Storgårds opens his NAC Orchestra tenure with Ives, Beethoven and a rare Coulthard
The new music director's first concerts in Southam Hall paired a six-minute Ives piece with Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto and Jean Coulthard's Vision of the North.
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John Storgårds opened his tenure as music director of the NAC Orchestra in Southam Hall on Nov. 4 and 5, with a program that put a Jean Coulthard work in front of Ottawa audiences for the first time. More of her music will be performed this season.
The evening began with Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question, a six-minute piece for strings, solo trumpet and four flutes that Ives wrote in 1908 and revised between 1930 and 1935. It was not performed until 1946. The trumpet plays from the balcony of Southam Hall and repeats the question about the meaning of life, while the flutes answer in increasingly frantic atonal lines. The strings, which Ives labelled "the Druids – Who Know, See and Hear Nothing," play triple pianissimo throughout. It is a first for the NAC Orchestra.
Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58 followed, with Élisabeth Pion as soloist. Pion, from Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec, is at an early stage of an international career and lives in London. Erwin Dreessen, reviewing the concerts, called her playing "simply impeccable" and singled out the first-movement cadenza, which Beethoven wrote out himself, as bravura. Pion's encore was jazzy, bluesy and ragtime-like.
After intermission, the orchestra played Symphonic Image: Vision of the North, a 1989 work for strings by the West Coast composer Jean Coulthard, who lived from 1908 to 2000.
Storgårds succeeds Alexander Shelley, whose tenure ended in July 2026. He first performed with the orchestra in 2013 and has been its Principal Guest Conductor since 2015.
