Events

Born in Montreal, Mélanie Léonard is music director of the New Brunswick Symphony Orchestra. She has held positions with other Canadian orchestras and, as a guest conductor, has led the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Les Violons du Roy, among others. In 2014, Mélanie Léonard founded the Wild West New Music Ensemble in Calgary, as well as the Calgary New Music Festival. At the head of the City Symphony, she conducts works by Chopin and two black women composers.

Also a violinist and educator, Jessie Montgomery interweaves classical music with improvisation, poetry and social awareness, making her an interpreter of 21st century American sound and experience. The composer’s works are regularly performed by major orchestras and ensembles around the world. Starburst is a short piece for string orchestra constructed as a game of rapidly changing musical colors: explosive gestures are juxtaposed with soft, fleeting melodies in an attempt to create a multidimensional soundscape.

Chopin wrote two concertos for piano and orchestra, both of which are works of his youth, as well as being one of the few compositions not dedicated to the solo piano. His concertos move away from the Mozartian model, in which orchestra and piano establish an ingenious dialogue, to prioritize the role of the latter. Concerto No. 2, contrary to its numerical indication, was the first to be composed. Less extensive and richer in contrast than No. 1, it took pride of place in the program that marked the composer’s Paris debut on February 26, 1832. Performing it is the young pianist Ingrid Uemura, winner of the first edition of the National Chopin Competition, held in 2024. Ingrid joined the piano class at the Escola de Música do Estado de São Pauo (Emesp Tom Jobim) as a student of pianist Luiz Guilherme Pozzi, by whom she is still supervised.

Florence Price has been remembered as the first black American composer to have a symphony premiered by a major orchestra, as well as for leaving a considerable body of work, including four symphonies.

In 1932, she entered the Rodman Wanamaker Competition and won first place with her Symphony No. 1. The prize caught the attention of the music director of the Chicago Symphony, who gave the world premiere of the work in June 1933. The historic concert, entitled The Negro in Music, also included works by Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. For the Chicago Daily News, Florence Price’s symphony was “impeccable, a work that conveys its own message with restraint and passion”.