Into the future

On April 6, the Prince Edward Island Symphony Orchestra will present the fourth concert of the season with Music Director Jaelem Bhate, at Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown.

Just prior to the November 2024 concert, on behalf of The Buzz, I met with Jaelem and asked him how he goes about programming an orchestral season.

This first season was very much just to introduce myself and to get to know the people a bit more and the way it was structured is that the first and fourth concerts were a bit more adventurous and the inner two were a bit, let’s say, closer to home.

The April concert is titled Encounters, presenting “The Observatory” by Caroline Shaw, “Mothership” by Mason Bates and “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky as orchestrated by Maurice Ravel. I asked Jaelem to elaborate on what the Symphony audience might encounter in this concert.

I wanted the fourth concert of this season, the finale of the artistic Confederation Centre season, to showcase the future of what was coming. Season two will introduce some new spices, some new concepts of how will be served. The fourth concert of the year is a feed of that. The idea of the future led to “Mothership” by Mason Bates, which is a spaceship coming down to earth and making its way through four different cultures represented by four different soloists. It’s electroacoustic: there will be a DJ dance track happening in the hall while the orchestra is playing… I’ll have an earpiece in and will be conducting along to this track but the audience will be hearing it as well.

In Carolyn Shaw’s “Observatory,“ the observatory in question is Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles which looks out over the city. Some of it is looking outwards into space but also looking down on the mass of 14 or 15 million people in the metro LA area. She takes quotes from famous classical works, morphs them, reverses them, flips them upside down and integrates them into her music. And it’s a mishmash of humanity that LA represents.

Then I thought, what does that sound like? That sounds like “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Attending an exhibition and coming across different pictures that represent scenes of life from different areas. And then each of those pieces is interrupted by the promenade theme.

So I realized that all three of these pieces have this idea of encountering something familiar to them. That’s the through line. This was all music written by humans and we all have this idea of a first meeting, a first encounter or dreaming about alien life or what’s in space. We’ve all looked up and wondered what’s out there. But also, since the dawn of time, we’ve been explorers coming into contact with each other’s cultures—sometimes for better, sometimes worse—so this very innate human drive to explore is represented by all these pieces.

On May 4, Jaelem Bhate will lead the PEI Symphony in a bonus, fifth concert for the season titled May the Fourth Be With You: The Music of Star Wars with music by John Williams, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss. The will perform John Williams’ themes of “Imperial March,” “Across the Stars,” “Battle of the Heroes,” “Duel of the Fates,” “Princess Leia’s Theme”—all from the Star Wars movie franchise—as well as the classical repertoire that inspired them.