Volume 28 Issue 5 | April & May 2023

IN WITH THE NEW
WAVE AFTER WAVE
Esprit Orchestra
celebrates 40 years of
making a difference
WENDALYN BARTLEY
Eugene Astapov
April 2023 will be a busy month for Esprit Orchestra,
Canada’s only full-sized, professional orchestra
devoted to performing and promoting new
orchestral music. First up will be two programs in this
year’s edition of the New Wave Festival, on April 12 and
16, followed by their Season Finale concert on April 23, all
designed to celebrate Esprit’s 40 years of music making.
The New Wave Festival began in 2002 as a way to support emerging
Canadian composers. From the beginning the goal was to create
a more relaxed social environment to facilitate a more casual interaction
between the composers, performers and the public. For this
year’s festival, Toronto’s newest concert space – the TD Music Hall,
which is connected to newly restored Massey Hall – will be the venue.
The Music Hall has been designed with cutting-edge audio, video and
lighting technology to create a lounge-like environment that mixes
both music and the nightlife scene.
One key feature of the New Wave Festival, consistent since the
beginning, is Esprit’s three-year Creative Strategy Program which
gives participating composers the opportunity to premiere a commissioned
work in each of three years, with each successive work
gradually increasing the size of the orchestration. These commissions
are presented in concert, alongside works by other influential
composers. This year, four composers from the program will have
their latest premieres programmed: Sophie Dupuis and Roydon Tse on
April 12, and Julia Mermelstein and Stephanie Orlando on April 16.
Interestingly, on Esprit’s Season Finale concert April 23, a newly
commissioned work by Eugene Astapov will be premiered, which
brings the narrative full circle: Astapov is himself an alumnus of the
Julia Mermelstein
Creative Strategy program. I spoke to both Astapov and Mermelstein
about their cumulative experiences working with Esprit.
Julia Mermelstein, now in her second year of the program, was very
enthusiastic about her experience, and emphasized how important
it was to have so much rehearsal time, comparing it to an experience
elsewhere that only allowed for ten minutes of rehearsal; with Esprit
she enjoyed three rehearsals, each one from 45 minutes to one hour in
duration. In her first commission for Esprit, titled in water suspended,
which premiered in May 2022, she explored different textures and ways
of layering the instruments. “I was able to find a groove for myself, what
I really like to express, and am now able to take it further with this new
piece,” she said, adding that she likes to work with the musicians on
the fine details and describing it as “very intimate work, and not something
that can be rushed.”
Her latest piece to be premiered at New Wave, between walls,
includes a harp as part of the instrumentation (a new venture for
Mermelstein), as well as fixed electronics which will no doubt be
well suited to the performance venue. She has used recorded samples
of instrumental sounds and field recordings in the piece, as well as
her own experiments, such as recording herself playing a stick on a
wooden counter. Once again, she’s drawn to closeup and intimate
sounds, with the electronics as an extension of the orchestral. “I’m
playing with extending the natural resonances of each instrument
– artificially extending what a piano, harp or wind instrument, for
example, can do. It’s about blending and creating a seamless interaction
between the acoustic and electronic sounds.”
The ideas behind the piece were inspired by a lecture given by
Buddhist teacher Alan Watts in the 1960s called The Web of Life.
What fascinated Mermelstein was the way Watts described the duality
between the micro and macro. In this composition she is working
with the metaphor of fabric, and how its complex textures made from
individual threads weave together to create a whole.
Eugene Astapov has been connected with Esprit since his days
in the music program at Earl Haig Secondary School, and has been
heavily involved in past New Wave Festivals since then. During his first
year as an undergrad at university, he received his first commission
from Esprit, and in 2017 his piece Hear My Voice was premiered as
part of that year’s New Wave Festival. Recognizing Astapov’s talent for
conducting, Esprit’s Alex Pauk invited him to conduct his own piece,
and also works by other composers who were part of the festival.
Electronics featured in that piece as well. Hear My Voice has an early
recording of Alexander Graham Bell, made shortly after the invention
of the telephone, embedded into the orchestral texture. Astapov’s
second commission for the festival, Emblem, was premiered in 2019.
Then, when COVID interrupted things, Astapov was offered a contract
to serve as Esprit’s associate composer/conductor; part of this contract
14 | April & May, 2023 thewholenote.com