POETRY SERIES with PETER SKOGGARD
Go to Adult & Youth Programs HERE
$10 each night or all 4 nights for $35 (Package Code A10F19)
PETER SKOGGARD is a teacher, composer, poet, and playwright living ecstatically in Elora, Ontario with his wonderful wife Deborah, and near to his fabulous daughter, Emily. Peter comes from a family of artists, which will be discussed in his talk “The Family Business”. He has had many commissions and presentations of his work at the Centre, the Gorge Cinema, Sensational Elora, The River Run Centre, David Earle’s Temple Studios, The CBC, Ontario Universities and many more. To see family artwork go to: http://jeanskoggard.artspan.com, http://rskoggard.artspan.com .
The Art and Poetry of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Wednesday, September 8th, 7:00 pm
A10F15
As beguiling as some of these poems are, they were also a witness to profound social changes in early Industrial England that were occurring at same time as the tumultuous French Revolution. Without losing any of their simple charm, we will investigate Blake’s probing look into the struggles of the human spirit as well as observe prints of his hand painted etchings of these poems.
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
Wednesday, September 29th, 7:00 pm
A10F16
While some of us may know of Eliot’s fastidious Anglo-Catholicism, his Four Quartets are a distillation of universal spirituality, a map of the human condition in all its despair and hope, thereby being the most concise spiritual handbook of the 20th Century.
Poetry of E.E. Cummings
Wednesday, October 20, 7:00 pm
A10F17
If Eliot teaches us to understand life, then Cummings demonstrates to us how to live it. He is a dancing dervish, touching almost spontaneously all aspects of life in a single poem. I will, notwithstanding, read many, and discuss setting them to music, and present recordings of some of them.
War and Poetry: Two Men and Seven Women:
Wilfred Owen and R.A.D. Ford and Women, War, and, Poetry
A10F18
Thursday, November 11, 3:00 pm
How do women as diverse as Canada’s Margaret Atwood, Iraqi’s Mazek a la Ma’Ika, Palestine’s Fadwa Tuqan, and others tackle such a subject as war? British Captain Wilfred Owen broke the mold on wartime poetry with his unbearably poignant verses. And what of a little known Canadian poet who was also Canada’s Ambassador to the USSR for 15 years? These were my sources for the dramatic oratorio Bayt Lahm and War & Peace.
Robert E. Lee said: “It is a good thing that war is so horrible, otherwise we should love it too much.”
The Family Business Preview: A 2011 Minarovich Gallery Show
Wednesday, November 24th, 7:00 pm
$8 Mem / $10 Non
A10F20
Peter and Ross Skoggard were two of four boys growing up among artists. Both their paternal grandfather from Sweden and their mother who studied in China, were painters. This inspired Ross to follow in their footsteps. Now there is a rich heritage of family history in pictoral art: portraits, and the same scene painted each of the three generations. Peter presents a preview of the February show with examples from his own collection.
TALK & CONCERT: (Seperate from Poetry Series)
My Musical Settings of Poetry of Margaret Atwood
Saturday March 27th, 2011 at 3:00 pm
$8 Mem / $10 Non at the door
A11W9
Skoggard will be doing a reading and an appreciation of some poems of this great Canadian literary figure, followed by concert performances of his music inspired by her incisive and direct poetry. One set of three poems will be performed on the Elske Albarda piano with clarinet. This will include three songs: Romantic; Sekhemet, The Lion-Headed Goddess of War, Violent Storms, Pestilence, sand Recovery from Illness, Contemplates the Desert in The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and The Loneliness of the Military Historian. The other cycle, Half Hanged Mary, will be performed a Jan Albarda harpsichord.
The musicians will be Marion Samuel Stevens, voice, with Bill Shookoff on the piano and harpsichord. Tilly Kooyman will play clarinet.
William Shookhoff is currently Music Director for Tryptych Productions. He has been on the music staff of the Canadian Opera Company, the Edmonton Opera Company, the Portland (Oregon) Opera, and the Netherlands Opera. Since 1989, he has been primarily involved in musical theatre, conducting Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera in Toronto and across Canada. Mr. Shookhoff has been instrumental in initiating groups such as Comus Music Theatre, Canada Opera Piccolo, Opera theatre of Alberta, Opera York, the Edmonton New Music Festival and Tryptych Productions. He is also known as one of the foremost conductors of massed piano (Monster) concerts, having conducted such events in Rome, Italy, Festival of the Sound, Carnegie Hall, Massey Hall and the White House.
Soprano Marion Samuel-Stevens is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Voice Performance and is an avid supporter of new music and new performance practices. Marion was one of 8 semi-finalists in the 2008 Eckhardt-Grammatté competition and has worked with Richard Armstrong and Jaqueline Vaillancourt as well as the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre. Marion has performed Grigori Frid’s Diary of Anne Frank as Anne, Peter Skoggard’s new opera Stratas in the title role, Ruth in Ronald Beckett’s opera Ruth, Mark Adamo’s Little Women as Beth, as well as David Del-Tredici’s Alice with the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra. Operatic roles include Elle in La Voix Humaine by Poulenc, Hélène in Hindemith’s Hin und Zurück and Estelle in The Stronger by Hugo Weisgall, Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute by Mozart and Titania in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Oratorio highlights include Mozart’s Coronation Mass and Vespers, Haydn’s Paukenmesse, Lord Nelson Mass, and Creation. Vivaldi’s Gloria and Magnificat, Gounod’s St. CeciliaMass, Faure’s Requiem, Handel’s Messiah and Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and the Christmas Oratorio by J. S Bach, Brahms Requiem, and Mozart's Mass in C minor. Marion brings her love of movement and a great imagination to all projects that she is involved with!
Tilly Kooyman, clarinet, is an active solo, chamber and orchestral musician with a special interest in contemporary music. She has performed across Canada, toured Japan with the Higashi-Hiroshima Clarinet Ensemble, and performed at the World Bass Clarinet Convention in the Netherlands with the duo Bass Impact. This past summer, Tilly and poet/actor Rae Crossman were invited to perform at the International Clarinet Association's ClarinetFest in Vancouver. Tilly can be heard on four compact discs of music by Canadian composers and has premiered many new works that have been broadcast on CBC's Two New Hours and on West German Radio. She has worked with renowned Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer for over twenty years and has performed in many of his unique multi-disciplinary works of the Patria Cycle.
Her education includes a Master of Music degree from the University of Western Ontario, an Associateship from the Royal Conservatory of Music and advanced studies at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts. A former student of James Campbell and Robert Riseling, she has also studied 'Deep Listening' with Pauline Oliveros and free improvisation with Casey Sokol.
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