PROMS ISLAND STYLE

Invite your friends, wear your finest gown or jeans and experience “Proms Island Style” – a fun-filled evening of classical and popular music that you know and love to hear! .

GUEST CONDUCTOR: Arthur Arnold

GUEST ARTIST: Ken Lavigne TENOR

Concert Programme

Johann STRAUSS JR. : Fledermaus: Overture

Pietro MASCAGNI : Cavalleria rusticana

Lalo SCHIFRIN : Mission: Impossible Theme

Giacomo PUCCINI : Nessun Dorma – from Turandot

Edward ELGAR : Nimrod from Enigma Variations

Astor PIAZZOLA : Libertango

Pastiche Symphony:

Ludwig van BEETHOVEN: : Symphony No. 5, I. Allegro con brio

Gustav MAHLER : Symphony No. 1, No. 1, Blumine

Johannes BRAHMS : Symphony No. 2, III. Allegretto grazioso

Pyotr Ilyich TCHAIKOVSKY : Symphony No. 6, III. Allegro molto vivace

and more….

GUEST CONDUCTOR
Arthur Arnold

GUEST artist
Ken Lavigne

tenor

PORT THEATRE
APR 29, 2023

CONCERTS 5:00 PM OR 7:30 PM

PURCHASE 5:00 PM CONCERT TICKETS

PURCHASE 7:30 PM CONCERT TICKETS

SEASON SPONSOR

SERIES SPONSOR

PERFORMANCE SPONSOR

We offer an inviting, inclusive and fun symphony experience.

Join us for our free pre-concert talks. One hour prior to the concert in the theatre lobby.

Beverages served prior to concert and at intermission. You can pre-order your intermission beverage before the concert.

Mobile phones are allowed to be on but must be set to silent.

What to wear? Be comfortable. Dress in a way that works for you. If you feel like dressing up, do it and you won’t be the only one, we promise. If you prefer to be more casual you will fit right in as well.

We welcome you to clap when you like what you hear.

Dutch-born conductor Arthur Arnold is co-founder and Artistic Director of the Pacific Region International Summer Music Association (PRISMA Festival & Academy) on Canada’s west coast. The annual event attracts world-renowned musicians and international music students from top universities and draws over 7000 concertgoers to daily musical events. Arnold is the Music Director and conductor of the PRISMA Festival Orchestra, the premier ensemble at the festival. 2022 marks the 10^th anniversary of the PRISMA Festival & Academy.

Arnold was the Music Director of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra from January 2012 to his resignation in March 2022. Artistic cooperation with the MSO started in 2004 with two concerts in the Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam and developed into a long and fruitful collaboration.

Arnold is the driving force behind The Mosolov Project. In Russian libraries he discovered lost manuscripts of the repressed composer Alexander Mosolov. He performed and recorded the Fifth Symphony (1965) and Harp Concerto (1939) in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. The CD (Naxos) received the second prize in the prestigious Russian competition Pure Sound. For more information and links to CD reviews, see The Mosolov Project.

Recent engagements included concerts with the Silesian Philharmonic in Katowice, Poland, the Spokane Symphony Orchestra in the USA, a three-week concert tour through China with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, a new opera production with Pacific Opera Victoria and recordings for the Canadian Broadcast Company with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

Maestro Arnold conducted orchestras in Europe, North America, and Asia and appeared at international festivals with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and as guest conductor. He has conducted the Arad Philharmonic Orchestra, Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra, Banatul Philharmonic Orchestra, Het Balletorkest, Košice Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra, North Netherlands Orchestra, Novaya Opera, Moscow, Nieuw Ensemble, Oradea Philharmonic Orchestra, Opera Minora, Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Pacific Opera Victoria, Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic, Raduga Ensemble, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Flemish Philharmonic Orchestra, Sibiu Philharmonic Orchestra, Targu Mures State Philharmonic Orchestra, Transylvania State Philharmonic, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Victoria Symphony, and Woodstock Mozart Festival. As assistant conductor to Hans Vonk, he was invited to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Netherlands Opera, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, The Hague Philharmonic and WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne. Arnold was Music Director of the Symphony Orchestra Academy of the Pacific from 2004 to 2011. In South Korea, he served as Principal Guest Conductor of the Seoul National Symphony Orchestra from 1997 to 2001.

Arnold studied conducting with Anton Kersjes and Hans Vonk and received additional training from Marcello Viotti, Jean Fournet, and Graeme Jenkins. He studied at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy with Myung-Whun Chung and Gianluigi Gelmetti, and with Jorma Panula and Diego Masson in international master classes.

Arthur and his wife Kim divide their time between the rugged West Coast of Canada and The Netherlands. In Canada they enjoy hiking, sea kayaking and paddleboarding. In Europe they enjoy the adventurous road trips to the different orchestras, camping in a roof tent on their Volkswagen van. Kim writes about their travels in her blog Waking up on the roof.

Turandot is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, posthumously completed by Franco Alfano in 1926, and set to a libretto in Italian by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni. Turandot‘s best-known aria is “Nessun dorma“, which became globally popular in the 1990s following Luciano Pavarotti‘s performance of it for the 1990 FIFA World Cup.

Though Puccini first became interested in the subject matter when reading Friedrich Schiller‘s 1801 adaptation, he based his work more closely on the earlier play Turandot (1762) by Count Carlo Gozzi. The original story is one of the seven stories in the epic Haft Peykar—a work by twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami (c. 1141–1209). Nizami aligned his seven stories with the seven days of the week, the seven colors, and the seven planets known in his era. This particular narrative is the story of Tuesday, as told to the king of Iran, Bahram V (r. 420–438), by his companion of the red dome, associated with Mars. In the first line of the story, the protagonist is identified as a Russian princess. The name of the opera is based on Turan-Dokht (daughter of Turan), which is a name frequently used in Persian poetry for Central Asian princesses.

The opera’s version of the story is set in China. It involves Prince Calaf, who falls in love with the cold Princess Turandot. In order to obtain permission to marry her, a suitor must solve three riddles. Any single wrong answer will result in the suitor’s execution. Calaf passes the test, but Turandot refuses to marry him. He offers her a way out: if she is able to guess his name before dawn the next day, he will accept death. In the original story by Nizami, the princess sets four conditions: firstly “a good name and good deeds”, and then the three challenges. As with Madama Butterfly, Puccini strove for a semblance of authenticity (at least to Western ears) by integrating music from the region. Up to eight of the musical themes in Turandot appear to be based on traditional Chinese music and anthems, and the melody of a Chinese song “Mò Li Hūa (茉莉花)“, or “Jasmine”, became a motif for the princess.

Puccini left the opera unfinished at the time of his death in 1924; Franco Alfano completed it in 1926. The first performance took place at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 25 April 1926, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. The performance included only Puccini’s music without Alfano’s additions. The first performance of the opera as completed by Alfano was performed on the next evening, 26 April, although it is disputed whether the second performance was conducted by Toscanini or by Ettore Panizza.

Read more on Wikipedia.org…

Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King’s Musick in 1924.

Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-conscious society of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was acutely sensitive about his humble origins even after he achieved recognition. He nevertheless married the daughter of a senior British Army officer. She inspired him both musically and socially, but he struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations (1899) became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, and has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory.

In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were immensely successful. His second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertory of British orchestras. Elgar’s music came, in his later years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences. His stock remained low for a generation after his death. It began to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of his works. Some of his works have, in recent years, been taken up again internationally, but the music continues to be played more in Britain than elsewhere.

Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works. The introduction of the moving-coil microphone in 1923 made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, and Elgar made new recordings of most of his major orchestral works and excerpts from The Dream of Gerontius.