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1 / LAMENT
7.30pm, Wednesday, September 25
(Desautels Concert Hall, UM)
Anne Manson, conductor; Jonathon Adams, baritone; Jessica Sparvier-Well, flute-composer; Tyson Houseman, video artist
THE VISIONARY CREE-MÉTIS BARITONE sings baroque and urgent new musical lamentations. Guiding you through stirring discoveries, disruptions, and landscapes, this concert will leave you changed.
Jessica Sparvier-Well
Lament for Small Souls
Jan Dismas Zelenka
Lamentation 1 (for Holy Wednesday) in Cm
Jessica Sparvier-Well
For Nikâwiy
Jan Dismas Zelenka
Lamentation 2 (For Maundy Thursday) in Gm
Jessica McMann
Pekiwewina
Jessica Sparvier-Well
Mountain Prairie
Intermission
John Adams
The Wound Dresser
Program subject to change
LAMENT sounds a cry for what we have lost and all we are in danger of losing…
MCO’s season-opening concert amplifies the visionary voices of Cree-Métis baritone and curator Jonathon Adams, Cree flutist-composer Jessica Sparvier-Well, and Cree filmmaker Tyson Houseman. Past, present and future are woven together in a call to reflect on the responsibilities of living on and from Indigenous land. Houseman’s extraordinary projections will fill the newly opened Desautels Concert Hall as we witness a Cree takeover of the historical Lament form through story, song, light and shadow.
The Lamentation is a musical expression of grief. We hear it first in Lament for Small Souls, scored for solo flute and voice. Written after the discovery of 751 unmarked graves on the grounds of the Marieval Indian Residential School, Sparvier-Well’s overwhelming piece gives the visceral sense that not only the composer, but the land itself mourns these little ones. This is followed by the first of two plague-era Lamentation settings by 18th century Bohemian composer Jan Dismas Zelenka. In these Baroque motets Zelenka uses Biblical depictions of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians as allegorical vessels for his own doubt, shame and despair.
Interpolated into these expressions of loss, we hear Sparvier-Well’s For Nikawîy and Mountain Prairie: The first, a hyper-personal confession of longing through a forced-adoption lens, the second an invocation of the powerful medicines alive within the Rocky Mountains. We end with composer John Adams’ 1988 setting of Walt Whitman’s The Wound Dresser. This is a vivid, conflicted remembrance written in old age of the poet’s own service as a young volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Through a care-filled curation of lived experience and seemingly distant memory, Jonathon Adams sings an accounting of colonial violence on stolen land. The tender dressing of war wounds, the apocalyptic fall of once sacred walls, the return of young bodies to the ground they were made of – these painful visions encircle an ecstatic hope of reconciliation with the land and water. This concert will leave you changed.
Jessica Sparvier-Well (formerly McMann) is an artist in the total sense. A classically trained flutist, the Alberta-based Cree musician is also a dancer, choreographer, and composer. She interweaves land, Indigenous identity, history, and language throughout her art, and has thrilled and moved audiences across western Canada and northern Europe. Her 2023 album recording, Prairie Dusk – a follow up to the celebrated Incandescent Tales (2021) – is available on all platforms. Sparvier-Well is currently pursuing her MFA in unceded Coast Salish territory.
Tyson Houseman is one of the most unique artists to grace the MCO stage. He is a nehiyaw (plains cree) interdisciplinary video artist, puppeteer, and actor. As a visual artist alone, his work astounds for eclecticism. Painting, filmmaking, photography, video projection – Houseman does all of it powerfully and to growing acclaim. As an actor, his work as Quil Ateara in the Twilight Saga (you read that right) is known to millions. He recently completed an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and has toured all over the world as a performer and puppeteer.
Jonathon Adams is a phenomenon. One of North America’s most thrilling young baritones, the Cree-Métis (Nêhiyaw-Michif) artist joins the MCO fresh off working with the New York Phil. Gifted with an effortlessly rich, enveloping, and lyrical baritone voice, Adams fuses their vocal talents with their lived experiences as a non-binary Indigenous person. Specializing in Early and Baroque music, they consistently prove that there is room to be both dedicated to historically informed performance practice – while remaining authentic to who one is and what they believe.
Casual tickets available here!
The concert begins at 7.30pm on Wednesday, September 25th, in the Desautels Concert Hall at 150 Dafoe Road, UM Campus. Casual tickets available online June 15th and on MCO’s Ticketline at 204-783-7377.