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What to wear? Be comfortable. Dress in a way that works for you. If you feel like dressing up, do it and you won’t be the only one, we promise. If you prefer to be more casual you will fit right in as well.

Beverages served prior to concert and during intermission. You can pre-order your beverage before the concert.


Mobile phones are allowed to be on but must be set to silent.


We welcome you to clap when you like what you hear.

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VIS Orchestra

Featuring our new Concertmaster, Joan Blackman, this concert ignites in a blaze of colour with Music for a Celebration, a burst of rhythm and light that sets the evening in motion. Brahms follows with a feat of imagination, forging an entire work from a single Haydn theme. The night culminates in Rimsky-Korsakov’s beloved Scheherazade, inspired by the Arabic folktales of One Thousand and One Nights.

GUEST CONDUCTOR: Jonathan Girard

PROGRAMME

Alexina LOUIE: Music for a Celebration

Nikolai RIMSKY-KOSAKOV: LOUIE:

Johannes BRAHMS: Variations on a Theme by Haydn

CLASSICS SERIES

Arabian Nights

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2026

PRE-CONCERT TALK: 6:30 PM | CONCERT 7:30 PM

 

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ROMEO & JULIET

APRIL 25, 2026 | 7:30 PM

 

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PRE-CONCERT TALK: 6:30 PM
CONCERT: 7:30 PM

Prepare for an unforgettable season finale concert filled with poetry and passion. Featuring special guests, renowned Nigerian poet Titilope Sonuga and Calgary’s “People’s Poet Laureate,” Wakefield Brewster, this event brings their evocative words to life on the mainstage. Paired with the music of Lili Boulanger and Gabriela Smith, the evening culminates in a captivating fusion of spoken word and the emotional depth of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet Suite No. 2. Experience the timeless tale of star-crossed lovers through Prokofiev’s powerful and dramatic compositions, which vividly capture the intensity, romance, and tragedy of Shakespeare’s classic story. Don’t miss this extraordinary blend of literary and musical artistry!

CONDUCTOR: Cosette Justo Valdés
GUEST ARTISTS: Titilope Sonuga , Wakefield Brewster ; poets

PROGRAMME

Lili BOULANGER: D’un Matin De Printemps

Gabriella SMITH: Tumblebird Contrails

S. PROKOFIEV: Romeo and Juliet, suite No. 2

What to wear? Be comfortable. Dress in a way that works for you. If you feel like dressing up, do it and you won’t be the only one, we promise. If you prefer to be more casual you will fit right in as well.

Beverages served prior to concert and during intermission. You can pre-order your beverage before the concert.


Mobile phones are allowed to be on but must be set to silent.


We welcome you to clap when you like what you hear.

VIS Orchestra

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Jonathan Girard
Conductor

Director of Orchestras at the University of British Columbia and Artistic Director of the Vancouver Youth Symphony Orchestra, Jonathan Girard is known for his generous, sophisticated conducting and boundless enthusiasm.

He is Principal Guest Conductor of the Athens Philharmonic (Greece) and has guest conducted around the world, including recent engagements with the Orquestra Sinfônica de Porto Alegre in Brazil and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. He is thrilled to be back with the Vancouver Island Symphony for this concert.

In the kaleidoscope of orchestral sound, Girard emphasizes structure, colour, and nuance. He designs innovative concerts involving orchestral improvisation, visual arts, and climate data. Notable projects include Slippages, combining ink drawings and glacier movement data, and Kamoi Komachi, a Noh opera integrating Japanese and Western classical music. A champion of underrepresented voices and repertoire, he has conducted world premieres including the Canadian and North American premieres of works by Kaija Saariaho, Florence Price, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and others.

His work has been broadcast on NPR, CBC Radio, and featured on CBC’s The National. Internationally recognized for his conducting pedagogy, he has trained many successful emerging conductors who occupy professional positions across North America.

Off the podium, he takes to the skies as a pilot with multi-engine and instrument ratings. Discipline becomes freedom, precision becomes adventure, and practice becomes poetry.

Alexina Louie
Canadian Composer

Alexina Diane Louie, (born 30 July 1949), is a Canadian composer of contemporary classical music.[1] She has composed for various instrumental and vocal combinations in a variety of genres. She has fulfilled a number of commissions,[2] and her works, which have been performed internationally, have earned her a number of awards, including the Order of Canada and two Juno Awards.

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Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Russian Composer

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (18 March 1844 – 21 June 1908) was a Russian composer, a member of the group of composers known as The Five. His best-known orchestral compositions—Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade—are staples of the classical music repertoire, along with suites and excerpts from some of his fifteen operas. Scheherazade is an example of his frequent use of fairy-tale and folk subjects.

Rimsky-Korsakov believed in developing a nationalistic style of classical music, employing Russian folk song and lore along with exotic harmonic, melodic and rhythmic elements in a practice known as musical orientalism, and eschewing traditional Western compositional methods. Rimsky-Korsakov appreciated Western musical techniques after he became a professor of musical composition, harmony, and orchestration at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1871. He undertook a rigorous three-year program of self-education and became a master of Western methods, incorporating them alongside the influences of Mikhail Glinka and fellow members of The Five. Rimsky-Korsakov’s techniques of composition and orchestration were further enriched by his exposure to the works of Richard Wagner.

For much of his life, Rimsky-Korsakov combined his composition and teaching with a career in the Russian armed forces—first as an officer in the Imperial Russian Navy, then as the civilian Inspector of Naval Bands. He wrote that he developed a passion for the ocean in childhood from reading books and hearing of his older brother’s exploits in the navy. This love of the sea may have influenced him to write two of his best-known orchestral works, the musical tableau Sadko (not to be confused with his later opera of the same name) and Scheherazade. As Inspector of Naval Bands, Rimsky-Korsakov expanded his knowledge of woodwind and brass playing, which enhanced his abilities in orchestration. He passed this knowledge to his students, and also posthumously through a textbook on orchestration that was completed by his son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg.

Rimsky-Korsakov left a considerable body of original Russian nationalist compositions. He prepared works by The Five for performance, which brought them into the active classical repertoire (although there is controversy over his editing of the works of Modest Mussorgsky), and shaped a generation of younger composers and musicians during his decades as an educator. Rimsky-Korsakov is therefore considered “the main architect” of what the classical-music public considers the “Russian style”. His influence on younger composers was especially important, as he served as a transitional figure between the autodidactism exemplified by Glinka and The Five, and professionally trained composers, who became the norm in Russia by the closing years of the 19th century. While Rimsky-Korsakov’s style was based on those of Glinka, Balakirev, Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt and, for a brief period, Wagner, he “transmitted this style directly to two generations of Russian composers” and influenced non-Russian composers including Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas, and Ottorino Respighi.

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Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms (7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. His reputation and status as a composer are such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the “Three Bs” of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. An uncompromising perfectionist, Brahms destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished.

Brahms has been considered, by his contemporaries and by later writers, as both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms’s works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. Embedded within his meticulous structures, however, are deeply romantic motifs.

Variations on a Theme by Haydn
composed by Johannes Brahms

The Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn (German: Variationen über ein Thema von Jos. Haydn), now also called the Saint Anthony Variations, is a work in the form of a theme and variations, composed by Johannes Brahms in the summer of 1873 at Tutzing in Bavaria. It consists of a theme in B♭ major based on a “Chorale St Antoni”, eight variations, and a finale. The work was published in two versions: for two pianos, written first but designated Op. 56b; and for orchestra, designated Op. 56a. The orchestral version is better known and much more often heard than the two-piano version.

The first performance of the orchestral version was given on 2 November 1873 by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Brahms’s baton.

It is often said to be the first independent set of variations for orchestra in the history of music, although there is at least one earlier piece in the same form, Antonio Salieri’s Twenty-six Variations on ‘La folia di Spagna’ written in 1815.

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Titilope Sonuga
Poet

Titilope Sonuga is a Nigerian poet, playwright, and performer. Her poetry concert, Open, has shown to sold-out audiences worldwide. She has published three poetry collections and released three spoken word albums.

Sonuga has scripted campaigns for Google, UN Women, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and more. She was an ambassador for Intel’s She Will Connect program. Her plays include Sankofa, a libretto reimagining Igor Stravinski’s L’histoire du Soldat, which premiered in Toronto in 2024. She made history as the first poet to perform at a Nigerian presidential inauguration and served as the 9th Poet Laureate of the City of Edmonton.

Wakefield Brewster
Calgary Poet Laureate, 2022–2024

Wakefield Brewster, Wakefield Brewster stepped onto his first stage as a Poet and Spoken Word Artist, January 1999.He’s now known as one of Canada’s most powerful Professional Performance Poets. Wakefield became the sixth Poet Laureate of Calgary in 2022, first Black Poet Laureate of Calgary, ever. During National Poetry Month in April 2024, after a quarter-century of Professional Performance Poetry, Wakefield released his first written Poetry collection titled:WakeWord (FrontenacHouse)For more about Wakefield and his Lyrical Life, please visit: http://wakefieldbrewster.com

Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (27 April [O.S. 15 April] 1891 – 5 March 1953) was a Russian Soviet composer, pianist and conductor. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous musical genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His works include such widely heard pieces as the March from The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet — from which “Dance of the Knights” is taken — and Peter and the Wolf. Of the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created – excluding juvenilia – seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, a cello concerto, a symphony-concerto for cello and orchestra, and nine completed piano sonatas.

A graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev initially made his name as an iconoclastic composer-pianist, achieving notoriety with a series of ferociously dissonant and virtuosic works for his instrument, including his first two piano concertos. In 1915, Prokofiev made a decisive break from the standard composer-pianist category with his orchestral Scythian Suite, compiled from music originally composed for a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev commissioned three further ballets from Prokofiev—Chout, Le pas d’acier and The Prodigal Son—which at the time of their original production all caused a sensation among both critics and colleagues. Prokofiev’s greatest interest, however, was opera, and he composed several works in that genre, including The Gambler and The Fiery Angel.

 

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