The Peterborough Symphony Orchestra (PSO) will take the audience on a romantic musical voyage from Egypt to Vienna with “Sea You”, the orchestra’s final concert of its 2023-24 season on Saturday, May 25th at Showplace Performance Centre in downtown Peterborough.
With critically acclaimed Canadian pianist Sheng Cai as guest artist, the PSO will perform works by French composer Camille Saint-Saens and German composers Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms.
“This concert, designed to be a big thank-you and send-off for the summer vacation, will be a thrilling season ending featuring the entire PSO,” Michael Newnham, the PSO’s music director and conductor, tells kawarthaNOW.
The evening begins with Felix Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, which the German composer wrote in 1828 when he was just 19 years old. The overture was inspired by two contrasting poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language.
“It describes a ship in the middle of the ocean which is not moving because there has been no wind for days,” Newnham explains. “This concert overture perfectly describes the peaceful but dangerous calm of the sea, followed by movement — first in the flute and then in the rest of the orchestra — giving the feeling of wind pushing on the sails and a joyful journey to the final destination.”
Goethe’s two poems were extremely popular at the time — they also inspired fellow German composer Beethoven’s 1815 cantata of the same name — and Mendelssohn’s audience would have been familiar with both poems and able to follow the musical progression of the overture.
For the second piece of the evening, Newnham says “We are welcoming pianist Sheng Cai to play a jewel of a piece by the late Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns.”
Cai will be the soloist in the PSO’s performance of Piano Concerto No. 5 in F major, Op. 103, the fifth and final piano concerto of French composer Camille Saint-Saens. Written in 1896 when Saint-Saens was 61, the piece is popularly known as “The Egyptian” for two reasons.
“It was begun during a sea voyage to Egypt and then finished in Luxor,” Newnham says, referring to the Egyptian temple city which is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. “It has all kinds of exotic elements in it, where the piano and orchestra sometimes imitate sounds and instruments heard in Northern Africa during his trip. It makes me think of Jules Verne’s Phineas Fogg.”
Saint-Saëns, who frequently took winter vacations in Egypt, said the three-movement piece represented a sea voyage. The composer was himself the soloist for the 1896 premiere of the work, which was a popular and critical success.
For the PSO’s performance of the piece, there could be no better soloist than the highly praised Canadian pianist Sheng Cai, who is making his first visit to the PSO.
When he was just 15 years old, Cai won the top prize at the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM) Competition and Toronto Symphony’s competition. He has since performed a broad spectrum of concerto repertoire, from Mozart to 21st-century composers, with invitations to over 50 orchestras worldwide as guest soloist. The 34-year-old pianist’s solo recitals are far too numerous to list, but he has performed at many prestigious venues and he is also a passionate recording artist.
Cai began his studies in Canada and U.S., where he was a student at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and the Juilliard School’s pre-college division in New York. He received his Bachelor of Music Degree under full scholarship at The New England Conservatory in Boston. His teachers and mentors include pianists Anton Kuerti, Gary Graffman, and Russell Sherman.
VIDEO: “The Egyptian” performed by Sheng Cai (2019, Qintai Concert Hall, Wuhan, China)
Following an intermission, the PSO’s final performance of the 2023-24 season — a season that Newnham describes as “unusually successful” — is “one of the most iconic and recognizable symphonies that exists.”
German composer Johannes Brahms wrote his Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 over two decades, finally premiering the four-movement work in 1876 when he was 43 years old. He was first inspired to write the symphony at the age of 21, after hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Brahms was a merciless self-critic, and he destroyed draft after draft of the symphony that did not meet his exacting standards. He also felt pressure from his friends and the public that he would continue “Beethoven’s inheritance” and produce a symphony of commensurate dignity and intellectual scope.
Despite Brahms’ concern about the quality of the symphony, it was an immediate critical success, with distinguished German conductor Hans von Bülow calling it “Beethoven’s Tenth.”
The symphony has since become a perennial favourite of audiences and orchestra musicians alike, and sits at the very core of the Western orchestral music canon.
“Brahms’ First is music of strength, beauty, and tenderness, with some of the greatest melodies ever written,” Newnham says. “To me, this is one of the absolute pillars of the symphonic repertoire, combining to perfection the head and the heart.”
VIDEO: Except from Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 (2008, Berliner Philharmoniker)
“Sea You” begins at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 25th at Showplace Performance Centre at 290 George Street North in downtown Peterborough.
A pre-concert “Meet the Maestro” talk takes place at 6:45 p.m., where Newnham takes the Showplace stage for an intimate chat about the evening’s program.
Tickets for the concert — which are selling fast — are $33, $48, or $55, depending on the seat you choose, with student tickets costing $12 for all seats. Tickets are available in person at the Showplace Box Office from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Thursday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday, and one hour before the concert, or online anytime at showplace.org.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be a media sponsor of the Peterborough Symphony Orchestra’s 2023-24 season.
