WNMF 5: Theofanidis & Stafylakis: Sunset

For this closing concert of WNMF 2026, music director Daniel Raiskin and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra begin with two nature-inspired works.

Swedish composer Jacob Mühlrad comes to Winnipeg for the first time to present the Canadian premiere of his RESIL I, a sonorous work that considers humanity’s role within Earth’s complex natural systems.

The WSO then welcomes guest soloist Stephen Williamson – principal clarinetist of the Chicago Symphony – to give the Canadian premiere of distinguished guest composer Christopher Theofanidis’s Indigo Heaven. Composed for Williamson, the work evokes the majesty we experience as we navigate between epic natural landscapes.

Guest ensemble CC Duo then returns, joining the WSO in a performance of Kelly-Marie Murphy’s characteristically energetic, playful, and virtuosic The Confectioner’s Handbook, one of a series of concerti for two guitars commissioned by the ensemble for their 2025 album – a collaboration with string ensemble Collectif9 – Re/String.

The festival comes to a resounding end with the Third Symphony of Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis, his last major work composed for the WSO as part of his historic 10-year tenure as the orchestra’s composer-in-residence and co-curator of the Winnipeg New Music Festival.

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PROGRAM NOTES

Jacob Mühlrad – RESIL I (2024) for orchestra [Canadian premiere]

When the lights are dimmed, in the silence that follows the applause, you hear something – you are not sure what: a collection of quiet sounds drowned in excessive air, vibration, and resonance, some of them very low, others uncomfortably shrill, some actually inaudible to the human ear. Noise, out of which anything could appear. As we are drawn to listen intently, tensions appear towards pitches, chords, like a camera lens trying to focus on an object, found and lost again in a colorful blur. We are beginning to enjoy the cinematic effect, but intervals emerge, stretching on individual instruments into scales and simple rhythmical cells. Instruments start collaborating, based on timbral affinities, structures get more complex, something larger forms, that has a pulse. Seamlessly melodies appear, and you start following them, only to get lost in a factory of mechanical pounding that overcomes the heartfelt tunes. As we seem to have anticlimactically returned to shapeless noise, something unexpected happens: these different components start overlapping, assisting each other, in a motley combination of musical worlds that shouldn’t belong together, both epic in breadth and full to the brim with heterogeneous fragments and ideas. The sound masses grow leaner, settle around the fundamental overtone series, like iron dust under the influence of an invisible magnet. The piece ends in almost liturgical recollection, as we process the whirlwind of these dense ten minutes that feel like a fast forward, or maybe a rewind.

Perhaps all of this should be experienced by the listener before reading in this program note that the composer Jacob Mühlrad was inspired by the writings of environmental scientist Carl Folke and his concept of panarchy: the idea that, understood as a whole, our Earth is an aggregate of systems (biological and social, among others) nested in each other, bound by complex relationships of mutual influence. Then we understand RESIL I not just as a symphonic movement, but a symphonic poem that presents us with an accelerated history of life on our planet, from its humble beginnings to the incredible diversity of biological forms spawned by the Cambrian Explosion, and the many complications that followed, in which our species has come to leave its controversial mark. Knowing all this in advance, the listener might be tempted to try to read the events of this chronology in the details of the music, looking to decipher them as a story; and in doing so one might miss out on the fact that the work does not simply deliver an encrypted message on what Professor Folke calls resilience, meaning our planet’s systems’ ability to transform by adaptation and integration, to constantly reinvent themselves – rather, we are offered an opportunity to experience resilience for ourselves. Jacob Mühlrad doesn’t challenge our ability to understand meanings hidden in music, but the very ways in which we listen, by repeatedly switching between styles and techniques, therefore demanding continuous refocusing of our ears and attention. Our recent history shows that comprehending such a process of resilience intellectually is insufficient: if we are to invent sustainable ways of living on Earth, it has to be a skill that we train actively. In making that experience in a controlled environment, more concentrated in space and time than any natural scenery, we might actually get a glimpse of a humbling realization: the deeper under-standing of ourselves as a fleeting state of an ever-changing system, bound to the lives, speeds, and accidents of other ever-changing systems.

Aleksi Barrière, November 2024

Christopher Theofanidis – Indigo Heaven (2025) for clarinet & orchestra [Canadian premiere]
I. Hypnotic, easy
II. Vast, patient
Solo Cadenza
III. Brilliant
Stephen Williamson, clarinet

Indigo Heaven is a title taken (with permission) from author Mark Warren’s wonderful post-civil war era novel of the same name.  In an affecting scene, the protagonist, a former soldier named Clayt, sees a work of art and finds a deep truth in the representation of nature in it, as if there is no barrier between the landscape’s depiction and reality he knows.  In our case, the story’s setting of Colorado and Wyoming is personal here, as clarinetist Stephen Williamson spent most of his early life between those two states, and I spend time in both places each year myself.  The description of the sky at dusk, an indigo heaven, is haunting and tied to the beauty of the end of the protaganist’s life.  Each of the movements in my work take their affect from imagery from the novel.

The concerto is approximately 27 minutes, and is structured:

I. Hypnotic, easy
II. Vast, patient
Solo Cadenza
III. Brilliant

Steve and I met at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, in 1990, and it has been a dream long in the making for us to do a concerto together.  I am  grateful to the Chicago Symphony for the opportunity to bring this work to life, and for the Albany Symphony for making the recording of the work.

—Christopher Theofanidis

Kelly-Marie Murphy – The Confectioner’s Handbook (2022) for 2 guitars & strings
CC Duo: Adam Cicchillitti & Steve Cowan, guitars

Published in 1883, The Confectioner’s Handbook, is a practical guide to the art of sugar boiling. A successful sugar boil requires the right equipment, and very precise temperatures. It can go horribly wrong if the confectioner is not careful, and in that case, must be discarded.

When commissioned by the Cowan-Cicchillitti Duo for a concerto with string orchestra, I decided to reflect on these processes and draw a parallel with music-making. The heat, the bubbling mixture, the precise temperatures; long strands, threads, and fractures. There is an element of danger and a risk of failure at all times. But there are also moments of beauty and indeed, sweetness. Over its 9 minutes, the concerto touches on all these images.

Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis – Symphony No. 3 (2026) [World premiere / WSO commission]

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