PERFORMER BIOGRAPHIES
Named one of CBC Music's top 30 classical musicians under 30, Canadian pianist Vanessa Yu is establishing herself as a sensitive and charismatic musician. Raised in Toronto and currently based in Baltimore, Vanessa has given solo performances in Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, the United States, and across Canada at venues including Carnegie’s Weill Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Bradley Symphony Center, and the Chautauqua Amphitheater.
Vanessa has had recordings broadcasted on CBC Music, in addition to being featured on OMNI Television and 680 News. As a finalist at the Classicalia competition, her concerto performance with the Vienna Opera Ball Orchestra was televised by PBS SoCal and Stingray Classica. Recent recording projects include premieres of commissioned Canadian voice-piano works, recorded with soprano Maghan McPhee on the Akashic Classics label with distribution through Universal. Produced by the Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra, the album will be released in 2025.
A seasoned concerto soloist, Vanessa has performed Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Saint-Saëns concerti with several orchestras. She has garnered awards in Canada and beyond, receiving prizes at the Chicago international, Eisemann international, and PianoArts North American competitions, among others.
Vanessa graduated from the University of Toronto where she was a full scholarship BMusPerf student under the tutelage of Steven Philcox and Enrico Elisi. She is currently pursuing Master’s studies at the Peabody Conservatory in the studio of Boris Slutsky. Vanessa has also played in masterclasses for renowned musicians including Robert McDonald, Julian Martin, Jerome Lowenthal, and John Perry.
Inspired by her mentors, Vanessa enjoys teaching; her students have won awards at competitions including the International Music Festival and Competition in Ontario and OMFA provincials. In addition, she has recently led masterclasses and adjudicated in Ontario and Maryland. A passionate educator beyond music, Vanessa has also taught design-based workshops at Google and post-secondary institutions.
Sinfonia Toronto now in its 27th season, has toured twice in Europe, in the US, South America and China, receiving glowing reviews. It has released six CD’s, including a JUNO Award winner, and performs in many Ontario cities. Its extensive repertoire includes all the major string orchestra works of the 18th through 21st centuries, and it has premiered many new works. Under the baton of Nurhan Arman the orchestra’s performances present outstanding international guest artists and prominent Canadian musicians.
Maestro Nurhan Arman has conducted throughout Europe, Asia, South America, Canada and the US, returning regularly to many orchestras in Europe. Among the orchestras Maestro Arman has conducted are the Moscow Philharmonic, Deutsches Kammerorchester Frankfurt, Filarmonica Italiana, St. Petersburg State Hermitage Orchestra, Orchestre Regional d’Ile de France, Hungarian Symphony, Arpeggione Kammerorchester, Milano Classica and Belgrade Philharmonic.
PROGRAM NOTES
Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major, “Emperor” by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Chamber version by Vinzenz Lachner
In the spring of 1809 Napoleon besieged Vienna and occupied the city after a brief bombardment. Beethoven remained there and finished his Fifth Piano Concerto during this period. Some writers take their cue from the French occupation and to understand the concerto as Beethoven’s response to it. But far from being swept up in the fervor of the fighting, Beethoven found the occupation stressful and depressing. During the shelling, he hid in the basement of his brother Caspar’s house, where he wrapped his head in pillows to protect his ears. To his publishers, Beethoven wrote: “Life around me is wild and disturbing, nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers, misery of every sort.”
After an introductory orchestral chord, the piano enters with a cadenza, an unaccompanied virtuoso passage filled with scales and trills created from fragments of thematic material, usually heard at the close of a movement. By opening the concerto with a cadenza full of hints about what is to come, Beethoven telegraphs the themes and ideas of the opening movement to the listener. The seamlessness of the opening movement gives listeners a sense of inevitability, as if the music could unfold in no other way. Beethoven’s semi-subversive opening cadenza acts as a subliminal suggestion, planting the basic elements of later themes in our ears without our noticing.
The second movement Adagio un poco mosso takes us to a different world altogether. The energy of the first movement is replace by sylvan calm. Beethoven moves to the remote key of B major and mutes the strings, which sing a hymn-like main theme.
Beethoven links the second and third movements: the piano begins, very gradually, to outline a melodic idea, which struggles to take shape and direction. And then suddenly it does, as if the misty imaginings are hit with an electric current that snaps them to life as the main theme of the last movement. This Allegro finale is a vigorous rondo that alternates lyric episodes with some of Beethoven’s most rhythmically-energized music with a dance-like character.
The nickname “Emperor” did not originate with Beethoven, and his denunciation of Napoleon’s self-coronation several years earlier suggests that he would not have been sympathetic to it. The composer almost certainly never heard this concerto referred to by the nickname commonly used today.
Chamber Symphony (String Quartet No. 8), Op. 110a by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Orchestral version by Lucas Drew
In the summer of 1960 Shostakovich went to Dresden to work on the score for a Soviet-East German film. He was overwhelmed by the still-evident results of the 1945 Allied bombing that destroyed the city and killed even more civilians than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Within three days he composed a quartet dedicated “In memory of the victims of fascism and war.”
The quartet is full of extra-musical symbolism, but there is continuing controversy about how to interpret it. The work may be a doctrinaire Soviet artist’s revulsion against fascism, a subtly-integrated protest against the Soviet state, or a cry of anguish about totalitarianism of any kind. Shostakovich never explained his intentions; he gave no indication, even, about whether he had incorporated specific messages or was only expressing a general emotional state. In view of his precarious position as the Soviet Union’s most famous and honored composer and also at times the target of fierce criticism for “formalism” and “decadence,” his reticence is unsurprising, especially about a work of such tremendous strength.
The Quartet is in five movements played without pause. Its basic building block is a four-note theme built on the German notation for an abbreviation of the composer’s own name, turning DSCH into D-E-flat-B. The Quartet opens with a fugal introduction of this motif, followed by a theme from the opening of his First Symphony, the work that first brought him national success. These two themes recur in a rondo-like structure along with a descending theme that references his Fifth Symphony, the work that restored him to favor in 1937 after the official denunciations that almost ended his career.
The first movement’s reminiscent Jews were tormented so mood is blown apart by the second, an Allegro molto from which several iterations of the DSCH motif emerge. At a mid-movement climax, the violins weep a theme from Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, which was written in 1944. Shostakovich called this a Jewish theme, saying: “Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me... it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears. This quality...is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.”
The third movement is a ghostly waltz-rondo in G minor and G Major at the same time. The violins play the DSCH motif, but with a B-natural, the identity note of the G Major scale, while the viola accompaniment stays with B-flat, the identity note of the G minor scale. The musical insecurity created by this schizophrenic hesitation between two versions of the same key is even more unsettling than the avoidance of a clear key structure; it is a frequent element of Shostakovich’s style. The third section of the rondo breaks the waltz rhythm by changing to duple time, bringing in a march-like theme from Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1, composed a year earlier.
The third movement recapitulates its themes and winds down with the Cello Concerto’s five-note motif and its three-note martial accompaniment heard last. The first violins stretch this theme out, all alone, leading into the fourth movement, when they are suddenly overtaken by the rest of the orchestra, who have re-cast the three-note accompaniment into a menacing unison attack.
These violent attacks are repeated at intervals throughout the fourth movement. They may be fate knocking at the door, gunfire, or the explosions of bombs dropped by the aircraft one can hear in the pianissimo droning of the first violins. The droning morphs into the first four notes of the dies irae, which are, not coincidentally, the same notes of the DSCH motif in a different order. The dies irae is followed immediately by a Russian funeral anthem, “Tormented by the weight of bondage, you glorify death with honor,” in the lower strings. The violent attacks transformed from the Cello Concerto theme recur; then, over a low drone in the cello and viola, the violins play a Russian revolutionary song, “Languishing in prison,” just before the cello sings an aria from Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the work that triggered the first official criticism of his writing.
After a last attack by the transformed Cello Concerto theme, the first violin chants the dies irae again and turns it back into the DSCH theme. The fifth movement builds a fugal elegy on the original motif, mourning for all the complex history that has gone before.
Contrapunctus 1 and 2 from The Art of the Fugue, by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Orchestral arrangement by Alan Bonds
The Art of Fugue is Johann Sebastian Bach’s final and most complete exploration of counterpoint. Bach began the work in the early 1740’s and likely finished it between 1748 and 1749. it was published in 1751 by his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, after his father’s death. It is both an educational and an artistic demonstration of fugal writing, possibly meant as a theoretical treatise rather than a performance piece.
The collection of fugues and canons showcases Bach’s matchless skill in developing a single musical theme in various ways - a wide range of techniques such as inversion, stretto (over-lapping entries of new voices), augmentation, diminution, and mirroring, which are still in use today. It is notable for its lack of named instrumentation, leaving performers free to decide how to perform the music.
In all, the work consists of fourteen fugues and four canons, all in D minor, all based on a single main theme. The pieces are arranged in increasing complexity” Each fugue is referred to as a contrapunctus; each is based on the same theme, which undergoes increasingly complex transformations. The simplest, Contrapunctus 1 and 2, present the theme in its most basic forms, merely hinting at more complex fugal techniques.
Contrapunctus 1 is a forthright four-voice fugue featuring imitative counterpoint. After the main theme’s descending motion and dotted rhythm are introduced, different voices enter one after another, each copying the theme. A countersubject is introduced; smooth and flowing, it preserves the simple, connected motion of the main theme. Several episodes of modulations and inversions follow, but they consistently keep the theme clear. Complex techniques are avoided here, instead offering pure, elegant counterpoint at its simplest. A serene, measured tone sets the stage for more intricate explorations of counterpoint that follow.
Contrapunctus 2 is more energetic, incorporating stretto and rhythmic variation. It also features a pronounced dotted rhythm, reminiscent of a French overture, creating a lively, dance-like character. The subject is the same as in Contrapunctus 1, but the rhythmic alteration dials up the intensity. A similar developmental path as Contrapunctus 1 is followed, but with more extensive use of stretto, with subject entries coming in quicker succession. Greater dynamic and rhythmic complexity contrasts with the more serene tone of Contrapunctus 1, even while still developing the same theme.
The mathematical rigor of the collection’s works leads some to offer mathematical interpretations: some scholars claim The Art of Fugue follows a mathematical pattern based on the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio, while others think it may have numerological significance based on the Book of Revelation in the Bible describinb the apocalypse.
