Throughout its history, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra has played a leading role in supporting the creation of new music in Canada, most notably through its now 35-years-young Winnipeg New Music Festival. Building on this tradition of fostering the voices of the future, the (newly renamed) Michael Nesbitt Composers Institute now enters its seventh year, gathering emerging talents from across the nation to work with the WSO in bringing to life an exciting program of fresh ink orchestral music.

WSO’s Music Director Daniel Raiskin and RBC Assistant Conductor Monica Chen lead your WSO through a set of world premieres of new works by six gifted composers, including the winner of the Canadian Music Centre (Prairie Region)’s annual Emerging Composer Competition. Mentor composers Christopher Theodanidis and Kelly-Marie Murphy join WSO composer-in-residence Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis in introducing this year’s featured young artists as the 2026 Winnipeg New Music Festival lifts off in this free symphonic concert celebrating Winnipeg’s musical community.

PROGRAM NOTES

Chris Byman – Scherzo Oscuro (2025) [World premiere]
Winner of the 2026 CMC Prairie Region Emerging Composer Competition

“Scherzo Oscuro takes the idea of a scherzo – traditionally light and witty – and twists it into something darker. The work draws inspiration from Charles Ives’ provocative orchestral experiments and Bernard Hermann’s vivid cinematic language, but also from Carl Jung’s concept of “shadow-work”: the integration of subconscious darkness into conscious thought.

The music is built on dualities: left brain versus right brain, hero versus anti-hero, sobriety versus intoxication, order versus chaos. These tensions appear most clearly in the use of bitonality and in a rhythmic motive derived from the mantra “one day at a time” (or more bluntly, “one day at a f****** time”). Introduced by the strings in the opening, this obsessive figure re-emerges throughout the piece in various guises, often hammered out as a stubborn, recurring thought.

Formally, the scherzo tipsily bends the rules of Sonata and Rondo, never settling neatly into either. The result is a humorous and layered musical joke: a piece that laughs at the dark while grappling with serious undercurrents of addiction, duality, struggle, and persistence.”

Liam Berry – O My Heart, the Wind (2025) – [World premiere]

It’s close to the end of winter and you’re standing on the back porch of your new house in the West End. The inescapable road dust that coats everything has tinged the yard grey-brown. A siren wails along Portage. Your wife is getting the baby to bed upstairs and you really don’t have the energy to carry the bag of garbage in your hand out into the alley.

Weighing down your mind is an anger and a disappointment so deep it seeps into everything. The sea levels you were told were rising when you were six years old have only gotten higher. The wildfires have become seasonal. Systemic change does not seem as inevitable as structural failure. All any of your friends want is an inkling that they might one day live in a home they own.

Upstairs, your baby is still crying and the wind starts blowing and your heart is wrenched out of your mouth because when the future bends towards certain catastrophe of one kind or another, what hope can there be?

And yet, the wind is blowing, and the trees off your back porch are beautiful even before their leaves have come in, and what a wondrous thing it will be when your baby first sees leaves. So hope is really the only possible thing to do.

O My Heart, the Wind asks and answers a question:
“Where does hope lead us?”
“It is on the wind.

Gabriella Canzani – Ode to Mourning Doves (2025) – [World premiere]

When I was in the initial stages of writing Ode to Mourning Doves, it became clear that the melodic lines I was creating evoked birdcall. Once this idea of birds had gotten into my head, it began to overtake the project; I couldn’t help but conceptualize this piece as a plethora of birds, singing and flying around together. Throughout the piece, you might catch the moments when the birds emerge at sunrise, sing from the treetops, fly by the oceanside, and engage in several other escapades until the sunset quiets them.

All of the birdcalls in Ode to Mourning Doves are fictional, with the exception of one: the mourning dove’s. This bird’s beautiful song, which I used to imitate with my sister when we were kids, first appears in its entirety after the first complete silence of the piece (mm. 24-25). The flutter-tongue and pitch-bending used on the flute to imitate the mourning dove’s call create a beautiful, but lonely sound. As the piece progresses, certain aspects of this call, such as the subtle downward slide (pitch-bending) at the end of notes, are transferred from the flute to the strings, who eventually play the full melody at the climax of the piece (mm. 64-65).

With this work, I hope to have captured the beauty of a spring morning, and the tranquillity that washes over us as we let nature become our escape.

Madeleine Ertel – Dance in Fragments (2025) – [World premiere]

“If we’re not supposed to dance, why all this music?” – Gregory Orr

Dance in Fragments is the journey of one theme through the prisms of rhythm, counterpoint, and melodic variation to create an uneasy, disjointed dance – a dance for a clumsy, self-conscious dancer. As a composer, Ertel is concerned with preserving music’s relationship to dance/movement through rhythm as a way to strengthen the performer-audience relationship. The constant referencing and reshaping of musical material in this piece creates a feeling of indecision, like the dancer cannot stop going back and rehashing past decisions. In this piece, listeners may experience moments of vulnerability, reactivity, and longing, and are encouraged to think about how these themes come up in their own lives.

Kevin Hayward – Fractured (2025) – [World premiere]

Fractured speaks about broken things and broken people. Its broad textures are partially inspired by the view of the St. Lawrence from Domaine Forget, in Saint-Irénée, Québec.

Ashton Latimer – Overflow (2025) – [World premiere]

When starting this orchestral piece, I had many ideas in mind. I composed sketch after sketch, trying to shape a sense of story in what I was writing. One thing I noticed across all these sketches was their strong connection to texture, timbre, and the coloristic properties of the orchestra. With that in mind, I wove together material from each to create Overflow.

In my mind, Overflow doesn’t follow a set story or programmatic narrative. Instead, its title serves as a literal reflection of how I envisioned the piece. The opening section features flourishes from various instruments alongside a melodic line in the violoncello and bassoon. As the layering develops, the music grows increasingly unstable, leading into the second section—where the overflow begins.

This section is driven by a rising and descending line in the strings and woodwinds, which continuously expands in length and speed, creating the effect of the orchestra spilling over itself in a chaotic surge. The final section revisits and reflects on the textures explored earlier, incorporating an altered version of the opening melody.