A triple concert melding sound, sight, and story!

OLIVIA SHORTT: MAKWA

A sensory-dense, stream-of-conscious storytelling piece that switches back and forth between saxophone, voice, and video art feed, ‘Makwa’ explores the unexpected rage of living inside of yourself and being alone with your thoughts.

OLIVIA SHORTT (They /Them // Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation // ireland + canada)

Olivia Shortt is a weirdo, noisemaker, video artist, wannabe fashion icon, curator, and troublemaker. Shortt’s work is inspired by their love of camp, drag, and gender expression and its relation to Indigeneity. 

Highlights include Shortt’s world premiere performance (Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC) of  ‘For Olivia Shortt’ by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon (as part of Chacon’s series ‘For Zitkala-Ša’ as featured at The 2022 Whitney Biennial); their Lincoln Center (NYC) debut playing percussion in 2018 with the International Contemporary Ensemble (Shortt is NOT a percussionist FYI); their film debut in Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film ‘Guest of Honour’; and recording an album of Robert Lemay’s music two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB, a Neutrino laboratory in Sudbury, Canada. 

Shortt is working on a new site-specific opera about museum repatriation/rematriation, ‘The Museum of the Lost and Found: gaakaazootaadiwag.’

(Photo credit : Karen Reeves)

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TERRI HRON: OUT LOUD

Performed by Helen Pridmore, Jennifer Beattie and Terri Hron

Out Loud is a two-part opera, a contemporary feminist take on classic female characters in literature.  Using live performance, electronic audio, and video, three performers present multi-layered versions of familiar tales, exploring and exposing new strengths and approaches to understanding these well-loved women.

 Part I, “Solstice Queen”, is a re-examination of Titania, Queen of the Fairies, familiar to many from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania is represented here as a powerful leader, gathering her fairy troupe around her as night falls and the mystical Solstice night begins.   Part II, “Mermaid”, is a re-telling of the Little Mermaid fairy tale:  in our version, the Mermaid has authority and strength, and explores her powers through conversations with her ancestors.

Soprano Helen Pridmore and mezzo soprano Jennifer Beattie appear in the videos, which were filmed in the Québec countryside with videographer Philip Fortin and designer Tiago Cabreira; and they perform live onstage as a complement to the visual beauty and imagery of the videos.  Terri Hron directed the project, and created the forest sets, ceramic props and audiovisuals, which transform and weaves sonic and visual imagery together to create a magical and potent contemporary opera.

NICOLE LIZÉE : SASKBIENT / MANITOBIENT

Performed by Amy Horvey, double-bell trumpet and banjo

Nicole Lizée – electronics

Adriana Bogaard – set design

With additional percussion performed on video by Ben Reimer

Saskbient: the long-awaited sequel to Nicole Lizée’s ode to Saskatchewan, Sasktronica!

Saskbient evokes the sounds, images, events, and mirages that affected Lizée during her formative years in Saskatchewan, harnessing the mysticism experienced by many people who grew there, including her collaborator in this project, the internationally renowned trumpet soloist Amy Horvey.

Saskbient: a non-stop emotional and sonic roller coaster which immerses the listener in a world of locusts, threshing, cults, millipedes, crop circles, board games, the Bible, ghosts, Carmen Campagne, power pylons, rye whisky, broken playground equipment, cathode ray tubes as playthings, etc..

Amy Horvey will also perform a new work for double bell trumpet and electronics by Keiko Devaux : SADA [ صدى ; echo ],  inspired by the historical use of the trumpet to play short melodies or ‘call’ to communicate messages over great distances.

Amy Horvey is a Montreal-based creator/interpreter of new and experimental music, a performer of modern orchestral music, and a researcher of the baroque trumpet. She has been praised for her”.. outstandingly eminent know-how, her timbre a thing of beauty – control and restraint mixed with eloquent intensity.” (Massimo Ricci, Temporary Fault). 

On the orchestral stage, Amy has appeared as a soloist with the National Arts Center Orchestra and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. She has performed for many years in the trumpet sections of both orchestras, and has toured with them throughout Europe, Asia, South America, Mexico, and the USA. In 2022 – 2023 she was Acting Principal Trumpet of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. She has worked with many of the world’s greatest conductors including Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, and Roger Norrington.

A champion of Canadian contemporary music, she has commissioned works by Cassandra Miller, Nina C. Young, Nicole Lizée, Anna Höstman and Christopher Butterfield, among many others. Her solo projects have been featured at festivals across Canada, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Italy, and the USA.

(Photo credit: Colin Medley)

Innovations en concert would like to thank the SOCAN Foundation, the Conseil des arts de Montréal and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for their support in commissioning and developing these new works.

We would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its support.

A SODEC series event in collaboration with Casa del Popolo Presents.