Vancouver Chamber Choir
The Vancouver Chamber Choir is Canada’s longest-running fully professional choral ensemble. Formed in 1971 by Founder & Conductor Emeritus Jon Washburn, the choir has become an amazing success story, ranking with the handful of North America’s best professional choruses and noted for its diverse repertoire and performing excellence. The choir has presented concerts at home in Vancouver and on tour across Canada. International excursions have taken them to the USA, Mexico, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Finland, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine. Artistic Director Kari Turunen began leading the Vancouver Chamber Choir in September 2019, its 49th concert season.
Honoured with the Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence by Chorus America, the choir has performed countless concerts and broadcasts, has released nearly 40 recordings and has received numerous awards. Foremost supporters of Canadian music, they are responsible for commissions and premieres of over 400 choral works by 150 composers and arrangers, most of whom are Canadian. Over the years the choir has sung over 4,000 performances of works by Canadian composers, in addition to their extensive international repertoire.
The choir’s award-winning educational programs include the Conductors’ Symposium for advanced choral conductors, Interplay interactive workshops for choral composers, Focus professional development program for student singers, OnSite visitations for school choirs, the biennial Young Composers’ Competition, and many on-tour workshops and residencies.
For more information, please visit www.vancouverchamberchoir.com.
KARI TURUNEN
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Kari Turunen was appointed Artistic Director of the Vancouver Chamber Choir in 2019, its 49th concert season. He is a versatile performer and continues to play an important role in the choral music scene in his native Finland as an artistic director, educator and administrator. He has toured extensively across Europe and Asia as a conductor, performer, clinician and adjudicator.
Dr. Turunen has been awarded numerous international prizes with the choral ensembles he has directed: Akademiska Damkören Lyran, Akademiska Sångföreningen, Kampin Laulu Chamber Choir, Chorus Cantorum Finlandiae, Spira Ensemble and the professional early music ensembles Ensemble Petraloysio and I Dodici, with which he continues to work. He was a founding member of Lumen Valo and appeared with them in over 250 concerts and nine critically acclaimed recordings. In 2008, he was named Finnish Choral Conductor of the Year and is the recipient of over 20 grants from Finnish and Finnish-Swedish Cultural Foundations.
In addition to his artistic activities, Dr. Turunen has been active in festival administration. He was the Artistic Director of the 2022 Finnish-Swedish Song Celebration and the 2023 Tampere Vocal Music Festival, as well as the Aurore Renaissance Festival in Helsinki from 2015-2020. He was also Chair of the Finnish Choral Directors’ Association (FCDA) from 1997-2018.
Kari Turunen holds a doctorate in early music performance practice from the University of the Arts, Helsinki, and an MA in choral conducting from the Sibelius Academy. He lives in Vancouver with his wife, Anna.
The Gift is about the gift of community coming together. There is a call to gather, and the community responds by gathering their voices. The lyrics in this song are not words in any language but they are based on Aboriginal vocables from the western part of North America. I am a member of the Lil’wat Nation and have sung and composed many songs based on this traditional form. (Russell Wallace)
Carmen Braden is an exciting Canadian composer born in Whitehorse and now living in Yellowknife. Crooked by Nature is a study of women’s role and position in Tudor England, with almost unavoidable references to our time. Braden has set three fragments of texts from the turn of the 17th century that reflect the discussion on women of the time. A few more contemporary additions by the composer add to the relevance of the work. As one might expect, this piece is not easy listening, although especially in the references to music of the Tudor period there are moments of real beauty. The ending drowns out the negative voices and leaves us looking forward with optimism.
Queen Elizabeth I (1588) – from a speech given to troops in Essex preparing for a Spanish invasion
I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king.
Joseph Swetnam (1615) “The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward [sic] and Unconstant Women” (excerpts)
Women are called Night crows. Eagles eat not men til they are dead but women devour them alive. Then who can but say that women sprung from the devil? And he also saith that they were made of the rib of a man and that their forward nature shows, for the rib is a crooked thing, good for nothing, for women are crooked by nature. I pray you let us consider the times past with the times present.
Rachel Speght (1617) “A Mouzell for Melastomus*, or an Apologetical Answer to that Irreligious and Illiterate pamphlet made by Joseph Swetnam and by him Entitled The Arraignment of Women.” (*A muzzle for the evil mouth – excerpts)
The efficiency of women’s creation was Jehovah the eternal. The truth of which is manifest in Moses’ narration. Yet was she not produced from Adam’s foot? Not to be his too low inferior, Nor near his head to be his superior, but from his side near his heart to be his equal. That where he is lord she may be Lady.
Words translated into Latin and Greek
femina – woman
homine – man
mela – evil
stoma – mouth
regina – queen
Adapted text by Carmen Braden
crooked woman
evil mouth
lock her up
Our composer-in-residence for the 2025/26 season is Stuart Beatch from Edmonton and his music will be featured in most of our concerts during this season.
Girl Hours is based on the life of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, an influential American astronomer who discovered a way to measure the distances of stars in the early twentieth century. Alongside other women, Leavitt was employed at the Harvard College Conservatory as a human computer, made to study photographs and make calculations, rather than operating the telescopes. As a result, the director of the conservatory measured the difficulty of their projects in ‘girl hours’. Sofia Samatar’s elegant poetry turns this belittling phrase into a statement of power and a testament to the important intellectual labour of these women. My music imagines Leavitt working late into the night, studying her photographic plates and seeing instead the immensity of the universe stretching before her. (Stuart Beatch)
Twelve o’clock.
My husband and children asleep.
To chart one more star, to go on working:
this is a way of keeping faith.
Draw me a map.
Show me how to read music.
Teach me to rise without standing,
to hold the galaxy’s calipers
with the earth at one gleaming tip,
to live vastly and with precision,
to travel
where distance is no longer measured in miles but in lifetimes,
in epochs, in breaths, in light years, in girl hours.
laura hawley, also from Edmonton, was our composer-in-residence of our 2024/25 season. One of the works we very much enjoyed singing was her O, The Snow. It is an unusually upbeat take on winter. The composer writes: ‘The vision was for a rhythmic, faster work with a light dancing quality, and this excerpt from John Whitaker Watson’s poem Beautiful Snow was the perfect fit. This piece has changing textures throughout; sometimes using a double-choir texture with one SATB group singing the melody and another group providing the dancing snowy texture, sometimes dividing upper and lower voices, and ending with an extended coda section that begins homophonic and plays with changing textures as it goes along.’
O the Snow, the beautiful snow,
Filling the sky and the earth below!
Over the house-tops, over the street,
Over the heads of the people you meet,
Dancing,
Flirting,
Skimming along.
Beautiful snow! it can do nothing wrong.
Flying to kiss a fair lady’s cheek;
Clinging to lips in a frolicsome freak;
Beautiful snow, from the heavens above,
Pure as an angel and fickle as love!
O the snow, the beautiful snow!
How the flakes gather and laugh as they go!
Whirling about in its maddening fun,
It plays in its glee with every one.
Chasing,
Laughing,
Hurrying by,
It lights up the face and it sparkles the eye;
And even the dogs, with a bark and a bound,
Snap at the crystals that eddy around.
The town is alive, and its heart in a glow,
To welcome the coming of beautiful snow.
How the wild crowd go swaying along,
Hailing each other with humor and song!
American composer Nico Muhly’s Rough notes was written for the Tallis Scholars in 2018. It is based on two diary markings by Captain Robert Scott who led an expedition to the Antartic in 1910–13. Scott attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole, but was beaten by a Norwegian expedition. On the over 1,000 km trek back, Scott and his men perished. The first section of Muhly’s setting depicts the northern lights Scott so beautifully describes in a flickering, ever-shifting musical texture. When we come to Scott’s last markings, the music takes on a more hymn-like character. The ending intertwines the two styles and leaves the northern lights as a backdrop for the sad end of Scott’s expedition.
Tonight we had a glorious auroral display – quite the most brilliant I have seen. At one time the sky from the North North-West to South South-East as high as the zenith was massed with arches, bands, and curtains, always in rapid movement. The waving curtains were especially fascinating – a wave of bright light would start at one end and run along to the other, or a patch of brighter light would spread as if to reinforce the failing light of the curtain.
(Diary entry Sunday 21 May 1911)
For four days we have been unable to leave the tent – the gale howling about us. We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake, I do not regret this journey which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.
(‘Message to the Public’ March 1912)
Peteris Vasks is a Latvian composer whose highly ambitious works reach out to audiences thanks to their emotional strength and high quality. Piedzimšana is a visceral, almost a mythical voyage into the rebirth of nature – and perhaps a nationality, or even humankind. It is a cornucopia that seems to spill out new textures and elements, all anchored in limited musical material. It waxes and wanes and winds its way to a hair-raising ending.
Saulīt manu augstu radu
Ziemelim aizprecēta
Tāda nakte tāda diena
Neredz sauli šai zemē
Vidū jūras vidū ledus
Saule kāra šūpulīti
Tur līgoja rīta ausma
Tur auklēja auseklīti
Nedod zemi nedod sauli
Ziemeli vārdzināt
Liesim varu kalsim ratus
Lai brauc saule skanēdam
Vara rati cauri brauca
Grieztin grieza asi ledi
Tumša jūra sarktin sarka
No saulītes asinīm
Uz tām rīta robežām
Dzīvs ar dzīvu satikās
Zeme deva augumiņu
Saule savu dvēselīti
–Inese Zandere
The sun is a great relative of mine
Married to the northern wind
Through the night through the day
The sun is gone from these lands
Amidst the sea amidst the ice
The sun hung up a cradle
Where the dawn rocked away
And the morning star was nurtured
Don’t let the earth, don’t let the sun
For the northern wind to weaken
Let us pour copper let us forge a wagon
So that the sun can ride forth victorious
The copper wagon rode on
The sharp ice churning churned
The dark red sea reddened and reddened
From the bold of the sun
On the morning boundaries
The life is reborn
The form from the earth
The soul from the sun
(Translation Richards Kalninš)
Veljo Tormis is best known for his adaptations of Finno-ugric folk music to choral music. Before his expeditions into the folk music of the areas around his native Estonia, Tormis had already found a voice of his own – precise, concise and expressive, as Sügismaastikud, Autumn landscapes, from 1964 shows. The poems of Viivi Luik are effective depictions of the coldness and bareness of a northern fall, and Tormis finds music to reflect this detached coolness. The real flashes of warmth are the depiction of late summer in the first and the fire-like glow of the autumnal heather in the last song. The ending of the suite is hair-raising.
Ja lõhnab angervaks ja tulilill ja ohakas.
On hilissuvi.
Ja pihlapuus on marjakobar,
ja männikus on kanarbik.
Ja seda suve tule enam.
The fragrant meadowsweet and buttercup and thistledown.
It is late summer.
And the rowan trees are heavy with berries,
and in the forest of pines heathers abound.
And this summer will never return.
Üle taeva jooksevad vihmajärgse hommiku lillad pilved.
See on järvelt lõõtsuv tuul,
see on kartulivagude muld,
millest su käed külmetavad.
Over the skies rush the purple clouds on the morning after rain.
It is the wind from the lake,
it is the soil of the potato field
that chills your hands.
Kahvatu valgus sügismaatike kohal.
Valgeid tutte ohakad küldavad tuulde.
Kahvatu valgus…
All ribedeks rebitud taeva
pikad ja porised teed.
Pale light over autumnal land.
White tufts of thistles strewn into the wind.
Pale light…
Under the sky torn into strips
the long and muddy roads.
Valusalt punased lehed
poriseks sõtkutud teel.
Imetlen neid ma ja tallan
poriseks sõtkutud lehti
valusalt punasel teel.
Painfully red leaves
on the muddy-trodden road.
I admire them and trod
the muddy-trodden leaves
on the painfully red road.
Tuul kõnnumaa kohal
koolnu kollase kõnnumaa kohal.
Teekänul kohinal naeris
paar surnud puud
kohinal naeris.
Wind over the meadow,
over the corpselike yellow meadow.
At the bend in the road
a couple of dead trees
laugh-rustle.
Külm sügisöö kuu
nagu kummaline münt läigatas mere.
A cold fall night moon
like a strange coin is reflected on to the sea.
Kurb lilla kanarbik meeletult lõõskab,
päikese viimane virvendus silmis.
Muidu kõik on kui ikka,
need samad on nurmed,
need samad on teed,
ainult nende peal põleb
maailma suurune leek.
Sad purple heather blazes frantically,
catching the last light of the day.
Otherwise, all is as ever,
the same meadows,
the same roads.
But above them burns
a flame as great as the world.
At the same time Tormis was composing his Autumnal landscapes, R Murray Schafer was working on soundscape studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His compositions reflect his research on acoustical ecology, of how human beings are affected by natural and artificial sounds. Snowforms is a graphic score consisting of beautifully drawn lines and verbal guidance and the words used are some of the many used for different forms of snow in inuit languages. Because Schafer does not use traditional notation, each performance of this work is bound to be a little different.
Apingaut (first snow fall)
Mauyak (soft snow)
Qanit (falling snow)
Siditlorak (hard snow)
Akelrorak (newly drifted snow)
Anio (snow for melting into water)
Tiltuktortok (snow beaten down)
Pokaktok (snow lke salt)
Adut (snow spread out)
Zumak (Spring Salmon in the St’át’imc language). This song is about celebrating the return of the salmon up the Fraser river after a long period of having no salmon. (RW)
Inspired by travels in Baffin Island in 2009 and a collaboratioon with Iqaluit folksinger and songwriter Madeleine Allakariallak, Qilak is a concise song reflecting Cree composr Andrew Balfour’s experiences of the north. Balfour writes: “Qilak is about the northern sky which is so breathtaking up in the Arctic. I loved the open space, the Inuit’s relationship with the land, and the musical sound of Inuktitut’’. Andrew is yet another of our composers-in-residence (2023/24 season).
Qilak (the sky, heavens, paradise)
There is the sky.
Tunguniq (reflection of open water in the sky at the horizon)
Latvian composer Eriks Ešenvalds has for long been spellbound by northern lights, so it is no wonder that the aurora borealis are the subject of Ēriks Ešenvalds’ Rivers of Light. Sámi folk songs are interwoven throughout the piece, enhancing the timeless quality of the phenomenon. These are combined with the evocative and descriptive writings of Candace Savage, Kari Kaila, William Reed, and explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Charles Francis Hall. Ešenvalds’ trademark rich and shimmering harmonies bring to life the dancing and ever shifting northern lights.
Kuovsakasah reukarih tåkko teki, sira ria
(Northern lights slide back and forth. Fa-la-la.)
Winter night,
the sky is filled with symphony of light,
the sky is flooded with rivers of light.
The doors of heaven have been opened tonight.
Guovssat, guovssat radni go, libai libai libaida
Ruoná gákti, nu nu nu
(Northern lights, blanket shivering. Fa-la-la. Green coat. Fa-la-la.)
From horizon to horizon
misty dragons swim through the sky,
green curtains billow and swirl,
fast-moving, sky-filling,
the tissues of gossamer.
Nothing can be heard.
Light shakes over the vault of heaven,
its veil of glittering silver
changing now to yellow, now to green, now to red.
It spreads in restless change, into waving,
into many-folded bands of silver.
It shimmers in tongues of flame,
over the very zenith
it shoots a bright ray up
until the whole melts away
as a sigh of departing soul
in the moonlight,
leaving a glow in the sky
like the dying embers of a great fire.