Vancouver, BC – “Music Director Designate Otto Tausk and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra President Kelly Tweeddale announced today the VSO’s 2018/2019 100th Anniversary Season. One hundred years in the making, the season will honour the orchestra’s rich past, celebrate its role as an innovator and one of Canada’s leading orchestras, and launch the next centenary chapter of artistic growth with Maestro Tausk’s inaugural year” (VSO press release).
Music by Canadian composers will be featured prominently throughout the season, which includes five notable commissions. The season opens in September with a new Fanfare by Edward Top, the VSO’s Composer-in-Residence from 2011 to 2014. Then in January 2019, VSO Assistant Conductor William Rowson leads the orchestra in a work that is quickly becoming a Canadian classic, Abigail Richardson-Schulte‘s The Hockey Sweater, with words by Roch Carrier. That same month, the VSO presents its popular 6th Annual New Music Festival, which will include the world premieres of commissions from Nicole Lizée (Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra) and Emily Doolittle. The New Music Festival will also present Claude Vivier‘s Lonely Child.
Maestro Bramwell Tovey will return in February 2019 to conduct a program that includes Kelly-Marie Murphy‘s En el escuro es todo uno (In the darkness, all is one) with soloists Couloir (Ariel Barnes, cello, and Heidi Krutzen, harp). In May 2019, Tovey will return to conduct the premiere of his own Concerto for Orchestra, a work commissioned by the VSO to commemorate his appointment as Music Director Emeritus. Finally, the 2018/19 also includes a new commission from current Composer-in-Residence Jocelyn Morlock. A little further ahead, the upcoming season will mark the beginning of the VSO’s first Indigenous community commissioning program, with the world premiere planned for the 2019/2020 season.
For full details of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s 2018/2019 100th Anniversary Season, please visit the VSO’s website.