The Peterborough Symphony Orchestra (PSO) is kicking off its 2025-26 season by featuring the tabla — a pair of hand drums central to Hindustani classical music — for the first time in its history during “Bright Lights” at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 1 at Showplace Performance Centre in downtown Peterborough.
Guest artist Shawn Mativetsky will perform on the tabla when the orchestra performs a concerto by Canadian composer Dinuk Wijeratne, with the PSO also performing classic works by the early 19th-century Italian composer Gioachino Rossini and the 18th-century German-Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
“To open a season, we want to have some familiar music and some unfamiliar music,” says PSO music director and conductor Michael Newnham. “It’s the texture that I think about when putting things together. It’s like putting together a meal: if you’re going to have fish as your main course, then you have to make sure the other things are going to fit with it.”
The familiar music that will open the concert will take the shape of Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville, which Newnham says “95 per cent of people in the audience are going to automatically know.”
Labelled as “one of the funniest composers that existed” by Newnham, Rossini is known for his comic operas, with his most notable being 1815’s The Barber of Seville, based on a play by French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais. However, like Mozart before him, Rossini usually composed overtures for operas at the last minute. He ran out of time before the premiere of The Barber of Seville, so he instead used the overture he had written in 1813 for his opera Aureliano in Palmira.
The music from the opera continues to be featured in contemporary pop culture, and many members of the audience may recognize the overture from the 1950 Looney Tunes theatrical cartoon short “Rabbit of Seville” featuring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, which has been voted number 12 of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time.
VIDEO: Bugs Bunny at the Symphony II: “Rabbit of Seville” Excerpt
Despite the overture being so well known and widely performed, the PSO has not performed the piece for as long as Newnham has been PSO music director, which dates back to 2001.
“You feel in Rossini’s music there’s the Italian light,” says Newnham. “You go to Italy and you get infused by this light. The sun looks different, the sky is super blue, and the buildings just reflect all of that. Rossini’s music reflects that in the same way — it’s welcoming and it’s got a huge smile to it. It’s funny, and he has great humour.”
Newnham adds Rossini was “very much under the spell of Mozart” which is why the piece pairs so well with the “Bright Lights” concert finale. Audiences will also recognize Mozart’s 1788 Symphony, no. 41 which was later labelled “Jupiter” — Mozart’s last symphony and the longest and most complex he ever composed.
“It’s Mozart at his absolute greatest, at his finest, but it has a great deal of grandeur about it, like the planet Jupiter would,” says Newnham. “I don’t know of any music that is more full of light and brilliance and classical beauty.”
Though it’s unknown whether the work was performed during Mozart’s lifetime, the Jupiter symphony remains immortal like the Roman god after which it was nicknamed after his death by German violinist, composer, conductor and musical impresario Johann Peter Salomon.
“The piece itself is incredibly important in the history of music,” says Newnham.
Between the iconic compositions that will bookend the concert, the PSO will perform Concerto for Tabla and Orchestra, written in 2011 by Dinuk Wijeratne, a Juno award-winning conductor, composer, and pianist who was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Dubai in UAE, studied in the UK and at Juilliard in New York City, and moved to Canada in 2005.
VIDEO: Suite from “The Life of Pi” featuring Michael Newnham and Shawn Mativetsky
Commissioned by the Symphony Nova Scotia, the concerto’s world premiere was recorded live by CBC in February 2012.
“When I heard it, I thought this is absolutely perfect because it centred in the classical way of writing music, which means that there are ideas of fugues and counterpoint like there is in the Mozart piece,” says Newnham. “There is clarity in the texture like there is in Mozart and Rossini, but there’s also this influence of strong Asian music from India and Sri Lanka. The tabla player has to go through a lot of different hoops and the orchestra keeps it grounded.”
Special guest artist Shawn Mativetsky has already performed the Wijeratne piece under the baton of the composer, but has also worked with Newnham to perform music from The Life of Pi with Orchestra Toronto in 2024. Based in Montréal, Mativetsky is considered one of Canada’s leading ambassadors of the tabla, a pair of hand drums from the Indian subcontinent central to Hindustani classical music.
Mativetsky has studied under the renowned Pandit Sharda Sahai, who is a direct descendent of the founder of the Benares style of tabla playing. Though he began playing drums when he was just seven years old, Mativetsky was captivated when he first heard tabla on a CD.
“I was immediately awed and amazed by the sound of the instrument, its unique tone, and intricate rhythms,” he said to PSO general manager Christie Goodwin in an interview featured in a recent PSO newsletter. “I just had to learn how to play this instrument. Learning tabla has completely changed the course of my life.”
Like perhaps much of PSO’s audience, Newnham’s own first experience with the tabla came from listening to songs from The Beatles, including “Love You To” and “Within You Without You.”
“George Harrison really loved the tabla and that particular culture and tried to integrate the tabla and the sitar into rock music, and then the tabla and sitar found its way into all kinds of other music,” Newnham says. “It’s something that’s just tons of fun, and that’s what I’ve been hearing from people that are looking at coming to the concert.”
VIDEO: “Concerto for Tabla and Orchestra’ by Dinuk Wijeratne featuring Sandeep Das on tabla
While the tabla might be new to the PSO repertoire, introducing audiences to new instruments is not, as evident from the 2022-23 season when the orchestra featured a Chinese erhu soloist.
“We’ve been trying to feature instruments, at least once a season, that are very unusual,” says Newnham. “We’ve been very aware that we want to make our concerts relevant to our audiences. Relevant in the sense that, when we’re playing music that comes from a hundred years ago in another country (from composers) like Mozart or Rossini, we want to feature something besides that that’s homegrown and from Canada.”
He adds that Canadian identity has been changing over the past few decades, and instruments like the Chinese erhu and the tabla are now ingrained in our culture.
“I think the audiences enjoy this — we certainly enjoy it as musicians,” Newnham says. “We are trying to forge an identity for a Canadian orchestra that is different than an orchestra that might be in Austria or even Texas, because we are different.”
“That’s our goal and I think that’s what we have to be doing, and it’s what we should be doing. We have a responsibility to Canadian music, to Canadians, and to Peterborough to have programming that reflects us.”
The “Bright Lights” concert on November 1 will be preceded by a “Meet the Maestro” talk at 6:45 p.m., where Newnham takes to the Showplace stage for an intimate chat with the audience about the evening’s program.
Tickets are $36, $50, or $57, depending on the seat you choose, with student tickets costing $15 for all seats. Tickets are available at thepso.org/bright-lights.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be a media sponsor of the Peterborough Symphony Orchestra’s 2024-25 season.
