ESO channels the elements with new works including one from up-and-coming composer Alissa Cheung

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Thunder is going to roll in the Winspear next Friday, and it’s going to come from an unexpected source: a single bass timpani.

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The occasion is Alexander Prior’s last concert of new music before he ceases to be chief conductor of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. The work is Peter Eötvös’ Thunder, a five-minute tour-de-force percussion piece for a single pedal timpani, written in graphic notation — no pitches are indicated, but ESO tympanist Barry Nemish will be using the pedal extensively.

Another highlight of the exciting and varied program is a new ESO commission from a young Canadian composer who is getting increasing attention, Alissa Cheung.

Cheung is a native of Edmonton and after participating in the Boston Symphony’s famed Tanglewood summer camp, she played violin with the ESO for four years. Then in 2015 she became the second violin with Montreal’s famed Quatuor Bozzini, celebrated for its embrace of new works.

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She has now performed with the Bozzini all over the world — they will be playing in Norway this weekend — while developing her own compositional skills, with numerous performances of her music in North America and Europe.

Her new commission for the ESO is her first work for a full orchestra. She was asked by Prior to write something titled “post pandemic”, and her response to it is a seven-minute piece Impressions. Having seen how COVID-19 separated everything (and everyone) into what she calls nuclei, she explained that she “ended up kind of grouping by instrument families to represent the nuclei. I call it Impressions because I don’t really state an outright melody, though there is a suggestion of a chorale.”

Unexpectedly, she was also inspired by the brass writing in Strauss’ Alpine Symphony (an idiom far from her own), which she had played at Tanglewood with Haitink conducting, and by the harmonies of the French Impressionists.

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“Seven minutes really isn’t that much time,” Cheung points out, “so I just decided to stick to a few simple motives and just really work with colour. There’s a surprise at the end!”

The concert opens with one of Prior’s favorite works, the prelude and dance that Philip Glass arranged from the opening of his operatic masterpiece, Akhnaten. It is a minimalist masterpiece, on the one hand unrelenting in its massing of orchestral power, on the other hand building a powerful sense of spiritual ritual, reflecting the death of a pharaoh. A chance to experience this extraordinary piece is a rare and welcome event.

Another master of mesmerizing minimalist patterns is Steve Reich, but he is represented by a work that is more introverted and more lyrical than is usual for the composer with the duet for two solo violins and string orchestra. The five-minute work is a flowing conversational piece between instruments, with Ewald Cheung and Yue Deng as violin soloists.

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Vivian Fung is another composer with roots in Edmonton. She now lives in the United States, and already has an impressive catalog of larger-scale works. Her de ella orchestral de ella A Child’s Dream of Toys was commissioned by the 2019 Winnipeg New Music Festival (where Prior heard it), and was inspired by her then three-year-old son de ella and an oil painting by Grant Maxwell, Fung’s late piano teacher It’s full of Fung’s hallmarks of her: vivid colours, energy and sparkle, while clearly evoking the title of the 11-minute piece.

The only work in the concert the ESO has played before is by another Canadian female composer. Nicole Lizée’s Zeiss After Dark is a delightful, three-minute filigree soundscape, first heard in the Winspear in 2018.

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Galina Ustvolskaya is probably not a familiar name to Edmonton audiences, but she was one of the major composers who managed — just — to follow her own path in the face of Soviet oppression. Her Symphony No. 5 “Amen” is a symphony more in name than anything else, as it is for five instruments and a reciter and lasts around 13 minutes.

Premiered in 1991, it was her last composition, and is deeply imbued with her Christian faith — the text is the Lord’s Prayer (in Old Church Slavonic). It includes a part for a wooden block designed by the composer herself — the ESO had one specially made for this concert. It’s dark, slow-paced, intense and deeply heartfelt. Alas, it could all too well be an elegy for what is happening in Ukraine today, something Ustvolskaya would have surely condemned, and in which she would have recognized the shadow of the Soviet Union.

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Finally, there’s something completely unexpected. Karl Nielsen’s 1913 Canto serioso for French horn and piano would seem to be completely out of place here, but this is a version with a difference. Prior has done a reimagining of the piece, arranging it for full orchestra with enlarged percussion, lots of different orchestral colours, including alto flute, a bass trombone and gongs. Megan Evans is the soloist.

So roll on the thunder, and banished be the snow!

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PREVIEW

ESO New Music ‘Glass’

Driver: Alexander Prior

Soloists: Ewald Cheung, Yue Deng, Megan Evans and Barry Nemish

Where: Winspear Centre, 4 Sir Winston Churchill Square

When: April 29, 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: Starting at $32 from winspearcentre.com