Concert a tribute to losses of pandemic WSO playing pieces of peace, healing By: Alan Small Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Apr. 27, 2022

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This article was published 26/04/2022 (877 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Emotions will run higher than any notes played or sung Thursday night at the Centennial Concert Hall.

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra presents a free community concert, Manitoba Remembers: A COVID Elegy, Thursday at 7 p.m., an evening that will focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected Manitoba families and communities.

Those who have suffered from the virus include many the orchestra, perhaps none more notably than its musical director and maestro, Daniel Raiskin.

His wife Larissa was in Kharkiv, Ukraine, helping her mother, Galyna Reznikova, who was receiving cancer treatments, when Russian armies invaded and missiles rained down on the country’s cities, including Kharkiv

They spent 40 hours on an evacuation train to reach the border between Ukraine and Slovakia, where Raiskin met them. They eventually found a place for Reznikova to stay in Bratislava, Slovakia’s capital, where Raiskin has conducted many times and has built friendships over the years.

Her immune system was weakened by chemotherapy treatments and the stressful journey, Raiskin says. She contracted COVID-19 somewhere in the chaos and died March 24 in a Bratislava hospital.

“It was doubly terrible to see all this effort and courage my wife had to exhibit to extract her mother from the war zone, make it safely to western Europe and then still see her mother taken away by COVID,” Raiskin says.

“So this is very, very close to me also in regard to the project we are doing on Thursday. It’s going to be a really special commemorative event but also with a sense of hope, looking forward. We’re not out of the woods on too many fronts, including the one that’s very real, the war raging in Ukraine.”

Raiskin says concerts are built to create a narrative and that the choice of music to be played, which will include works by Mozart as well as opera, R&B and country performances, will resonate for audiences at the concert hall or those viewing at home on a free livestream at wso.ca.

“I’m sure that being part of this event will also be part of me telling the way my family has been impacted by COVID,” he says.

Soprano Tracy Dahl, the Winnipeg Singers, the Maples Collegiate Choir, country artist Don Amero and R&B singer Kelly Bado will also perform.

Joining them will be Gwen Hoebig, the WSO’s longtime concertmaster, who will be a soloist performing The Lark Ascending, a piece for solo violin with orchestra by British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams, who wrote it in 1914. It has since become one of the world’s most popular 20th-century classical works.

“We know music is a means of healing and I think the intent behind (the concert) is to really create an atmosphere of recognition and healing,” she says.

“The piece I’m playing is so symbolic of that. It really is so peaceful and transcendent and I’m looking forward to playing it. It’s extremely appropriate for this event.”

The violinist has performed the The Lark Ascending many times, most notably as the title track on a WSO album released in 1998, conducted by Bramwell Tovey, the orchestra’s musical director at the time.

“The piece I’m playing is so symbolic of that. It really is so peaceful and transcendent and I’m looking forward to playing it. It’s extremely appropriate for this event.” – Gwen Hoebig

“I’m going to be a little bit different than I was then, but certainly drawing on the knowledge of that,” Hoebig says, adding Raiskin will offer some input as well. “He usually has some wonderful suggestions.”

She is one of several members of the orchestra who contracted COVID-19 during the Omicron-variant wave in early 2022 and she has since recovered from the virus’s respiratory symptoms.

”It was minor, a couple of days of uncomfort and then lingering for another week or so, so it wasn’t like it was a serious thing,” Hoebig recalls.

The WSO’s string section has performed with masks since it returned to the stage from a pandemic hiatus in the fall of 2020, but Hoebig, as guest soloist, will be able to perform without wearing one, although she will take a rapid antigen test prior to taking the stage.

“That’s the first time I will be able to play on stage without a mask in a couple of years,” she says. “Playing with a mask on is really uncomfortable.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall