To regular followers of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, John McPherson occupies an honourable and familiar place.
He has been Principal Trombone of the ESO for more than two decades, and you’ll usually see him sitting up to the right, somewhere behind the double-basses, trombone in hand, ready to fill the Winspear Centre with the unmistakable sound of that most versatile of brass instruments.
Look up there for him this season, though, and you will look in vain. At this Friday’s Winspear concert, he’ll be somewhere in the audience because McPherson has, only temporarily, set his trombone aside to be the ESO’s composer-in-residence.
He’ll be there to hear the orchestra play the first performance of his new orchestral work, Triune. It opens a concert that includes Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the 26-year old Uzbek pianist Behzod Abduraimov, and an evocative Fourth Symphony by the French romantic composer Albéric Maynard, premièred only four months before the Germans burned down his house with him in it in 1914. McPherson will get a second chance to hear his work live, too, as the concert is being repeated on Saturday.
The ESO have featured his compositions before, but the composer-in-residency has given him the opportunity to concentrate on his creative skills. He therefore decided to do no performances or teaching for the year. “I wanted to take a break and see what a full-time composer’s life is like.”
He first picked up the trombone when he was 10, and started composing seriously in the 1990s. Those works, though, were for friends rather than for outside commissions. And he also learned that, as well as developing skills he could use in his own works, doing arrangements paid much better.
Playing with such orchestras as the Toronto Symphony and the Kitchener-Waterloo made him realize that if he stayed in Ontario, he would always be just a trombonist. As he says, “playing trombone in an orchestra is not a complete musical experience.” So in 1990 he joined the ESO and moved back to Edmonton, where he had been born and where he had studied with another trombonist-composer, Malcolm Forsyth. He saw Edmonton as a city that offered the opportunities to take part in a much wider range of musical activities, and so it has proved.
Indeed, McPherson’s range as a player has been eclectic: he has been heard on trombone with Manhattan Transfer and the Tommy Banks Big Band, on the euphonium with such groups as the Old Strathcona Town Band, and on tuba with such performers as Diana Krall and an opening act for Rod Stewart.
After Robert Uchida joined the ESO as concertmaster in 2015, McPherson sent him his string quartets, composed back in the 1990s, for comments. “As a trombonist,” McPherson explains, “it’s so liberating writing for other instruments.” He credits Uchida for giving him the encouragement to take the compositional path that has led to becoming composer-in-residence and temporarily laying aside that trombone.
The new work, Triune, explores life changes. “It’s not a piece I would have written when I was younger, and it has three elements: grief, peace and liberation. I’m fascinated by how and why music moves people.” It’s not an elegy for anyone in particular, but an exploration of those states. “Music has always been used for grieving, loss and pain.”
The ESO première will be swiftly followed by the première of a new work for cello and piano, to be given by Caroline Stinson and Sarah Ho at Muttart Hall on Feb 26. The occasion is the Tanya Prochazka Tribute Recital, remembering the Edmonton cellist who died in 2015, and who was a friend of McPherson. He describes the work as a portrait of Prochazka herself, and although the two works do not share material, he says it’s a ‘first cousin’ of Triune.
In between the two concerts, McPherson will spend three weeks in one of the best places to do uninterrupted creative work: the Leighton Artists’ Colony at the Banff Centre, with its backdrop of the Rockies and of the elk weaving around the artists’ studios.
There, doubtless, he’ll be working on his next large-scale work, a concerto for two horns and orchestra. He’s writing it for Allene Hackleman, the ESO’s Principal Horn, and Megan Evans, assistant principal. The ESO will première it in the 2017-2018 season.
Maybe he’ll take his trombone with him, to send the occasional fanfare bouncing off Tunnel Mountain, and serenade those wandering elk.
Preview
Première of John McPherson’s Triune
Organization: Edmonton Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Jean-Marie Zeitouni
Soloist: Behzod Abduraimov
Where: Winspear Centre
When: Friday, Feb 27, 7:30 p.m., Saturday Feb. 28, 8 p.m.
