2023-2024 Concert Season
The Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir presents:
ECCE COR MEUM
(Behold My Heart):
The Music of
Sir Paul McCartney
17 March 2024, 3 pm
Cathédrale de Saint-Boniface
SEASON SPONSOR:
Fettes Family Foundation
MEDIA SPONSOR:
CJNU Nostalgia Radio 93.7 FM
PLEASE SILENCE YOUR PHONES
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PLEASE DIM YOUR SCREEN
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PLEASE SILENCE YOUR PHONES 〰️ PLEASE DIM YOUR SCREEN 〰️
CONCERT PROGRAM
Can’t Buy Me Love - Lennon-McCartney arr. Keith Abbs
In My Life - Lennon-McCartney arr. Steve Zegree
Soloists: Kaylene Blackwood, Mallory Prescott, Nicola Spasoff
Eleanor Rigby - Lennon-McCartney arr. Paris Rutherford
Soloists: Vivien Laurie, Leah Ma, Lorenz Sarrondo
Blackbird - Lennon-McCartney arr. Daryl Runswick
Whistlers: Daniel Gervai, Christine Sveinson, Wanda Prychitko
Yesterday - Lennon-McCartney arr. Bob Chilcott
Soloist: Andrea Lett
BRIEF PAUSE FOR SET-UP CHANGE
Ecce Cor Meum (Behold My Heart):
by Sir Paul McCartney
I. Spiritus
II. Gratia
Interlude (Lament)
III. Musica
IV. Ecce Cor Meum
With guest artists:
Musicians of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra
Pembina Trails Voices: Valdine Anderson – Artistic Director & Conductor Chamber Ensemble Leanne Regehr Lee – Conductor, Cantemus
Andrea Lett – Soprano
The Music of Sir Paul McCartney
Early in their partnership, Paul McCartney and John Lennon agreed to share credit on all songs, whether written alone or in tandem. Lennon’s cynical edge and knack for introspection and McCartney’s storytelling optimism and gift for melody were a perfect complement to one another.
A common misconception is that they each composed their songs alone and simply credited them to the partnership. While they did often write independently — and many Beatles songs are primarily the work of either one or the other — it was rare that a song would be completed without some input from both. In many instances, one would sketch an idea or a song fragment and take it to the other to finish or improve; in some cases, two incomplete songs or song ideas that had been worked on individually would be combined into a complete song. Lennon called it "Writing eyeball-to-eyeball", and "Playing into each other's noses". This approach — with elements of competitiveness and mutual inspiration as well as straightforward collaboration and creative merging of musical ideas — is often cited as a key reason for the Beatles' innovativeness and popular success.
Can’t Buy Me Love
The initial segment of this concert features a cappella arrangements of five Lennon-McCartney works. The first, Can’t Buy Me Love, was written by McCartney. When pressed by American journalists in 1966 to reveal the song's "true" meaning, he stated: “I think you can put any interpretation you want on anything, but when someone suggests that Can't Buy Me Love is about a prostitute, I draw the line.” He went on to say: “The idea behind it was that all these material possessions are all very well, but they won't buy me what I really want.” However, when later reflecting on the perks that money and fame had brought him, he commented: “It should have been, CAN Buy Me Love.”
SOURCE: The Paul McCartney Project
In My Life
In My Life was primarily written by John Lennon. Before his untimely death in 1980 Lennon said, “I had a complete set of lyrics after struggling with a journalistic vision of a trip from home to downtown on a bus naming every sight. It became In My Life, which is a remembrance of friends and lovers of the past. Paul helped with the middle eight musically. It was, I think, my first real major piece of work. Up till then, it had all been sort of glib and throwaway.”
Paul McCartney has maintained that he wrote all the music for In My Life, and in 2019, researchers from Harvard University used AI on hundreds of the Beatles’ hits to build a “musical fingerprint” for each songwriter. The findings, published in Harvard Data Science Review, allow for each artist’s influences on the song to be assessed and predict the probability that either McCartney or Lennon were chiefly responsible. In My Life “garnered the greatest amount of speculation about its true author,” the researchers said. The algorithm determined with 81.1 percent certainty that Lennon wrote the verse, and McCartney’s influence in the song’s bridge was given with 43.5 percent certainty. Insights from the study include that McCartney’s work “tended to use more non-standard musical motifs” in his songs, with higher song complexity as a “distinguishing feature” of his songs.
Sources: The Independent, Harvard Data Science Review
Eleanor Rigby
In an October 2021 article in The New Yorker, Paul McCartney wrote that his inspiration for Eleanor Rigby was an elderly lady from his neighbourhood who lived alone and for whom he did the shopping, visiting her kitchen where she shared her tales while they listened to broadcasts on the crystal radio set. McCartney said, "Just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write." As with In My Life, John and Paul disputed who had a greater hand in writing the song, although all four Beatles ended up contributing, with George Harrison adding the line, “All the lonely people” and Ringo Starr providing the poignant image of Father McKenzie “darning his socks”.
Blackbird
Blackbird, written and performed solo by Paul McCartney, was composed shortly after The Beatles’ visit to Rishikesh, India in 1968. He has said that the music was inspired by J.S. Bach’s Bourrée in E minor (from Suite in E minor BWV 996), which both he and George Harrison had as youngsters learned to play on the guitar. “Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me. Bach was always one of our favourite composers; we felt we had a lot in common with him… I developed the melody on guitar based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fit the words to it.”
Source: The Beatles Bible
Yesterday
With more than 3,000 recorded cover versions, Yesterday holds the Guinness World Record for the most covered song ever written. McCartney first composed the melody, and he and John sketched out the working lyrics, “Scrambled Eggs. Oh, baby how I love your legs.” Said John, “We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn't find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way because we'd had so many laughs about it.”
Source: The Beatles Bible
Ecce Cor Meum
Sir Paul’s fourth classical album, Ecce Cor Meum (Behold My Heart) is an oratorio in four movements, scored for soprano solo, trebles, chorus and orchestra. The album’s origin lay in a commission from Magdalen College, Oxford: Paul was asked to compose a piece for the opening of a new concert hall at the college. Following his wife Linda’s death in 1998, however, the performance was delayed and eventually premiered in 2001, with a studio recording created in 2006. Each of its four movements begins with unaccompanied voices, and the text combines English and, to a lesser degree, Latin. As Paul explained, “Something I found out later, being a complete innocent in the field, was that most people find a text and set it to music, which it would have been very convenient to know that, but I didn’t. So, I started writing the music and then putting my own text to it, which is probably completely the wrong way around to do it. It didn’t matter. I suppose, you know, in that respect, it meant that it was a bit less conventional.”
Ecce Cor Meum’s premiere on 10 November 2001 at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre brought to light several areas that needed further refinement. Again, in McCartney’s words: “An experienced choral composer knows that children can’t be given huge, sustained passages; they don’t have the energy and the stamina. At the Sheldonian, there was some quite hard stuff that I didn’t realise, because I’d done it on the synthesizer – which has endless stamina – but during that first performance, the solo treble couldn’t come on for the second half. I think I’d used him up in the first half. These are things that people either learn because they are taught them immediately at the first lesson, or you learn through the years. So, it was good to go through the piece a lot of times, and we took out huge choral sections and gave them to the orchestra. If it had been a Beatles song, I would have known how to do it. But this was a completely different ball game!”
In My Life - Lyrics
Blackbird - Lyrics
Yesterday - Lyrics
GUEST ARTISTS
Andrea Lett, Soprano
Soprano Andrea Lett has worked for companies across North America including San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Against the Grain Theater Company, Manitoba Opera, and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Lett's career highlights include winning the CBC Young Artist Prize and the Audience Choice Award at the Canadian Opera Company's Centre Stage Gala Competition, singing at San Quentin, and meeting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Ms. Lett is honoured to be able to sing with the Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir, and can also be heard as the soprano soloist in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's upcoming production of Carmina Burana.
Pembina Trails Voices – Valdine Anderson, Artistic Director
Pembina Trails Voices (PTV) is an award-winning auditioned choral program offered to children and young people in Winnipeg, ages 5 – 28 years. The largest city choral program of its kind, PTV’s family of choirs has served the Winnipeg community for over 35 years.
Recent performing highlights include the world premiere of Jonah by Sid Robinovitch with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra in April 2022 and guest appearances with the Winnipeg Singers and the Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir in the 2023/2024 season.
Recent awards include PTV’s Cantemus ensemble winning the 2019 National Associated Music Festivals Choral Competition award for treble voices, third place in the 2019 CBC National Amateur Choir Competition and, internationally, a top finalist award to PTV Singers at the 2019 Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod Choral Festival competition in Llangollen, Wales.
PTV is affiliated with the University of Manitoba, Desautels Faculty of Music, Division of Preparatory Studies.
Valdine Anderson
An established international artist with over two decades of solo performances and recordings, Valdine Anderson currently serves on the voice staff at the Desautels Faculty of Music, University of Manitoba.
During her concert career as a soprano, Valdine Anderson’s solo performances and tours included the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, Germany’s Ensemble Moderne, France’s Ensemble Intercontemporain where she toured extensively with Pierre Boulez, the Orchestre National de France, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Chicago Symphony with Winton Marsalis and Daniel Baremboim, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and many more. In 2004, Valdine toured the U.S.A. with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle opening Los Angeles’s new Walt Disney Concert Hall. Premieres written for and interpreted by Valdine include works by Kaija Saariaho, Gerard Grisey, Henryk Gorecki, Witold Lutoslawski, Thomas Ades, George Benjamin and Elliot Carter. Valdine has worked with conductors Sir Colin Davis, Seiji Ozawa, David Robertson, Winton Marsalis, Bramwell Tovey, Esa Pekka Salonen, and Edo de Waart among others.
Valdine’s recording of Mahler’s 4th Symphony CD with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra won a Prairie Music Award (now Western Canadian Music Awards), and her recording of the opera Powder Her Face by Thomas Ades received a Grammy Award nomination. Her signature aria from that recording was made into a short music video by Canadian film director Guy Maddin called ‘Fancy, Fancy Being Rich’ in 2002. Other solo recordings include Szymanowski’s Songs of the Fairy-Tale Princess with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Gavin Bryars’ The Adnan Songbook, Eliot Carter’s opera What Next with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, shortlisted for a Grammy Award nomination, and Michael Torke’s Book of Proverbs with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. Valdine’s live recording of Witold Lutoslawski’s Chantefleurs et Chantefables with the Toronto New Music Concerts Ensemble was conducted by Lutoslawski in his last public performance.
Valdine Anderson is a frequent juror for the Canada Council for the Arts and is in demand as an adjudicator across Canada. Locally, Valdine has worked as a vocal coach for Manitoba Opera and maintains a private voice studio. In 2011, Valdine founded the women’s choral ensemble, Esprit de Choeur and in 2017 was appointed Artistic Director of Pembina Trails Voices, a Winnipeg youth choir organization. Her choirs have won awards nationally and internationally and regularly record and commission new works for choral ensembles.
Leanne Regehr Lee
Leanne Regehr Lee is an in-demand teacher, adjudicator, and collaborative pianist, and is the conductor of Cantemus, Pembina Trails Voices’ choir for high school treble singers. Having earned her Bachelor of Music (piano) and Bachelor of Education (senior years choral music) degrees, Leanne has taught music in Winnipeg and Nottingham, England. She is a Manitoba Registered Music Teacher and a certified teacher with the Royal Conservatory of Music for Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced levels of piano.
Enjoying a full teaching studio of motivated and creative students, Leanne strives to create a community where students are supported and challenged to pursue high levels of musical excellence. She has recently expanded her studio to include a pedagogy program for aspiring piano teachers and is a sessional Piano Pedagogy & Studio Teaching Techniques instructor at the Canadian Mennonite University.
Leanne performs regularly with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, as well as many other professional and amateur musicians. She is on the faculty at the Rosamunde Summer Music Academy and is the pianist for Winnipeg’s Festival Chorus.
When she’s not teaching or playing piano, Leanne enjoys outdoor activities and exploring new places with her husband Garth, a luthier, and their teenage twins.
Musicians of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra
From its debut 1948 performance, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra (WSO) has been a powerhouse orchestra that regularly surprises audiences, guest conductors and artists with the exceptional musicianship of its members. The WSO is an integral part of Winnipeg's rich cultural life. Each year the orchestra delights more than 225,000 audience members with innovative programming and musical excellence. The orchestra also presents educational programs for over 40,000 students annually and tours regularly across Manitoba and Canada and has been invited twice to New York City to perform at Carnegie Hall.
FIRST VIOLINS
Gwen Hoebig, Concertmaster
The Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté Memorial Chair, endowed by the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation
Karl Stobbe, Associate Concertmaster
Jeff Dydra, Assistant Concertmaster
Mona Coarda
Tara Fensom
Hong Tian Jia
Mary Lawton
Sonia Lazar*
Julie Savard
Jun Shao
Rebecca Weger**
Erika Sloos+
SECOND VIOLINS
Chris Anstey, Principal
Elation Pauls, Assistant Principal
Karen Bauch
Kristina Bauch,
Elizabeth Dyer
Bokyung Hwang
Rodica Jeffrey
Susan McCallum
Takayo Noguchi*
Jane Radomski
VIOLAS
Elise Lavallée, Acting Principal
Dmytro Kreshchenskyi,** Acting Assistant Principal
Marie-Elyse Badeau
Laszlo Baroczi
Richard Bauch
Greg Hay
Michael Scholz
Miguel Stamato+
CELLOS
Yuri Hooker, Principal
Robyn Neidhold, Assistant Principal
Ethan Allers
Arlene Dahl
Alyssa Ramsay*
Sean Taubner
Emma Quackenbush
Samuel Nadurak+
BASSES
Meredith Johnson, Principal
Daniel Perry, Assistant Principal
James McMillan
Eric Timperman*
Emily Krajewski
Taras Pivniak**
FLUTES
Jan Kocman, Principal
Supported by Gordon & Audrey Fogg
Alex Conway
PICCOLO FLUTE
Alex Conway, Principal
OBOES
Beverly Wang, Principal
Robin MacMillan
Renz Adame+
Tracy Wright+
ENGLISH HORN
Robin McMillan, Principal
CLARINETS
Micah Heilbrunn, Principal
Alex Whitehead
Colin Mehmel+
BASSOONS
Kathryn Brooks, Principal
Elizabeth Mee
HORNS
Patricia Evans, Principal
Ken MacDonald, Associate Principal
The Hilda Schelberger Memorial Chair
Aiden Kleer
Caroline Oberheu
Michiko Singh
TRUMPETS
Chris Fensom, Principal
Isaac Pulford
The Patty Kirk Memorial Chair
Paul Jeffrey, Associate Principal
TROMBONES
Steven Dyer*, Principal
Keith Dyrda, Acting Principal
Kyle Orlando**
Eric Prodger**, Principal Bass Trombone
TUBA
Justin Gruber, Principal
PERCUSSION
Andrew Johnson, Principal
TIMPANI
Justin Gingrich
HARP
___
Principal
Endowed by W.H. & S.E. Loewen
Angela Schwarzkopf+
ORGAN
Cary Denby+
PERSONNEL MANAGER
Isaac Pulford
LIBRARIAN
Michaela Kleer
ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN
Aiden Kleer
*On Leave
** 1 year Appointment
+ Extra musician for this performance
Sir James Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney (born June 18, 1942, Liverpool, England) is a British vocalist, songwriter, composer, bass player, poet, and painter whose work with the Beatles in the 1960s helped lift popular music from its origins in the entertainment business and transform it into a creative, highly commercial art form. He is also one of the most popular solo performers of all time in terms of both sales of his recordings and attendance at his concerts.
While much is known about his work with The Beatles, Wings and his solo career, Sir Paul had interests beyond popular music. Inspired by a meeting with Willem de Kooning in the late 1970s, he began painting, and by the late 1980s he was devoting much of his time to it. His work was first shown publicly in May 1999 at a retrospective held in Siegen, Germany. McCartney branched out in other areas too: his semiautobiographical classical composition Liverpool Oratorio, written in collaboration with American composer Carl Davis, was first performed in 1991 by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral, where McCartney once failed his audition as a choirboy. He subsequently oversaw the recording of his other classical compositions, including Standing Stone (1997), Working Classical (1999), and Ecce Cor Meum (2006). In 2001 a volume of his poetry, Blackbird Singing, which also included some song lyrics, was published. In addition, he composed the score for Peter Martins’s ballet Ocean’s Kingdom (2011). McCartney authored several children’s books, including Hey Grandude! (2019).
In 2010 McCartney received the U.S. Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, and later that year he was named a Kennedy Center honoree. He was made a Companion of Honour in 2018.
McCartney is a strong advocate of vegetarianism and animal rights and is engaged in active campaigns to relieve the indebtedness of less-developed countries, to eliminate land mines, and to prevent seal culling. More than a rock musician, McCartney is now regarded as a British institution; an icon like warm beer and cricket, he has become part of British identity.
About the Arrangers
Keith Abbs
Keith Abbs (Can’t Buy Me Love) is a British performer, teacher, arranger, and composer. He has sung with many professional classical choirs such as the Linden Singers and the BBC Singers, and for five years he was a member of St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir. Several of his jazz band arrangements have been featured in foyer concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Cadogan Hall, and two of his vocal arrangements have been recorded and published by the King’s Singers.
Steve Zegree
Steve Zegree (In My Life) was internationally recognized as one of the most respected vocal jazz conductors and educators in the world, and was active as a pianist, conductor, clinician, and adjudicator. His career as a pianist and conductor included performances on five continents. A renowned educator, his students are among today's leaders in jazz and pop performance, Broadway, recording studio production, writing, arranging, singing, and music education.
Paris Rutherford
Paris Rutherford (Eleanor Rigby) is widely considered one of the top vocal jazz arrangers today. His vocal jazz arrangements focus carefully on sing-ability, both in the lyric and in voice leading, and are crafted to bring an unusual touch to the music. A Regents Professor Emeritus from the University of North Texas, Rutherford served for 30 years on the jazz studies faculty, directing the award-winning UNT Jazz Singers, the North Texas Summer Vocal Jazz Workshops, and the Jazz Arranging/Composition program. With extensive experience as a writer in film and broadcast music, Rutherford arranges for vocal groups, large jazz ensembles and symphony orchestras.
Daryl Runswick
Daryl Runswick (Blackbird) jokes that he was educated at Cambridge University and Ronnie Scott’s Club. He spent his early career writing and performing jazz and pop and, more recently, concert pieces. He has also been involved with free improvisation and indeterminate music, one of the few (to quote John Wickes) who can claim to have worked with both Ornette Coleman and John Cage. This duality has permeated his career as an improvising pianist, singer with Electric Phoenix, bass player, arranger, record producer, broadcaster, educator, community animateur and film / TV composer. Head of Composition at Trinity College of Music in London for 10 years before retiring, he has searched for a synthesis of the improvising skills of jazz with the more complex structures of concert music.
Bob Chilcott
Bob Chilcott (Yesterday) has become one of the world's most widely performed composers and arrangers of choral music. His compositional output reflects his wide taste in music styles and his commitment to writing music that is both singable and communicative.
He has been involved in choral music most of his life – he was a chorister and then a choral scholar in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and was a member of the British vocal group The King's Singers, for whom he created many popular arrangements of well-known songs spanning nearly all genres. As well as being a full-time composer he is also a highly acclaimed choral conductor and conducted countless choirs worldwide.
Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir
Sopranos
Rachael Buckingham
Brenda Dyck
Linda Feasby
Wendy Gainsborough
Deborah Ginther
Debbie Girard
Kadri Irwin
Betty Loewen
Kristin Lovrien-Meuwese
Janet Marchylo
Leah Ma
Sahar Sharifian
Marika Nerbas
Grace Suttorp
Christine Sveinson
Dolores Tjart
Altos
Kaylene Blackwood
Vida Chan
Glynis Corkal
Shirley Eckhardt
Kelley Frye
Veronica Larmour
Vivien Laurie
Victoria Lyonin
Brenda Marinelli
Sandi Mielitz
Arlene Petkau
Jaqueline Phaneuf
Mallory Prescott
Wanda Prychitko
Val Regehr
Gail Singer
Nicola Spasoff
Alison Thiessen
Brenda Thiessen Wiebe
Tenor
Fred Dyck
Brian Fristensky
John Drewitt
Bill Grant
Len LaRue
Bruce Waldie
Nick Wiebe
Stuart Sladden
Julian Vanderput
Lorenz Sarrondo
Bass
David Elias
Rob Giesbrecht
Brian Marchylo
Liam Martin
John Murray
Dennis Penner
Tim Smith
Paul Wiebe
Daniel Gervai
Laurent Waldie
Joel Wiebe
Georges Kirouac
