The UBC Symphony Orchestra and choirs join forces for a winter concert, December 5
Program pairs Jean Coulthard’s Quebec May with a work by her teacher, Ralph Vaughan Williams
SPONSORED POST BY UBC School of Music
UBC Symphony Orchestra
This winter, the UBC Symphony Orchestra joins forces with the UBC Choral Union and the UBC University Singers for an evening of music.
Taking place at the Chan Shun Concert Hall on December 5 at 7:30 pm, the program moves from spring celebration to Parisian wit to an urgent plea for peace. Conductors Jonathan Girard, Hyejung Jun, and Han-Ah Park will lead the artists.
The program opens with Quebec May by Jean Coulthard, one of the great figures in Canadian music and a composer whose career was rooted at UBC. Her vivid choral-orchestral work captures the rush of a northern spring. It also starts a thread that runs through the whole evening, because Coulthard was a student of Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose Dona Nobis Pacem closes the concert.
As a young Vancouver musician, Coulthard won a scholarship from the Vancouver Women’s Musical Club that took her to the Royal College of Music in 1928–1929, where she studied with Vaughan Williams. Her time with him left a lasting mark, and his influence can be heard in her later music. Coulthard joined the UBC faculty in 1947 and taught there until she retired in 1973. At this concert, UBC musicians are performing the music of a UBC composer alongside the music of her teacher.
Poulenc’s suite from Les Biches follows: music from his 1920s score for the Ballets Russes, full of charm, irony, and the bright energy of Paris between the wars. The title means “the does” (young deer), but in 1920s Paris it was also slang for fashionable young women. The ballet depicts a languid summer house party full of flirtation, shifting glances, and ambiguous attractions.
The mood changes for Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem, a cantata written in 1936 as Europe drifted toward another war—music that remains unfortunately relevant in modern times. Combining excerpts from the Latin Mass with poems by Walt Whitman and others, it is one of the 20th century’s most powerful choral statements about the cost of conflict and hope for peace. The soprano and baritone solos will be sung by students of the UBC School of Music.
Tickets and more details are available here.
Post sponsored by UBC School of Music.
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