To share the story of one of the greatest storytelling figures in the history of literature, it takes an orchestra – an orchestra comprised solely of women – and a sitarist.
The Allegra Chamber Orchestra is performing Songs for Scheherazade as the closing concert of the Indian Summer Festival, taking place throughout the Greater Vancouver area until July 16. Joining them is acclaimed sitar player Mohamed Assani.
“We worked together before with the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra,” said Janna Sailor, founding director, violinist and conductor of Allegra Chamber Orchestra. “But this has been our first time together creating our own project, so that’s been kind of neat.
“It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, collaborate violin and sitar,” she added. “It’s just like a whole other musical language. It’s really been a fascinating process to dive a little bit deeper and actually work within that medium and experiment with those colours and see what we can come up with when you combine, you know, his musical language and background with traditional, Western classical musical idioms and language.”
The concert will include a smaller version of the orchestra, with a cross section of musicians, according to Sailor.
“Then we also have our composer in residence, Elizabeth Knudson, who is a rising star in the Canadian compositional world,” she said. “She has been studying sitar with Mohamed for the past couple of years.
“She was just dying to write a piece for sitar and orchestra, because there’s very little as far as the repertoire goes for that combination,” she added.
And finally, soprano Heather Pawsey will be singing solo pieces between the orchestral pieces.
“There’s some of these myths and legends that feature women prominently but we don’t hear from the women themselves, so basically that’s her role as a narrator to bring it all together in a really organic way but also from a different perspective,” Sailor said.
The festival is focused on mythmaking this year, which is why Allegra chose Scheherazade as their focus.
“Even though she was this mythic character she seemed to be burned into our memories as the storyteller of Arabian nights and Ali Baba, and all these major myths from that part of the world,” Sailor said. “We thought it would be interesting to pay tribute to her once again from the female perspective.”
The concert will be held in the gardens of the Ismaili Centre in Burnaby at 4010 Canada Way on Sunday, July 15. The event will begin with a high tea.
“I feel like the venue will become part of the performance in a way. We’ll be out there underneath the dome and the impeccably groomed beautiful geometric shapes of the Islamic garden there,” Sailor said, “and I think that kind of puts it more into context of the historic beauty we’re referring to and the culture that a lot of the things we’re referring to come from, and respecting and honouring that as well as bringing it into the modern day.”
For tickets, go to bit.ly/SongsforScheherazadeTickets.
