Concerts & Events

HANDEL’S MESSIAH
December 16, 2023
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
7:30 pm

Doors Open at 6:45 pm

PERFORMERS

Gordon Gerrard, conductor

Conductor Gordon Gerrard is among the exciting new generation of music directors demonstrating new visions for orchestral leadership in Canada. Currently in his sixth season leading the Regina Symphony Orchestra, Gordon has distinguished himself as a leader in innovative and inclusionary programming. Trained first as a pianist and subsequently as a specialist in operatic repertoire, he brings a fresh perspective to the podium that endears him to audiences and musicians alike. After an international search, Gordon was appointed Music Director of the Regina Symphony Orchestra where he has taken bold steps reimagining the orchestra’s programming, including its Forward Currents Festival dedicated to social change and community engagement.

He has held the posts of Associate Conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Resident Conductor of Calgary Opera. He has returned to Calgary Opera to lead productions of La Bohème, Roméo et Juliette, Die Fledermaus, Lakmé and the Canadian premiere of Mark Adamo’s Little Women, which was recorded for national broadcast on CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera. Gordon made his debut with Edmonton Opera leading the western Canadian premiere of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory.

Gordon has made appearances with many of Canada’s leading orchestras, including Toronto, Québec, Kitchener-Waterloo and Victoria. He has worked regularly with the National Ballet of Canada, and in 2016, he made his European debut at Kammeroper Schloss Rheinsburg in Germany.

Ablaze Vocal Arts Ensemble

Ablaze Vocal Arts Ensemble is a new group of choirs founded and directed by Dorianna Holowachuk and located on Treaty 4 Land in Regina, Saskatchewan. Many of the Ablaze choristers began singing together under the direction of Dorianna Holowachuk in 2021 to sing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Regina Symphony Orchestra in May 2022.

Chelsea Kutn, soprano

Emerging Canadian soprano, Chelsea Kutyn, is doing her best to follow the advice of mentor Ben Butterfield who said, “Don’t bore me!” This year Chelsea made her debut with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and debuted two roles- "Susannah" from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro with Manitoba Underground Opera, and "Magda Sorel" in Menotti's The Consul with Opera NUOVA. 

“Kutyn was magnificent…capturing the full range of Magda’s anger, exasperation and ultimate despair chillingly…her depth of characterization and technical command owned the room”-Opera Canada

Chelsea is set to complete her Master of Music degree in Vocal Performance with Monica Huisman at the University of Manitoba in spring 2023.

​Chelsea is the 2022 recipient of the Rose Bowl, George H. Price Memorial Scholarship, and Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra Community Concert Performance Award from the Winnipeg Music Festival.

Up next, Kutyn sings with Pacific Opera Victoria in Braunfel’s “The Birds” and Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte.” Recent performances also include “ A New Year's Day Celebration” with the Victoria Symphony Orchestra, “Postcards” with Pacific Opera Victoria,  “Poppea” in Monteverdi’s L'incoronazione di Poppea (Desautels Faculty of Music Chamber Opera) and musical theatre scenes in the roles of "Sergeant Sarah" from Guys and Dolls, "Velma Kelly" from Chicago, "Catherine Parr" from Six, and "Beth" from Merrily We Roll Along (Desautels Faculty of Music Theatre Ensemble). 

April 2023

Simran Claire, mezzo soprano

Simran Claire is a Punjabi-Canadian mezzo-soprano and creative based in Vancouver, BC. Her artistic practice is rooted at the intersection of innovation and tradition, with an emerging focus on multidisciplinary work. She is proud to represent her community in the white-domintated spaces of opera and art song.

This past February, Simran released Dadima (Pacific Opera Victoria), a short film exploring her identity, heritage and lineage using the framework of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. Her creative debut was praised as “utterly moving, disorientating in a beautiful way, like uncovering a cultural bias you didn’t know you had,” (Opera Canada). Dadima was created as a part of her work in Pacific Opera Victoria’s Civic Engagement Quartet.

Last season, Simran made her French debut as Gossip 3 and Dancer in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, performed in the historic Opéra Royal at the Château de Versailles and co-produced by the Glimmerglass Festival; the production was recorded and broadcast internationally on arte.tv. Back home in Vancouver, she performed Oberaufseherin in the Canadian premiere of Mieczysław Weinberg’s Pasażerka (UBC Opera). As a member of Vancouver Opera’s Pre-Professional Internship Program, she understudied the role of Bunny in the world premiere of Maxime Goulet’s The Flight of the Hummingbird.

Simran is a graduate of the University of British Columbia (BMus 2018, MMus 2020), where she performed roles including Nicklausse in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Angelina in La cenerentola; she is a recipient of the music faculty’s highest graduating award, the UBC Medal for Music. She was a Young Artist at the Glimmerglass Festival in 2019, where she worked with director Francesca Zambello and sang in a concert curated and hosted by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

April 2023

Evan Korbut, baritone

Evan Korbut is a Toronto-based Anishinaabe baritone, born in Sault Ste. Marie, ON who is quickly garnering praise for his work in traditional, and particularly, new opera. His lyric baritone has been called “beautiful” and his command of the stage “complete” (Operaramblings, 2019).

Evan’s 2022-23 season includes multiple roles in Anchorage Opera’s Missing and a recital with the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto. 2021-22 season saw the baritone appear in a variety of live and digital presentations including Edmonton Opera’s ‘Wild Rose Project’ of new Canadian operas, as Bird in Ian Cusson’s Indians on Vacation, and as Virgil Thompson in The Mother of Us All and Michonnet in Adriana Levouvreur, both for Toronto’s VOICEBOX: Opera in Concert.

Other recent engagements include Owl in the premiere of Vancouver Opera and Pacific Opera Victoria’s production of Flight of the Hummingbird by Maxime Goulet. Korbut is a Dora Award winner for his roles as Simms/Spirit Chorus in Shanawdithit by Dean Burry, produced jointly by Tapestry Opera and Opera on the Avalon. The Stuart Hamilton Memorial Award Winner starred as Jamie Paul in the world premiere of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe for VOICEBOX: Opera in Concert, followed by the Canadian premiere of Schubert’s Fierabras for the same company. Other select credits include Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus, Danilo in The Merry Widow, Guglielmo in Così fan tutte, Marcello in La bohème, Tarquinius/Junius in The Rape of Lucretia, Dandini in La cenerentola, Figaro/Count Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro, Taddeo in L’italiana in Algeri, Publio in La clemenza di Tito, and Moses in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

Evan studied voice at the University of Western Ontario where he earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees.

April 2023

Mishael Eusebio, tenor

Filipino-Canadian tenor Mishael Eusebio is a dynamic performer whose creativity and charisma bring unique interpretations into every project. His recent portrayal of Young Harvey in the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’s world premiere of Harvey Milk Reimagined was received with much acclaim as well as being featured in the summer 2022 edition of Opera America Magazine.

Other recent credits include covering Tamino (The Magic Flute, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and L’Opéra de Montréal), the cover for Rose’s Fiancé (Awakenings, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis). Recent roles include, Passager (Le Flambeau de la nuit) the Navigator/Manoj (A Space of Sky, Houston Grand Opera workshop), Brighella (Ariadne auf Naxos), Bardolfo (Falstaff), and Nemorino as part of CCM’s Fall Scenes Gala. He also created roles for several new short operas as part of the Juilliard Opera-Composer Collaborative Project, debuting at the National Sawdust in Brooklyn.

Alongside a grant from the Art Song Foundation of Canada, Eusebio was a Colburn Fellow at Songfest Los Angeles where he collaborated with John Harbison, Lydia Brownand Graham Johnson. He was also the resident Tenor soloist for the Bach Ensemble at St. Thomas from 2019-2021 where he regularly performed Bach cantatas with members of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He has also performed with the Musica Sacra of Cincinnati.

Eusebio was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Concours OSM, a finalist at the 2020 American National Opera Association Competition, a recipient of the 2019 John C. Erskine Prize, and the Encouragement Award at the 2020 Metropolitan Opera District Auditions.

His artistic diversity has also allowed him to explore other forms of theatre past opera, working in experimental theatre with Expect Theatre in Toronto, Beyond the Machine at Juilliard as well as having created the role of Winnie in the critically acclaimed Summerland the Musical at the Toronto Theatre Fringe Festival.

He is a graduate of the Juilliard School and the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati.

Currently, Mishael is completing his second season as a member of L’atelier lyrique de l’Opéra de Montréal.

April 2023

PROGRAMME

Messiah, HWV 56
G.F. Handle (1685-1759)

Part I:
Sinfonia: Gave – Allegro moderato
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people
Ev’ry valley shall be exalted
And the glory of the Lord
Thus saith the Lord
But who may abide
And He shall purify
Behold, a virgin shall conceive
O though that tellest
For behold
The people who walked in darkness
For unto us a child is born
Pifa
There were shepherds
And, lo, the angel of the Lord
And the angel said unto them
And suddenly there was
Glory to God in the highest
Rejoice greatly
Then shall the eyes of the blind
He shall feed his flock
His yoke is easy

~ Intermission ~

Part II:
Behold the Lamb of God
And with His stripes are healed
All we like sheep
All they that see Him
He trusted in God
Thy rebuke hath broken his Heart
Behold and see
He was cut off
But thou didst not leave
Lift up your heads, O ye gates
How beautiful are the feet
Why do the nations
Let us break their bonds asunder
He that dwelleth in heaven
Thou shalt break them
Hallelujah

Part III
I know that my Redeemer liveth
Since by man came death
Behold, I tell you a mystery
The trumpet shall sound
Worthy is the Lamb
Amen

PROGRAM NOTES

HANDEL, George Frideric (1685-1759). Messiah, HWV 56

Composed in 1741, George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is one of the few works from the Baroque era that benefited from centuries-long successful publicity, allowing it to adapt to audiences' mercurial tastes.  Unlike the works of many other Baroque composers, including Bach, many of Handel’s compositions continued to be performed and loved long after his death, particularly in the United Kingdom.

Handel arrived in England permanently in 1712 around the time he received a very lucrative commission from Queen Anne to write a sacred choral composition celebrating the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession.  Already a highly successful composer of Italian opera, Handel went on to compose and produce many operas as well as English-language oratorios and anthems.  On top of his musical activities, he started a total of three commercial opera companies to bring Italy’s biggest stars to stages in London.

As the 1730s wore on, several pressures led Handel to move away from Italian opera to sacred choral music.  Not only were opera productions expensive and logistically burdensome, but Handel’s team experienced creative differences with several of the imported artists.  Most famously, a pair of lead sopranos engaged in a physical altercation that included colourful name-calling onstage in front of an audience.  There was also a tranche of concertgoers who were outraged that the same performance venue might host a concert of a spiritual nature one night, and a ribald comic opera the next.

Sensitive to these social tensions, Handel’s original title for Messiah was A Sacred Oratorio, and he agreed to have the premiere take place in Dublin, Ireland, in April 1742 away from the watchful eye of Anglican Bishops.  Nonetheless, both controversy and crowds followed him, and the beleaguered venue staff begged its tickets buyers to please leave their hooped skirts and swords at home.

Although the subject matter for all three parts of Handel’s Messiah better suits Easter programming, its association with Christmas may be due to the large quantity of great music written for Easter.  Without other competing Yuletide sacred works, the niche fit Messiah perfectly.

While many performances have firmly adhered to authenticity, artistic approaches to Messiah have been subject to experimentation over the centuries. A version by Mozart added larger orchestral forces and recreated the libretto in German in 1789.  In 2013 the Mormon Tabernacle Choir released an edition requiring a full symphonic orchestra and a three-hundred-and-sixty-member choir following a century of exploring large-scale Messiah performances with a uniquely American audience in mind.

Faithful Messiah concertgoers are no doubt aware of the tradition of rising to one’s feet for the Hallelujah Chorus, which concludes Part II. Legend has it that King George II stood up at that point in the music during the London premiere, naturally prompting the rest of the audience to do the same.  However, there is no evidence that the King was in attendance, and the simplest explanation is that classical music audiences occasionally experience uncertainty regarding concert decorum.

Program Notes by Tamsin Johnston