Alexander Shelley. Photo by Rémi Thériault.
SPHERE
Become Ocean
Ottawa, Ontario
Presented by
National Arts Centre
We honour the voice of water and ice with music dedicated to the critical ecological milestones our planet faces, including two works from ground-breaking female composers Anna Clyne and Outi Tarkiainen.
British composer Anna Clyne wrote Restless Oceans for Marin Alsop and the all-women Taki Concordia Orchestra for performance at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019. In addition to playing their instruments, the musicians are called upon to use their voices in song and strong vocalizations, and their feet to stomp and bring them to stand united at the end.Songs of the Ice, by Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen. Songs of the Ice is dedicated to Iceland’s Okjökull (Ok glacier), which was declared “dead” by the Icelandic Meteorological Office in 2014, by which time the glacier had lost almost 80 percent of its mass and was no longer a living, moving glacier.The concert closes with John Luther Adams’s epic Become Ocean. Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, Become Ocean is written for three orchestras, each of which moves on its own sonic journey before meeting as one in crucial moments. If the ocean of our planet has a song, then Become Ocean is it.This concert is presented as part of the NAC Orchestra’s SPHERE Festival.
The event will be also be livestreamed to audiences with no tickets required.
Outi Tarkianen was born in Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland, a place that has proved a constant source of inspiration for her. She has long been drawn to the expressive power of the human voice, but has written vocal, chamber, and solo instrumental works as well as works for orchestra and soloist. “I see music as a force of nature that can flood over a person and even change entire destinies,” she once said.
Outi has been commissioned by orchestras including the San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestras, and her music has been taken up by the symphony orchestras of St Louis, Detroit, and Houston, among others. Her early work with jazz orchestras culminated in Into the Woodland Silence (2013), a score that combined the composer’s sense of natural mysticism with the distinctive textures of the jazz orchestra tradition. Major works since include an orchestral song cycle to texts by Sami poets The Earth, Spring’s Daughter (2015), the saxophone concerto Saivo (2016, nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize), and Midnight Sun Variations premiered at the BBC Proms in 2019 (nominated for the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco’s Musical Composition Prize). Her first full-length opera, A Room of One’s Own (2021), was commissioned and premiered by Theater Hagen in Germany.
Outi studied composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Guildhall School in London and at the University of Miami. She has been composer-in-residence at the Festival de Musique Classique d’Uzerche in France and was for four years co-artistic director of the Silence Festival in Lapland.
