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Pentland Program.Pages The Canadian Music Centre in BC Presents The Murray Adaskin Salon Concert Series CELEBRATING OUR LEGACY Barbara Pentland Celebration Friday, November 18, 2016 • 7:00pm As a courtesy… Please turn off the sound for all phones and other electronic devices. You are welcome to take non-flash photos during applause between pieces, but please refrain from taking photos during a performance and between movements, thank you. We encourage you to post your photos and share your experience on social media using the hashtag #CMCBC CMC BC on Twitter: @MusicCentreBC CMC BC on Facebook: facebook.com/CanadianMusicCentreBC Website: musiccentrebc.ca CMC National on Twitter: @CMCnational CMC National on Facebook: facebook.com/CanadianMusic Website: musiccentre.ca Red and white wine from Show your ticket and get Chaberton Estate Winery, a 10% off all hot beverages at local vineyard in Langley, BC, Breka Bakery next door at is available at the lobby bar. 855 Davie Street. Letter from the BC Director This concert tonight celebrating Barbara Pentland is the second in our Murray Adaskin Salon Concert Series, a year-long celebration of the first generation of composers to write concert music on the West Coast of Canada. I wish I’d known Barbara Pentland — I bet she was fascinating! My impression is that she was an uncompromising rebel, a fiercely independent woman a century ahead of her time, discouraged from composing by nearly everyone she knew including her parents, the all-male (then) musicians who found her music ‘difficult’, and the male composers she encountered throughout her life. To understand Barbara Pentland is to understand the courage and insistent devotion to her own voice that both drove and sustained her against all odds. She studied with Aaron Copland, and her early music was written in an essentially neoclassical style. But once she discovered Anton Webern and the serialists she never looked back. True to form, though, she didn’t just adopt serialism; she developed an entirely original atonal musical language of her own. Barbara Pentland should be celebrated, then, as being at the vanguard of avant-garde music in Canada. She was also a founding member of the Canadian Music Centre, and it is thanks in part to a large gift from her estate that the BC Region has remained so vibrant over the past fifteen years. Honouring that gift, the CMC music library here in Vancouver bears her name. ⇨ – 1! – In addition to the concerts in this year’s series and the documentaries we have commissioned about each composer, we are also creating a lasting program or infrastructure enhancement to honour each of these foundational legacy composers. To commemorate Barbara Pentland, I’m pleased to announce that we will be launching a new province-wide composition competition next March to be called the Pentland Prize. It will be open to students at every level — from Grade One to Graduate school — starting in the 2017–18 season. The documentary film being premiered this evening is based on Barbara Pentland’s opera, The Lake. This significant work, neglected for 60 years following its appearance in 1952, was revived in 2012 by soprano and CMC BC Regional Advisory Council member Heather Pawsey. But the recording for the soundtrack of the film, which features Turning Point Ensemble, is so good that we went on to record the entire opera which will be released as a boxed set next year along with a DVD of the documentary you will see tonight. I hope you find tonight’s concert a fitting tribute and a compelling introduction to this exotic and completely original Canadian icon of creativity, as we continue this season’s voyage of discovery. Sean Bickerton, BC Director Canadian Music Centre / Centre de musique canadienne – 2! – About Tonight’s Program Barbara Pentland was a pioneer, an important member of the first generation of modernist composers in Canada, and a legendary figure in the musical history of British Columbia. Despite encountering discouragement throughout her life, Barbara Pentland’s intense commitment to her artistic values never waned. This evening’s concert spans nearly fifty years of Barbara Pentland’s extraordinary creative output through a broad selection of some of her most beloved chamber works. Pentland’s own instrument, the piano, is featured prominently in several pieces ranging from the early Five Preludes, composed during Pentland’s graduate studies at Juilliard, to the late song for soprano and piano, Ice Age, wherein her compositional voice has become much more distilled and concentrated. The program also includes Pentland’s two major works for harp, Commenta and Trance, as well as a more light-hearted Sonatina for solo flute, and the mercurial pedagogical miniature Puppet Show for piano duo, which reflects Pentland’s life-long interest in education. — Stefan Hintersteininger, 2016 – 3! – My Introduction to Barbara Pentland I was first introduced to the music of Barbara Pentland by my teacher, Robert Rogers. Bob, a wonderful pianist and advocate for new music, was a close friend of Dr. Pentland’s and an enthusiastic supporter of her work. He played most if not all of her piano music and gave first performances of several of her solo and chamber works. His appreciation of her music was infectious and I came to love the colours and gestures she used in her piano writing. She was a formidable pianist herself and her keyboard pieces reflect this. They are often difficult, but always make sense both technically and musically. Bob took me to meet Dr. Pentland when I was a high-school student. I remember her as being quiet and friendly. I was so young at the time that I did not fully appreciate the significance of her achievements as a composer. I am impressed now by her commitment to her own music and her insistence on writing it. Barbara Pentland’s music was the first serious new music that I played and it drew me into the world of 20th (and now 21st) century styles. Returning to her music after many years of exploring new works by other composers, I am struck by the strength, integrity and sheer musicality that her pieces exhibit. It has been a pleasure for me to curate this program. I have enjoyed discovering works I had not heard before. The difficulty for me lay in having to choose amongst so many intriguing pieces of music. Albertina, Jane, Janice, Mark and I all hope you enjoy this program. It has been a delight for us to prepare. — Barbara Pritchard, 2016 – 4! – Barbara Pentland Barbara Pentland (1912–2000) was born in Winnipeg and began to write music at the age of nine, an activity which was met with strong disapproval from her conventional and socially prominent parents. She nevertheless continued to write surreptitiously during her school years in Montreal and was eventually “allowed” to study composition while at finishing school in Paris. In 1936, she received a fellowship enabling her to continue studies at the Juilliard Graduate School in New York. During the Second World War years Pentland became an instructor at the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto and in 1949 she was invited by Harry Adaskin to join the just-founded music department of the University of British Columbia. Pentland's earliest works are flavoured by the chromatic tradition of the French late- Romantic school of Franck and D’Indy. In the 1930s she became concerned with avoiding the textures and idioms of 19th century music; at that time, she was greatly impressed by the linear focus of early music, and of Gregorian chant in particular. As she began to embrace modernists aesthetics, her work became neoclassical in spirit inspired, if not influenced, by Copland, Stravinsky, and Bartok. After her contact with Schoenberg’s pupil Dika Newlin in the late '40s and her introduction to the music of Webern and a sojourn at Darmstadt in the mid-'50s, she adopted serial techniques. – 5! – By the middle years of the 20th century Pentland saw herself as a committed high modernist and a steadfast partisan of contemporary values. In the 1960s and 1970s, Pentland continued her explorations investigating such then current trends as microtones, “found” texts, directed improvisation, and tape. Though Pentland was recognized by scholars and many fellow composers as one of the most significant figures in 20th century Canadian music, her work was rarely popular with audiences or a broad spectrum of performers. Pentland wrote her last works almost invariably for members of a loyal coterie of performers in Vancouver and elsewhere who celebrated the quality as well as originality of Pentland’s work. Her final years were clouded with ill health, and at the time of her death in the winter of 2000 she had been unable to compose for almost a decade. — David Gordon Duke, 2003 – 6! – Barbara Pentland Celebration Artistic Advisor: Barbara Pritchard The Lake Documentary Film Premiere Written, directed, and produced by John Bolton Five Preludes I. Prologue • II. Legend • III. Jest • IV. Romance • V. Curtin Jane Hayes, piano Sonatina for Solo Flute I. Andante tranquillo • II. Allegro • III. Allegretto giocoso Mark McGregor, flute Ice Age Janice Isabel Jackson, voice; Barbara Pritchard, piano Ow INTERMISSION Wo Puppet Show Jane Hayes and Barbara Pritchard, piano duo Let the Harp Speak, from Three Sung Songs Janice Isabel Jackson, voice; Barbara Pritchard, piano Commenta Albertina Chan, harp Trance Mark McGregor, flute; Albertina Chan, harp – 7! – The Lake Music by Barbara Pentland; libretto by Dorothy Livesay Composed 1952 in Vancouver, BC. Performers: Angus Bell (John Allison); Kwangmin Brian Lee (Johnny MacDougall); Heather Pawsey (Susan Allison); Barbara Towell (Marie); Turning Point Ensemble conducted by Owen Underhill. The Lake / n’-ha-a-itk is, in a sense, a project and a history that have been 143 years in the making.
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