45th PARALLEL UNIVERSE ORCHESTRA

NORTHERN LIGHTS

he Liberty Presents
March 7th, 7pm 
$30 per show, $25 with season package

Arcturus Quintet's 2019-2020 season features a performance of three delightful Scandinavian wind quintets. Written in 1971, Johan Kvandal's Quintet, Op. 34 captures the ever-changing beauty of a northern landscape, from darkly brooding dawns to swirling snowflakes.  A more recent addition to the repertoire, Esa-Pekka Salonen's 2003 composition Memoria is a slow arc through different textures, requiring three of the musicians to double on their darker, lower auxiliary instruments (alto flute, English horn, and contrabassoon).  Wrapping up the program is Carl Nielsen's eponymous Quintet, Op. 43, which was written in 1921 for the musicians of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet.  The piece captures the different personalities of each of the instruments – the chatty flute player, the sultry oboist, the practical joker who plays clarinet, the stoic horn player, and the grumpy bassoonist – and has since become a favorite of the wind quintet repertoire.

WORKS:
Johan Kvandal: Quintet for Winds
Johan Kvandal (1919-1999) counts without doubt among Norway's most frequently performed composers. With strong influences from both Norwegian folk and international contemporary musics, Kvandal developed his own language, a “modern tonality.”
Esa-Pekka Salonen: Memoria
Composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is known for his innovative approach to creating new music and curating concerts.
Carl Nielsen: Quintet for Winds
The work might not have been written except for the fortuitous timing of a phone call, in 1921, from Nielsen to the pianist Christian Christiansen at the very moment he was rehearsing the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante with four of the members of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet (the Københavns Blæserkvintett). While Christiansen talked, the wind players kept on rehearsing and Nielsen asked if he could come over and listen. He got to know both the Mozart work (which itself has a very odd history) as well as the members of the quintet. Later, he told the oboist, Svend Christian Felumb, that he wanted to write a quintet for them.

PERFORMERS:
Joe Berger, horn
Martha Long, flute
James Shields, clarinet
Steve Vacchi, bassoon
Karen Wagner, oboe

Music from 7pm-8pm. Please join us for a post-performance reception with our artists in our McTavish Room immediately following the performance! Main doors open at 6:30pm. Free tickets for students under 18 years old are available in our box office.