On November 16 and 17, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra will be performing Ana Sokolović’s Concerto for Orchestra. It’s the first time she’ll be working with the TSO and conductor Gustavo Gimeno.
We spoke to the composer about her start in music, and the work that Maestro Gimeno and the TSO will be performing.
Composer Ana Sokolović
Ana Sokolović was born in Belgrade, Serbia. She has made Montréal her base since 1992.
Her formal musical education began with ballet lessons at the age of four. She went on to study composition at the university level in Belgrade. Ana followed that with a master’s degree with José Evangelista at l’Université de Montreal, and her reputation quickly began to grow in that city.
Her growing body of works includes operas, solo and chamber music, and orchestral pieces. She often draws on the rhythmic folk music of her Balkan heritage for inspiration, along with a range of compositional and artistic techniques. Her work is performed across Canada, the US, and throughout Europe, and she is the fourth most frequently performed woman opera composer in the world.
She has also worked on music for stage, including collaborations with legendary choreographer Louise Lecavalier, director Denis Marleau, playwright Stéphanie Jasmin, and Oscar-nominated director Theodore Ushev.
Ana’s work has collected numerous accolades over the years, including two consecutive JUNOs for Classical Composition of the Year. She served as Composer-in-Residence at the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM) for three seasons. Ana teaches composition at l’Université de Montréal, where she was awarded the first Canada Research Chair in Opera Creation in 2022.
Ana Sokolović: The Interview
“I think that I composed — I improvised — because I was a young pianist. I started piano at the age of 8,” she says.
It came as an offshoot of her ballet lessons, as she explains. With no piano at home, during breaks from dance class, she’d improvise on the keyboard. “I was impressed by this sonic object,” she says.
She began to compose music almost right away, including a duet with a friend who played the bass line.
“After that, I started piano lessons, and eventually, started theatre lessons.”
She counts the influence of all three arts — dance, music, and theatre — as vital to her work and education. When she began to play the piano, she continued to improvise. “I changed pieces,” she says. “My piano teacher told […] my parents, I think she is a composer,” she adds.
“I thought that it was normal for everybody who was playing an instrument to compose.”
It wasn’t until high school, however, that she actually made her intentions of becoming a composer professionally clear.
“I vocalised it.”
Incorporating the elements of dance and theatre into her work isn’t always the norm, traditionally, in Western culture, where we tend to separate the disciplines. As Ana points out, though, popular music already brings theatricality and other elements into the mix. “It’s only since Romanticism that we really started to separate music.” Prior to that era, as she notes, composer, improviser and performer were the same person.
“We’re specialized in our era, but we’re coming back to our roots somehow.”
Concerto for Orchestra
“It was actually the musical world of the concert where the piece was premiered.” That’s how Sokolović describes the idea behind the Concerto for Orchestra at its genesis.
The Concerto for Orchestra premiered in 2007, and was written for an OSM tour while Kent Nagano was Music Director. It was the first cross-Canada tour for both the orchestra and Nagano, and took them from Yellowknife to St. John’s. On the program were Beethoven and Rossini.
Nagano was fond of concepts, she noted after discussions with him. “And I like challenges as well.” She considered the juxtaposition of Beethoven’s darker, deeper emotions, and the sunnier nature of Rossini’s art. “It was very nice for me.” To reduce them both to generalizations isn’t the intention, but instead to spark an idea. “It’s not really right, but it made me think of this,” she explains. “Just to think about dualities.”
It went beyond the pieces in question. “Thinking about what is deep music today, what is light music today?”
The music of the Concerto comes from her reflections and questioning revolving around those ideas. “I give some solutions for answers, but I don’t necessarily give the answer.”
A concerto for orchestra allows her to work with the orchestra’s colours in a different way. “I really work with the orchestra as a soloist,” she says. Different sections become the soloist at different moments during the three movement piece. It’s written in a traditional fast — slow — fast format.
Within the orchestra, she uses specific groups of instruments to play out those ideas about correlation, dialogue and duality. The whole orchestra offers a vast dynamic range, along with the various timbres of the individual instruments and sections.
“I was searching for different kinds of expressions of duality.”
The thought process behind the music, however interesting, isn’t required for its enjoyment. “But, all of this is not important for people to listen to the music,” she says. “It was written to be heard and to be felt.” As a composer, she says, you offer the initial energy of the piece, but it has to be caught by audience.
Concert with the TSO
The program in Toronto includes Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 99, and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 39. Lithuanian-born violinist, violist and conductor Julian Rachlin is the evening’s soloist.
“Just being programmed with Shostakovich and Sibelius — my two gods — is so amazing. And I love Julian Rachlin,” Ana adds. “Just being there is a treat.”
As she points out, where a piece falls in the program can also affect how the audience receives it. It appears first in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s Fire & Ice program. That’s a good spot for new works, she feels, when the audience has fresh ears.
“This atmosphere of not knowing what we want to hear is very exciting for me. But, at the same time, I don’t want them to think.” New music shouldn’t be overly intellectualized — it needs to simply be felt.
“So the context is, they’re open,” she says. “I hope maybe this will arouse some interest in these ideas — or more importantly, in this soundscape.”
- Find tickets and more details about the November 16 and 17 concerts with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra [HERE].
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