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Upcoming VSO season to include pop concerts, film projects and a one-night visit with Yo Yo Ma

What makes this the best season in many is the wealth of classical programming, some stellar international soloists, and a number of very interesting guest conductors.

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The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra has just released plans for its 2023/24 season. And what plans they are.

Naturally, there are all sorts of specials, including a one-night only visit with Yo Yo Ma, film projects a-plenty, and lots and lots of pops concerts.

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But what makes this the best season in many is the wealth of classical programming, some stellar international soloists, and a number of very interesting guest conductors.

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Music Director Otto Tausk leads the lion’s share of the two flagship Masterworks series. He starts the Masterworks Gold season in mid-September with Mahler’s darkest symphony, the Sixth, and bookends the season with Mahler’s incomparable Das Lied von der Erde to conclude the Masterworks Diamond concerts in June.

In between, Tausk and others offer one great symphony after another in the Masterworks lineup: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, Prokofiev’s wartime Symphony No. 5, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, and John Adams’s symphony-by-another-name, Harmonielehre.

The Musically Speaking concerts, Fridays at the Orpheum, add to the cavalcade with Brahms’s Symphony No. 1, Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 (the Organ Symphony) and Schubert’s magisterial Symphony No. 9 in C Major.

The concerto selection at the Orpheum and at Classical Traditions at the Chan Centre includes a generous helping of exceptional works, starting with Barber’s Violin Concerto, with Karen Gomyo as soloist, at the end of September, then a rare chance to hear Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 4, his last and the least performed of his concerti, with Louis Lortie in mid-October. Also on tap are Richard Strauss’s programmatic concerto Don Quixote, with VSO principal cellist Henry Shapard, Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with Paul Huang, Jennifer Higdon’s Concerto for Mandolin and Orchestra, with star mandolinist Avi Avital, and Benjamin Britten’s astonishing Violin Concerto with Augustin Hadelich. Soloists including violinist Sarah Chang, cellist Steven Isserlis, pianist Simon Trpčeski, guitarist Aniello Desiderio and violinist Vadim Gluzman offer more conventional repertoire.

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Of course there are lots of favourites to delight regulars and (hopefully) lure new listeners: Holst’s The Planets, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and Ravel’s Boléro, plus familiar extravaganzas like Verdi’s Requiem and Haydn’s The Creation. Notably, there is a very strong emphasis on contemporary music by women, headlined by works from Kelly-Marie Murphy, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Britta Byström and Cassandra Miller.

Then there’s quite the lineup of guest conductors.

Gerard Schwarz, the long-tenured conductor of the Seattle Symphony, tucks a work by his compatriot David Diamond into his September playlist. JoAnn Falletta is a remarkable and adventurous conductor, and it will be wonderful to welcome her in an all-French program, including La Tragédie de Salomé by Florent Schmitt, a lush work from the end of the Belle Époque. Leonard Slatkin, a renowned conductor associated with orchestras all over, including Detroit and St. Louis, offers the Vancouver premiere of Mason Bates’s Anthology of Fantastic Zoology. We also get to meet fast-rising conductor Gemma New, artistic adviser and principal conductor of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, as well as the current music director of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra.

For further details, check out Vancouversymphony.ca.


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