North Bay Symphony Orchestra

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The first half of the program this evening is the concert for actors and orchestra How the Gimquat Found Her Song, developed by Platypus Theatre. What is a bird if she has no song? It’s a warm spring day when Griffle the Great – the magical musical wizard – meets the sad and songless Gimquat bird. Soon they are off on a tumble through time in search of the missing music – an adventure that takes them from monasteries to Mozart and from  rap to Ravel, until a magical surprise to finish the performance.

We featured another Platypus Theatre production a few years ago, when the NBSO performed A Flicker of Light on a Christmas Night. Tonight will be just as special and exciting.  (more about Platypus Theatre >>)

The Norwegian Edvard Grieg (1843 – 1907) wrote the incidental music to Henryk Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt in 1875, and extracted his Suite No. 1 in 1888. Peer Gynt is the traveller and in this scene “Morning Mood” celebrates nature with the sunrise.  The majestic nature of the mountains of Norway comes dreamily to mind. However the piece was written for a Moroccan desert sunrise in the play, with Peer Gynt in a grove of palm and acacia trees protecting himself from a group of apes with a broken-off branch.

Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14 is a song by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943), published in 1912 as the last of his Fourteen Songs, Op. 34. It was originally written for voice (soprano or tenor) with piano accompaniment and contains no words, but was sung using any one vowel of the singer's choosing. Rachmaninoff later wrote it for orchestra, which is the version heard tonight.  The lovely but sad melody reminds us of nature’s songs. Rachmaninoff was a composer, pianist and conductor. Influenced by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, he wrote in the lush romantic style. A member of the minor aristocracy, he lost the family estates after the Russian Revolution; he escaped to Finland and then in late 1918 to the United States where he lived until his death in 1943.

The Thieving Magpie (La gazza ladra), is an opera written by the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini (1792 – 1869), and first performed 31 May 1817. The overture was apparently written 30 May 1817. It was reported that the producer had to lock Rossini in a room the day before the first performance in order to write the overture. Rossini then threw each sheet out of the window to his copyists, who wrote out the full orchestral parts.  Here we have not just the songs of nature from the magpie, but we also have a situation where nature affects us. The opera has many familiar elements – the beautiful servant girl in love with the young hero returning from the wars, his mother not approving of the relationship, the Mayor making improper advances to the heroine, and the heroine sentenced to death for stealing the silver spoons, but all works out in the end. The Magpie did it!