Returning to our familiar concert hall, music director Daniel Raiskin leads the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in a series of works that raise the spirit, evoking a sense of hope even in the face of great turmoil and tragedy.

Chealse Komschlies’s A Hidden Sun Rises offers a luminous and poetic symphonic opening to the concert. Distinguished guest composer Christopher Theofanidis then returns with A Thousand Cranes, a lyrical and contemplative work that features the WSO’s string section in nuanced dialogue with the harp.

The WSO is pleased to present the world premiere of Centuries of Hope: Variations + Theme by Winnipeg composer Neil Weisensel. Created for WNMF 2026 as a statement of perseverance and triumph over oppressive forces, this powerful new work carries a strain of strident resistance as it responds to world events.

Closing out the evening is Grammy-winning composer Gabriela Ortiz’s shimmering work TZAM, an epic orchestral statement that sees the composer taking a metaphorical step back to contemplate the Earth — and humanity’s place within it.

PROGRAM NOTES

Chelsea Komschlies – A Hidden Sun Rises (2019) [Canadian premiere]

A darkened orb, long dormant, and unseen by human eye

Begins to stir and wake at last, and glow within, and rise:

This, Of a great new dawn, the turning of the age, a sign.

Christopher Theofanidis – A Thousand Cranes (2015) [Canadian premiere]

A Thousand Cranes (2015) has been a piece I have long wanted to write. Many years ago on a visit to Japan, I encountered the story of Sadako Sasaki, a young girl who was affected by the radiation of the atomic blast in Hiroshima during World War II. There have been many artistic efforts written in response to that terrible event, most of which have had an understandably intense and dark impulse. The story of Sadako seemed to me to have a different focus- her short life met the unspeakable with the only response that can reflect true good- hope and faith in the future, and a belief in beauty.

After Sadako became sick, she followed an old custom that said that said that if she folded 1000 origami cranes, her deepest wish would come true. In an effort to heal herself, she folded the 1000 cranes, and then when she didn’t get better, the story goes that she still believed in the creative gesture so much that she started to fold another 1000 cranes. This hope and belief in a better future, even in response to such a tragedy, is what attracted me to the subject, and it is what underpins the impulse of my piece.

A Thousand Cranes is also in some ways a fulfillment of a promise that I made to my friend, Masakazu Hoshima, who hosted me and many others in Hiroshima, and took us to the memorial museum there, introduced us to a survivor who shared his story with us, and showed us many other facets of life in that remarkable city.

This work was facilitated by the Yellow Barn festival and was originally written for the East Coast Chamber Orchestra (ECCO) with Sivan Magen on harp and premiered in December of 2015 at the Nasher Museum in Dallas, Texas. It is commissioned by Charles and Jessie Price and dedicated to Nash and Marion.

The piece is approximately 25 minutes long.

—Christopher Theofanidis

Neil Weisensel – Centuries of Hope: Variations + Theme (2026) for orchestra [World premiere / WSO commission]

After Harry Stafylakis called and offered me a place on tonight’s programme, I started thinking first about what I would create, and then, given current world events, about the role of the artist in society. Why do artists create art? In 1991, I had the good fortune to meet the esteemed French-Romanian writer George Astalos (1933-2014) in Paris. We had a shared interest in opera, as he had produced a libretto (opera script) in 1979 entitled “Coup de Sifflet”, about the rise and fall of a dictator. M. Astalos wrote this piece while living in exile in Paris during the Ceausescu regime’s reign of terror in his homeland of Romania, and in fact predicted the fall of the Iron Curtain. I have always felt that this story, with its compelling dramatic arc of Glory/Diversion/Revolt/Downfall, needed to be told one way or another.

All would-be or actual dictators have a few things in common in my view: they are all men; they are megalomaniacs; they are delusional, with highly inflated sense of self-worth; they see themselves as messianic figures; they create a false enemy in order to garner support; they use fear and ignorance as a weapon; and, most importantly, their dictatorship always eventually crumbles. For centuries, humans have suffered under dictators, but against difficult and seemingly insurmountable odds and intractable situations, the people have always persevered, so I came up with the title “Centuries of Hope”, as a tribute to the people’s strength and resilience.

I have based this new composition on a musical idea (the “Theme” of the Variations and Theme subtitle) that I created for one of the scenes of Astalos’ opera “Coup de Sifflet”. I’m inspired in this work by the great 20th century German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), who I once heard deliver a speech at the Paris Conservatory of Music about how his piece “Michael’s Journey Around the Earth” uses an original theme, from which he built an entire orchestral composition of variations. Other musical and extra-musical inspiration comes from Frederick Rzewski’s monumental set of variations “The People United Shall Never Be Defeated” , based on the Chilean song “El pueblo unido jamás será vendico!” by Sergio Ortega and the Chilean folk group Quilapayún. Rzewski’s work was composed in 1975 as a tribute to the struggle of the Chilean people against the repressive regime of Augusto Pinochet. In fact, Rzewski’s work contains musical allusions to other European leftist struggles in Italy and Germany. However, because the timing of the inevitable downfall of every dictatorship is always hard to foretell, the Theme I will be using will only appear in its entirety as the conclusion of the piece. The subtitle of this work is therefore “Variations + Theme”, for which I take some of my inspiration in form, language and musical concepts from Claude Debussy’s “Preludes for Piano”, where the titles of individual pieces only appear at the end of the score.

Gabriela Ortiz – TZAM (2022) for orchestra

Due to circumstances that are entirely personal, heartfelt emotivity is conveyed in TZAM through a musical discourse that is, in turn, deeply rooted in the experiences life has to offer. Over the past two years, I have lost my father and two dear friends who were fundamental not only to me, but to musical development in Latin America: Carmen Helena Téllez, an orchestra conductor and tireless promoter of contemporary Latin American music, and Mario Lavista, my mentor and professor of musical composition. Somehow, as I began to compose TZAM, I found it impossible to defer what I felt was a pressing need to express my gratitude toward all of them through music.

Dedicated to the memory of Mario Lavista, TZAM means “dialogue” in Ayapaneco, one of more than 60 indigenous languages found in Mexico today although, with fewer than ten speakers, it is lamentably on the verge of extinction. I chose TZAM as a title not only for its attractive sound, but also because implicit in its meaning is our ability to converse and dialogue, not only with all that surrounds us and nourishes us as human beings within this secret, timeless space, but also and above all with what it means to be a human being on this Earth.

Parting from the action of dialogue as a primal concept, I decided to position the brass section differently, dividing it into two instrumental groups situated across from one another in a circular fashion, so that a stereophonic exchange of ideas could arise among them. Parting from this unusual instrumental placement of the brass, I thought it would be congruent to start out with a fanfare. This material acts as a leitmotiv or recurring idée fixe. Immediately afterwards, I carefully chose the main axes of harmony and textured timbre for each of the sections. I then tried to emulate the idea of representing an ocean of sounds —its rising and ebbing tides, acting time and again as a colorful harmonic and instrumental surprise. The central portion of TZAM includes the introduction of new musical material as a personal tribute to remind us of the intimate, delicate realm of Lavista’s music. Its development features a surprising and contrasting adagio for strings that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, originated in a genuine attempt to dialogue with Carmen, with Mario and with my father, perhaps for the last time. Finally, a brief epilogue appears in which I revisit the beginning of the work, thus reviving the primal concept that sparked its development.

—Gabriela Ortiz