Saturday, October 05, 2019  »  8pm

PROGRAM

GUEST ARTISTS: Gene Ramsbottom, Clarinet, and Manti Poon, Viola

$20 – Adults
$15 – Seniors
$10 – Students
Free – Kids 12 and under

Donations can be made by cash or cheque. Tickets are available at the door. 

Tickets are also available online through 

VENUE

Shaughnessy Heights United Church
1550 West 33rd Avenue
Vancouver, BC

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Parking: Free street parking on West 33rd and side streets near the church.

B i o g r a p h y

Manti Poon, Viola

After moving to Vancouver, Manti Poon furthered his studies in viola performance with Professor David Harding at the University of British Columbia on full scholarship. Since then he has become a much sought-after musician in British Columbia as a soloist, orchestral musician and chamber music collaborator. 

Apart from holding the position of principal violist with the Vancouver Island Symphony Orchestra, he also performed with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Victoria Symphony Orchestra, the Vancouver Opera Orchestra and the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, to name a few. Mr. Poon is a member of the Vancouver String Quartet.

Mr. Poon had served on faculty at the Douglas College, the Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the Vancouver Academy of Music and the VSO School of Music. He is also the violin and viola instructor at West Point Grey Academy. Apart from holding the position as associate conductor with the Richmond Delta Youth Orchestra, Mr. Poon also coached and conducted the Vancouver Youth Symphony Orchestra, the Surrey Youth Symphony Orchestra, the Vancouver Academy Symphony Orchestra and the Coquitlam Youth Orchestra. He was the Chamber Music Director for the Surrey Youth Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Poon was also on faculty at UBC String Music Camp, Courtney Youth Music Camp, VAM Music Camp, North Shore Music Camp and MMM Music Camp in Washington State. 

Mr. Poon performs on a fine viola by Marino Capicchioni and a rare Sartory viola bow on loan to him by Poesis Fine Instruments and Bows. 

Gene Ramsbottom, Clarinet

Gene Ramsbottom was accorded “Distinguished Artist” designation in 2015 by FANS, (Funding for the Arts on the North Shore, representing the tri-Cities of North Vancouver, West Vancouver and District of North Vancouver) in recognition of his lifelong artistic accomplishments nationally and internationally. He joined the CBC Radio Orchestra clarinet section in 1974 and was its principal clarinetist from 1984 until November 16, 2008 when the 70 year-old radio orchestra was disbanded. Maestro Richard Bonynge appointed him as the founding principal clarinetist of the Vancouver Opera Orchestra from 1975-1996. He has performed as a chamber musician and soloist in Canada, England, France, Germany, Israel, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the USA and Ireland.

A life-long producer, sponsor and organizer of classical music events, some of his many concert presentations include the Whistler International Mozart Festival (1989 & 1990) and the OUT FOR LUNCH Friday noon-hour concert series now in its 34th season at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The 927th concert is on Sept 27th, 2019 and the OfL series was voted # 1 as Vancouver’s most significant event in PLACES THAT MATTER, a Vancouver Heritage Foundation survey in 2011. Since the early 1980s he has taught clarinet and chamber music for the Departments of Music of Douglas College and Capilano University and was a clarinet instructor and chamber music coach at UBC Music for 34 years. With over fifty years of teaching experience he is the senior-most clarinet teacher in British Columbia’s history. Over 55 commercial recordings and innumerable radio broadcasts are to his credit and establish him as being one of Canada’s most recorded classical orchestral clarinetists.

His principal clarinet teachers were Carl Kellett (Vancouver), Ronald deKant (Vancouver Symphony), Peter Hadcock, (Boston Symphony), Robert Marcellus (Cleveland Orchestra), Marcel Moyse (Brattleboro, Vermont) and Marc Lifschey (San Fransisco Symphony). Post-university clarinet studies in the U.S.A. were possible with scholarship awards from the Canada Council and the B.C. Cultural Services Fund. He served as an apprentice arts manager under a Canada Council initiative with George Zukerman (Vancouver, B.C.) at Overture Concerts in 1976.

In May, 2005 Mr. Ramsbottom performed the Shanghai premiere of Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” at an International Concert for World Peace commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the end of WWII. In May 2007 he performed Stephen Chatman’s “Prairie Dawn” Clarinet Concerto in Taipei with their National University of the Arts Orchestra and was a guest professor. He was the featured Canadian artist at the Wright State University’s Clarinet Symposium in Dayton, Ohio in 2009 and was a featured artist at Alabama’s Troy State University’s Clarinet conference in 2010. He commissioned and premiered Alain Mayrand’s “Battling Boggarts” with American clarinetist Dr. Tim Phillips and the Troy University Symphonic Winds at the 2011 Whistler Music Festival. He has been the principal clarinetist and soloist with SUMMER MUSIC IN GALWAY/SUMMER MUSIC ON THE SHANNON Festival since 2009 in Ireland and is currently the principal clarinetist with Vancouver’s West Coast Symphony Orchestra and is guest conductor and soloist of the Terrace Symphony. In August 2019 he performed as a guest chamber soloist in the Hongmei Music Festival (Shanghai).

The Rest of the Story –

Concerto for Clarinet, Viola, and Orchestra, Opus 88 by Max Bruch – Copyright 2011 by Oliver Seely and assigned to the public domain

In an email to Vancouver Philharmonic Orchestra member Lucy Williams, Oliver Seely reveals the back story of Max Bruch’s Concerto for Clarinet, Viola, and Orchestra:  

“Thanks for the concert program, but hey, is that Bruch Concerto being played from my sequence?  Not important, just asking.”

 (And yes, it was.)

“If so, that’s the one which I had to sequence using a staff transparency because over a hundred years, the staff lines in Bruch’s autograph had become ghosts, but his ink had lots of carbon black, so fitting the ghostly staff lines to my transparency allowed me to see where the notes should be.

Monica Cuneo, a violist in the UK asked if she could edit my offering and she found 400 errors on my score because Bruch had a hard time hitting the lines and spaces correctly on the staff — he was okay with ledger lines above and below — so she sent it back in pdf format with red marks showing the corrections and with the editorial changes, we turned it into a decent score.

But the story gets better. Back up several years. I had already sequenced the piano reduction and continued to poke around looking for the complete orchestration. One day I received an unsolicited e-mail from some guy asking if I thought that the second theme of the second movement was a Scandinavian folk song (!), and I responded apologetically that it could be but that I wasn’t a student of Scandinavian folk songs. There it would have rested, had he not written back two weeks later saying, “Harrumph! I just wrote to the biographer of Bruch who told me indeed that it is a Scandinavian folk song. Ah, in one of my few strokes of genius, which I can pretty much count on one hand, I wrote saying that I’d very much like to ask Bruch’s biographer a couple of questions and could my correspondent share his e-mail address with me. He did and I wrote to Christopher Fifield and asked if he might know where I could find a manuscript of the full orchestration, that I felt that I ought not to sequence a published version because the publisher would probably only offer that by rental and make me sign a non-publication agreement. Christopher wrote back and said, as luck would have it, he recently authenticated the autograph and it was sold at Christies to the State Library of Austria in Vienna. What luck! I already had a contact there, so I wrote to Dorothea Hunger at the State Library of Austria and she sent me — wait for it — the piano reduction. So I wrote back to Christopher telling him and he said, as it was the weekend, that he wasn’t in his flat in London but that he’d check out his records the following Monday. On Monday he wrote back and said that he’d made a mistake, that it was sold to the Cologne Conservatory. I wrote to a clarinetist contact in Germany, Nicolai Pfeffer, told him the story and asked if I needed his service, could he be my intermediary in Cologne? He wrote saying that he goes to Cologne frequently with his day job and he’d be happy to do so. So I wrote one message in English to the Cologne Conservatory Library asking to buy a microfiche of the autograph.  Two weeks later it arrived, and that’s what I used to do the sequence (with 400 errors). 

Nicolai wanted to create his own edition and he wanted to know if I’d share the microfiche of the autograph I received from Cologne. I said sure and sent him the microfiche.  I had no more use for it, because I had a xerox copy of the whole thing.  Anyway, Nicolai made his own edition which Peters latched on to (so that he wouldn’t compete with them, I’m sure) and a couple of years later I told him that I really wanted to make the score and parts available to everyone.  He didn’t protest, so I uploaded it to IMSLP.

Here are Nicolai and his partner doing the Concerto together. Pretty nice, huh?”

“Got a great story about the five (or six) quartets for clarinet and strings by Carl Andreas Goepfert, but that will have to wait for another time.

Oliver”