This is an incredible boost to the group, as producing orchestral concerts involves expenses that range from preparing over fifty honorariums for the musicians, renting percussion instruments and a hall large enough to house the ensemble, to standard marketing expenses such as printing posters and programmes. According to Kevin:

“He really has been an ideal patron from the beginning. He comes to a lot of my own concerts, and he seemed like the logical choice to approach when we first founded the orchestra and had no other major sponsors. He was one of our most generous contributors on our first concert in 2007, and since then has regularly attended and supported all of our concerts.”

Over Christmas, Kevin Lau and Victor Cheng met with Reininghaus to talk about the future of the orchestra, and to find out whether he was interested in becoming an official sponsor of the orchestra. And thus, an orchestra sponsor for all up-coming SPO initiatives was born.

“We asked him what his vision for SPO was, and he simply said, ‘I want to see you guys do what you want to do and make the best of it. This is what I can do to help you out.’ He understands what an art organization is, and he is not trying to impose upon it, he just wants to help us get our dream off the ground.”

The Sneak Peek Orchestra has operated on a tight budget from the beginning, and they have managed to persist through a combination of thrifty spending and smart venue choices. Victor served as a fill-in organist for their recent venue, St. Gabriel’s Passionist Parish, which has in turn allowed the orchestra to rehearse and perform in its space for a very modest fee.

Victor expresses his relief and gratitude at these recent developments for the orchestra.

“It was a huge weight off our minds, not having to worry as much about our finances. We were extremely excited about this concert in a large part because our venue and orchestra sponsors allowed us to focus on what the orchestra set out to do in the first place. We are very thankful for their generous support. We hope to strengthen our relationship with St. Gabriel, and make the most of Rolf’s belief in our work.”

Lau echoes Cheng’s enthusiasm, not only on behalf of their own vision for SPO, but for all the musicians that have participated in and raised the bar of the orchestra over the years:

“The biggest thing we want to do is give back to the musicians, who form the backbone of our concerts. They are putting in a lot of work, and traditionally they have essentially played for free. The fee we offer them is really a monetary ‘thank you’. We wanted to raise that fee to a level that could be considered a reasonable fee in the professional world, which would in turn raise the professional level of the ensemble. That is first and foremost the goal Victor and I had in mind.”

Sign up for our newsletter for announcements of future concerts and initiatives as the SPO looks forward to bigger and better things in their future!

Photo credit: Miriam Lee

Among the most rewarding things about being a musician are the opportunities for creative collaboration with other artists. Kevin Lau’s “Foundation” (written for cello and orchestra), which will be premiered by the Sneak Peek Orchestra and cellist Rachel Mercer on Saturday February 4th, is one such collaboration. It was born out of a mutual respect between performer and composer as well as an admiration for each other’s musical goals and passions. Mercer has been the recipient of many prestigious awards and performs around the world, while orchestras and ensembles across Canada have commissioned Lau for his compositions.

Playing Lau’s “Starsail” this past Sunday as part of the New Music Concert Series at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music, Mercer admitted she felt most at ease with this piece on the all-new-music program.

“During the concert, Kevin spoke about the piece as representing homecoming after journeying far away, and that’s actually how I feel about the music, and I tried to convey that in my performance.”

Mercer encountered Lau’s music while performing with the Toronto-based Via Salzburg in concert. The ensemble had commissioned a piece by Lau for taiko drums and a small string orchestra.

“I was struck by how incredible and fantastic Kevin’s piece of music was. He had written some beautiful violin solos. I wondered whether he had written anything for cello, and that’s how I first learned of his cello music.”

This premiere performance of “Foundation” will be made even more exciting by the presence of the ‘Bonjour’ cello donated by an anonymous donor, a 1696 Stradivarius, which Mercer has had the honour of playing since 2010. It will be returning to Canada Council’s Musical Instrument Bank later this summer. During this time, she has had the opportunity to explored the incredible range of expression that this instrument affords, and has learned to express her own musicality through this instrument.

“It took about a year and a half before I felt I could fully express what it was capable of. Now, I can bring out musical expressions which I couldn’t before. It has its own special sound, and it took that long to figure it out! Now, I feel that my voice is part of it, and it’s just a really great instrument. I have at my disposal all this richness of expression that I have learned from playing with this instrument, and I can transfer this new expression when playing on any other cello. It has been a huge learning opportunity.”

When talking about her first rehearsal with the Sneak Peek Orchestra, Mercer’s excitement is infectious.

“The quality and level of playing on a shoe-string budget is incredible and inspiring. It’s amazing that they’ve brought together these different elements and produced such a professional concert. I wish we had more rehearsals, but ‘Foundation’ is just a fantastic piece. I know three of Kevin’s pieces already, so I know his language, and he has written a great range of expression in this concerto. I hope that many more people will perform this piece in the future.”

For a performer, having a piece of music written just for you is probably one of the highest compliments one could receive. For a composer, it is also a wonderful tribute to have a performer champion your work and perform it as part of their repertoire. Come see Rachel Mercer with the Sneak Peek Orchestra this Saturday on February 4th to experience the magical meeting of musical minds, and musical treasures.

Read the full interview by John Terauds here.

Photos by Lindsay Lozon; hair and makeup by Paul Langill; styled and co-ordinated by Liz Parker.

Experiences of the world are just as important to musicians as practicing and performing. For composers, it is even more important, as experiences feed ideas, and ideas are sometimes most aptly expressed as music.

Rob Teehan captures the feeling of exhilaration and elation that young musicians feel when they experience a break-through in their musical lives in an orchestral piece entitled “Dreams of Flying”. The piece was written for the National Youth Orchestra of Canada (NYOC), who performed and recorded it in 2009.

“Dreaming you can fly is a metaphor for dreaming that you can be a musician and living that dream. I was in the National Youth Orchestra once when I was younger. I remember being there and you feel like you’ve stepped up, and you’re in this new level of success. You’re surrounded by people like you, gunning for it, professional faculty supporting you, and everyone’s basically there saying, ‘Go, go, go, you can do this! You can have a career!’ I channeled that energy into a musical composition, and it was very well received by the members of the orchestra.”

The National Youth Orchestra captured the essence of the piece in their recording in 2009 so well that it earned two JUNO nominations: one for the album and one for Teehan’s composition. To top it all off, Teehan also had the enviable position of being the youngest nominee in the composer category in the history of the Juno Awards.

“I always thought that eventually, if I keep working hard towards the goal, I would get a Juno-nomination. You apply and hope for the best. I just never expected it to happen that fast.”

Despite such accolade and recognition on the red carpet, Teehan has not enjoyed the same recognition from his peers in the music competition circuit. When asked about why this may have been the case, he reflected on the nature of composition competitions and juries:

“I guess one of the reasons why it got the nomination is that the jury for the JUNO award is comprised of a variety of musicians from different genres, and also conductors, record label executives, and other industry people. When I enter competitions that are judged solely by other composers, I rarely win, I think because they might hear me as too popular-sounding or conservative. But I’m not interested in strictly avant-garde music—I’m interested in connecting with a people on a basic level, telling a story, and appealing to a broad audience.”

The appeal of Teehan’s music to a diverse audience is reflective perhaps of his own diverse musical interest. First trained as a tuba player, Teehan has been developing a reputation as a sousaphone player that performs across a variety of genres. He had just returned from the Zlane Uste Golden Festival in New York, which featured brass bands that performs Balkan and eastern European music, and he is an active member of many bands including The Heavyweights Brass Band, The Boxcar Boys, and The Lemon Bucket Orkestra.

His performing career has occupied so much of his time that he has had to put his personal composition projects on the back burner. At the moment, he focuses his compositional efforts on commissions, such as the two short films that he scored last year, writing and arranging songs for his bands, as well as his residency with Sinfonia Toronto this year.

“I haven’t written a full orchestra piece since ‘Dream of Flying’. Since 2009, I also shifted the focus back towards my performing career, which has really taken off. Playing the sousaphone has allowed me to play bass lines for all these different bands in different jazz, folks, and world music styles.”

After a performance of this piece by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra last October, Teehan is very excited about the performance of his piece by the Sneak Peek Orchestra in February. He’s excited not only because it is so difficult for new works to get performed after a premiere, but also because of his long connection to Sneak Peek Orchestra as one of the first tuba players.

“For me, SPO is inspiring, for a lot of the same sort of reasons that the NYOC is inspiring. You go into an environment that supports you as an emerging musician, and you feel that this is something special and of a totally different league. When I was in SPO rehearsals that were self-organized, music written by members of orchestra and conducted by one of us, then performing to a packed house, it was the same feeling, but a little bit different. It wasn’t like ‘I’m getting trained’, it was ‘Here I am, and we’re DOING it, and look at what we’ve built!”

Join us on February 4th, 2012 for a performance of “Dreams of Flying” by the members of Sneak Peek Orchestra under the direction of Victor Cheng. You’ll hear for yourself the music that was written for young orchestral players, echoing their shared dreams of becoming the musicians of tomorrow.

Photo Credit: Bo Huang

The idea for “Foundation” struck Kevin Lau during an ordinary ride on the subway. As a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music, his thesis composition had been preoccupying his subconscious. Suddenly, a novel idea struck him: his doctoral thesis would be a cello concerto, and Rachel Mercer was going to perform it.

It wasn’t a totally random thought, truth be told. In 2010, Rachel was looking for new music to perform and came upon a composition by Lau for cello and piano entitled “Starsail”, which was commissioned by Sarah Steeves in 2008. She emailed Lau for the score, and made first contact. When Lau was putting together a recital later that year, Rachel was one of the performers that he invited to perform his work. He recalls their first musical meeting:

 “When I heard her rehearse ‘Starsail‘, I knew immediately that I wanted to collaborate with her on a major project.”

After that subway ride, Lau immediately began work on “Foundation”. However, upon finishing about two minutes worth of music, it was clear that it was too ambitious a work for his thesis, and it would not be completed on time. Graduating being of utmost priority, the piece was put on the back burner. Instead, he and Rachel sought out grants that would support their musical collaboration, while he returned to his original plan for his thesis—a single movement orchestral work—which was successfully defended in the fall of 2011.

While the planning for Sneak Peek Orchestra’s “Up Close and Personal” chamber concert was getting under way, he started sketching out ideas for the cello concerto again. By the time the Sneak Peek team began to brainstorm for future concert programs, the idea of premiering a new cello concerto helmed by Rachel Mercer was met with great enthusiasm.

 “The ideas had been sitting in my head for a year, but I was always thinking about it. I started notating in mid-November, but I was sketching all throughout September and October, while Victor and I were working away at the Harry Potter Medley piano duet.”

The inspiration for “Foundation” is a core idea in mythology that many composers have explored using the orchestral form: the heroic confrontation with the unknown. In order to convey this idea, Lau experimented with composition techniques that he had never tried before, while incorporating a multitude of different styles in the piece.

 “The piece begins within the context of a standard classical sonata structure, which is familiar territory for me, but then starts to venture into musical landscapes that are more alien. By the second movement, much of the music is scored using aleatoric techniques, which frees up the notation considerably and gives the music a somewhat hazy, undefined sound. It’s the sound of ‘becoming’, something in the process of being created. The challenge was making these styles coexist without sounding incoherent.”

When asked whether he was concerned this approach would compromise the accessibility of the sound to a general audience, Lau admitted that the same thought had crossed his mind.

 “I do worry about these things, but it’s not something you really know until it is performed. I hope whatever it means for something to be ‘accessible’, is that the expression is direct, regardless of the compositional process. In that sense, I continue to express and communicate as directly as possible in my music.”

This solo part is conceived for cello, one of the most expressive instruments in the string family. Balancing the incredible range of the cello against the grandeur of the orchestra was also a new challenge for Lau. Not to give away too much—as music needs to be heard to speak for itself—but Lau noted that the last movement is an allegro, which is unusual for him.

 “I had lunch with Rachel before writing a single note, ages ago.  I said, somewhat jokingly: ‘I’m assuming you want to go out with a bang, right?’ She said, ‘Yes!’ So I wrote that. While a lot of my pieces end on a soft note, this one ends in a roar. I had to design a whole allegro to build up to it, and realized while doing so that it is very hard to keep the music consistently fast; it’s a lot of work to maintain the energy! Ultimately, I think it is very satisfying for a soloist and it was a great personal challenge to achieve this effect.”

How aleatoric technique—a way of scoring music that allows the musicians to exercise some control over musical decisions—will be merged with a more traditional style of orchestral music will be revealed at the upcoming Sneak Peek Orchestra concert, “Dreams of Flying” on February 4^th, 2012, featuring cellist Rachel Mercer as the soloist. Rob Teehan’s composition is the title piece that will also be featured at this concert. (The next post in this series will put the spotlight on him. Stay tuned.)