Canada's concert music is one of the great unexplored territories of the orchestral repertoire. The country produced a generation of composers in the 20th century whose work is admired at home and seldom performed anywhere else. On 8 November, the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra gives Doha a rare hearing of four of them, in a single evening presented as part of the Qatar Canada and Mexico Year of Culture.
The man on the podium embodies the programme. Charles Olivieri-Munroe was born in the Czech Republic, raised and educated in Canada, and went on to win First Prize at the Prague Spring International Conducting Competition before building a career across Europe. His path mirrors the thread that runs through the whole evening: the movement of people and ideas across borders, and the music that grows from it.
The composer at the centre of the night, Oskar Morawetz, knew that journey intimately. He fled Europe during the Second World War and settled in Canada, where he became one of the country's most prominent composers of the last century. His Carnival Overture opens the concert with a burst of energy. His Symphony No. 2, a work of real ambition and depth, brings it to a close after the interval.
Between the two Morawetz works sit two further voices from Quebec. Pierre Mercure's Kaleidoscope turns the orchestra into a play of shifting colour, exactly as its title suggests. Jacques Hétu's On the Banks of the Saint-Maurice River draws on the landscape of his home province, the river that runs through the heart of Quebec, and sets it to music of quiet power.
Taken together, the four pieces introduce Doha to a Canadian orchestral tradition that was built by newcomers and shaped by distance. It is the kind of programme that rewards curiosity. Most people in the hall will be hearing this music for the first time. That is precisely the point.
QPO Executive Director Kurt Meister puts it plainly: "Music allows us to experience another culture in an immediate and emotional way. With Sounds of Canada, we're bringing audiences in Qatar music they may not hear very often and giving them a chance to discover the composers and stories behind it.
