintet by local composer Bekah L-R: Terry Lim, Katherine Watson, Amelia Lyon, Laura Chambers, Tristan Durie. thewholenote.com June | July | August 2018 | 15